This comment is quite sobered up and constructive. The idea that we can't just march toward a predetermined image of what the world should be is difficult to admit because not exactly reassuring but is the only reasonable option. In "the response" James Goldsmith described a future where the manufacturing jobs, because of the global takeover by what he called transnationals, producing somewhere selling somewhere else, would essentially leave the western world, and where only high tech specialists and highly educated people would be flourishing in the west. He didn't seem to realize that in the long run, even the high tech jobs e.g. in engineering could be taken over by the likes of the chinese, as innovation isn't necessarily, as was long thought in the west, intrinsic to the westerners. Historically innovation, rather than due to an intrinsic racial advantage might be due to circumstantial pressures e.g. annoying combative germans as neighbours, or divided societies with permanent infighting and divisions between sources of power from merchants to aristocrats to religions to city-states to kingdoms not to mention the evergreen bankers, in other words, innovation might be transmittable, like a culture. The move in the west towards city-states with not much going on in between would be interesting as a full circle towards the social structure of much of the western world in the pre-industrial era. However, it wouldn't be dreadful to imagine a happy culture with low level green house emission as described in the french documentary "Demain." flourishing in between concentration of highly-educated high-tech quasi city-states. It is ironic this days that the more educated people are, the higher there income, and thus the higher their contribution to global warming and the future perturbations it entails. If those in the know behave in a worse manner than the ones not in the know, we might be, at least towards future generations, some kind of a giant criminal network of mafia families, with those higher up having more blood on their hands. One of the deep obstacles towards a balance with future generations seems that ownership of material things is our way to feel ego importance and to establish a social hierarchy, in the non-human primate world it is more about sheer muscle strength (however we still have some of it e.g. actually academic success is directly proportional to physical size e.g. tenured professors in the u.s. are on average taller than non-tenured professors etc.), while in the human primate world it is more about, say, potential muscle strength, the ability to hire sheer muscle strength. In other words, we are in the odd positions of primates that seem to depend on calming down some of our basic assumptions, like maximal ownership and consumption of material things is maximal success, as this type of maximal success fits also the bill of, at least for the time being, maximal long term destructivity.