Two Existential Questions for Humanity

After 8 books published, hundreds of articles written, and 48 stories published here on Medium outlining pathways to a thriveable future, I’ve got to a point where I now have as many questions as I have answers to our personal and global predicament.

The number one, primordial question none of us can escape, is:

1. Is This All There IS?

We’ve peered into telescopes to see events that happened 11 billion years ago a few billion years after the Big Bang. We’ve peered into particle accelerators to discover the “God particle”, the Higgs boson, which explains why gravity exists. We’ve sequenced hundreds of millions of genomes for millions of species, predicted 200 million protein folding sequences, and mapped the entire repertoire of the 37 trillion cells in the human body.

Yet half of the countries on earth are run by dictators and despots, while the other half are ruled by billionaires and corporations investing in the “best government money can buy”, with devastating consequences for democracy and income inequality, not to mention the environment.

I could go on, and on, but you get my point- we’re scientifically and technologically highly advanced giants, yet still ethical pygmies. For the most part. While life has always been something of a struggle for most of humanity, we now can measure how many billion are suffering, how many billion are struggling to make ends meet, and how one billion have never had it so good, thanks to…