Our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us, something we can do nothing about. Instead, all the major threats facing us today are problems entirely of our own making. And since we made the problems, we can also solve the problems.
Interpretation
The real challenges we face are self-created and solvable.
Jared Diamond's quote reflects on the nature of human-made issues as the most significant threats to our existence. Unlike natural disasters that occur beyond our control, the dangers posed by our own actions are the result of our decisions and behaviors, suggesting a responsibility and potential for us to address and rectify these problems.
In practice
During a keynote speech at an environmental conference, a speaker might reference this quote to emphasize the importance of addressing climate change as a human-made issue.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.
There is an ancient saying, famous among men, that thou shouldst not judge fully of a man's life before he dieth, whether it should be called blest or wretched.
One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called "weasel words."
I have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it's never happened yet.
Goodness is about character - integrity, honesty, kindness, generosity, moral courage, and the like. More than anything else, it is about how we treat other people.
God gave us free will, and we may choose to exercise it in ways that end up hurting other people.
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