Will the world fall apart at the seams before we fix it?

It seems to me that humanity is running down a bridge that’s falling apart behind it. We’re at a point where, in the near future, one of two things will happen. Either everything will collapse, or humanity will fix its problems and go on to weird, wonderful places.

In the first corner: there’s global warming, multinational cooperations taking over too much stuff, the oil crisis, the economic crisis, overpopulation, weapons proliferation, dictatorship and many countries generally falling apart.

In the other corner: there is unprecedented and exponential technological growth, freedom of information due to the internet, the rise of democracy and personal freedom, the extremely rapid growth of scientific knowledge, the decline of religious fundamentalism, and technologies on the horizon that will rapidly and fundamentally change the way we do everything, such as Brain-Machine interfacing, life-extension technology, and genetic engineering. And, of course, the election of Barack Obama will, in my opinion, go a long way.

So. Do you think everything will collapse? Or do you think everything will, on the whole, improve? Or will something else entirely happen? Am I even asking the right question? I’d love to hear your thoughts.