Maybe I should stop watching so many news/opinion shows. They are making me paranoid as to the condition of the world. Just politics can keep me riled (I'm pretty sure I'll be visiting this subject again), but news in general appears to be getting more pessimistic.

On the one hand, I see us poised on the birth of a time when man will change his very nature. Man and machine will begin to merge. We've gone from bleeding with leeches to manipulating genetic structure. From smoke signals to entangled quarks. We can toss out a bus-sized machine past a small planet nine years (?) and 4.5 billion miles (?) away and send back pictures. Robots and AI getting closer. Nano stuff. We bend electricity light magnetism to our will.

On that other hand, at that very moment our species is extending its command over the physics of its universe, we have vast portions of the world in which survival is a life-and-death struggle every moment and often ends in horrific ways: the rapes and murders of women and children; decapitations for believing in the wrong god; being burned to death for being different. Violence and pain are raging, nation-sized cancers all over the planet.

Can a dichotomy be any more defined? I swear we are about to slam into a Prigogine bifurcation. The transition is already upon us. The whole social system is becoming more unstable. Look around. So much is out of whack. The pace of change is accelerating. Increasing disparities will eventually trigger an explosion that wrenches the entire world.

The scariest thing about a Prigogine bifurcation is that it is inherently impossible to know what the post-system will become when (and if) it reorganizes.