Okay, but you all realize that pretty much in ALL OF RECORDED HISTORY there has never been a time with as little warfare and violence as there is now? A huge part of the problem is we live in a time and place where something tragic, but ultimately SMALL on the grand scale of the planet, causes us all to lose our shiite (intended)...

So much of our mindset is driven (and manipulated) by FEAR, when in fact there is much less to fear these days than there was 50, 150 or 1500 years ago... We live significantly longer lives, wars and violence affect smaller segments of our population, yet we feel less safe because we allow ourselves to get worked up about what 2 wackos did last weekend in some dark corner of the world.

On another topic of this thread, pretty much *EVERY* ecosystem that is thriving (which humans *clearly* are) has uncontrolled population growth (which we are) until it depletes it's food/resource supply, which causes the population to crash to a small fraction of the maximum. Sure seems like that's a believable trajectory for humanity -- albeit over a long time-scale.