ABSTRACT
Homo creator instigated, toward the middle of the 20th century, a quantum leap in the processes of evolution and in human macro-history by designing, building and using the first atomic bombs. Scientists and technologists, and their sponsors and pushers, have not retired on the olive wreath some of them think they deserve for enabling humankind to commit species suicide. They continually supply neogenesis technologies and tools. Proliferation and arms races increase the danger. A ‘local’ nuclear war can produce a nuclear winter endangering the survival of the human species. As demonstrated by the Cuban Missile Crisis and other events, safeguards are far from foolproof. Climate change is an escalating danger produced by a number of interacting and partly overlapping processes and instruments, including the industrial revolution, increasing energy and land uses related to a growing global population, and incessant demand for higher material standards of living, combined with the dynamics of a capitalist market economy.
