Harari 2015 Vintage
From Bioblast
| Harari YN (2015) Homo deus. A brief history of tomorrow. Vintage London:513 pp. |
Abstract: Homo deus shows us where we're going. Yuval Harari envisions a near future in sihch we face a new set of challenges. Homo deus exlores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twendty-first century and beyond - from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: how can we protect this fragile world from our own desctructive power? And what does our future hold?
• Bioblast editor: Gnaiger E
Some selected quotes
- The new human agenda
- 'Let's see what's on the agenda today.' .. Famine, plague and war were always at the top of the list.
- For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.
- There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines.
- Indeed, in most countries today overeating has become a far worse problem than famine. .. In 2010 famine and malnutrition combined killed about 1 million people, whereas obesity killed 3 million.
- Black death began in the 1330s, .. Between 75 million and 200 million people died - more than a quarter of the population of Eurasia. In England, four out of ten people died, and the population dropped rom a pre-plague high of 3.7 million people to a post-plague low of 2.2 million. The city of Florence lost 50,000 of its 100,00 inhabitants.
- the 'spanish Flu' .. Altogether the pandemic killed between 500 million and 100 million people in less than a year. The First World War killed 40 million from 1914 to 1918.
- In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.
- Whereas in 2010 obesity and related illnesses killed about 3 million people, terrorists killed a total of 7,697 people across the globe, most of them in developing countries. For the average American or European, Coca-Cola poses a far deadlier threat than al-Qaeda.
