Word: next
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...20th century lived with the nuclear bomb, and there was great economic and scientific progress and much human happiness. The same can be true in the next century. Our tools for defending against new diseases are improving all the time. Vaccines are getting better. Drugs to fight bugs are advancing. And new devices are coming that will identify an infectious agent in seconds...
...wire the bombs together. People travel rapidly by airplane, carrying diseases with them as they fly. The human species has become a biological Internet with fast connections. The bionet will only get faster in the next century--that is, more people will travel by air more often, increasing the speed at which diseases move. If a tropical megacity gets hit with a new virus, New York City and Los Angeles will see it days or weeks later...
...best part is that we could make money by making peace with the planet. If governments launched a program--call it a Global Green Deal--to environmentally retrofit our civilization from top to bottom, they could create the biggest business enterprise of the next 25 years, a huge source of jobs and profits...
...realizing that our own survival hinges on reducing the damage we do to Earth's natural systems. We may not drive ourselves to the complete oblivion of biological extinction, but I fear that the Malthusian specters of famine, warfare and disease will rise in the comparatively short run (the next few centuries), coupled with an accelerating loss of human cultural diversity and, ultimately, quality of life...
Niles Eldredge is a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History. His book The Triumph of Evolution is due out early next year...