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Foreign Affairs September October 2022 Issue, We stand at the beginning of history. For every person alive today, ten have lived and died in the past. But if human beings survive as long as the average mammal species, then for every person alive today, a thousand people will live in the future. We are the ancients. On the scale of a typical human life, humanity today is barely an infant struggling to walk. Although the future of our species may yet be long, it may instead be Óeeting. Of the many developments that have occurred since this magazine’s Úrst issue a century ago, the most profound is humanity’s ability to end itself. From climate change to nuclear war, engineered pandemics, uncontrolled artiÚcial intelligence ( ), and other destructive technologies not yet foreseen, a worrying number of risks conspire to threaten the end of humanity. Foreign Affairs Sept Oct 2022 Issue
Just over ÛÜ years ago, as the Cold War came to an end, some thinkers saw the future unfurling in a far more placid way. The threat of apocalypse, so vivid in the Cold War imagination, had begun to recede. The end of communism a few decades after the defeat of fascism during World War II seemed to have settled the major ideological debates. Capitalism and democracy would spread inexorably. The political theorist Francis Fukuyama divided the world into “post-historical” and “historical” societies. Foreign Affairs September October 2022 Issue
