My Pessimism...

I fear that the future many Sci-Fi writers have beaten to death will come true. Civilization will be greatly tested in the coming years. Some of the things I fear:

1) Nuclear weapons will be used in a major population center triggering a world crisis ending in a nuclear holocaust. Billions will die and human civilization will be set back hundreds to thousands of years.

2) A biological attack triggers a pandemic that threatens the very existence of the human species. Billions die with the survivors, spread thinly throughout the globe, struggling to survive in the new harsh natural world. Civilization is set back to the bronze age or earlier.

3) Immortality is achieved through somatic gene therapy. The world population explodes as routine genetic treatments extend life thousands of years. Children are shunned as parasites and laws are passed preventing procreation except to replace those killed in accidents (you get smashed flat by a piano or head cut off by a 1200 year old Japanese sword you still die, you just don’t die of old age, cancer, etc). This one is so weird that I don't like to think about the consequences.

4) Economic collapse causes massive riots resulting in massive looses of productivity which cascade into a worldwide collapse of the economic infrastructure. Banks fold, inflation explodes, looting starts to make economic sense, the government cracks down and becomes totalitarian because it works.

I’m a weird mix of short-term pessimism and long-term optimism. I know that Humans can survive anything we throw at each other, but it will be real messy in the short term. I believe the only thing that can screw us now is an astronomical event (meteorite, comet, supernova, gamma-burst).

Yet another reason to boost the NASA budget.