Why the West Rules for Now Part Three
Written by Ian Morris

In this part, the author focuses more on the future and social development. It starts out by explaining that biology is not the answer to why the west rules for now, it is social development. The key to social development is that the west had the more favorable geography. This gave the west several generations ahead of the east, but the imbalance of progress was able to give the east more time to catch up with the west in terms of development. Because of the ability to farm, and because people are more of the same, westerners had an advantage. The point is that geography made it easier for westerners to advance in social development. After Morris explains a brief look in the past he then focuses on our time and the future we have ahead if trends continue to occur. And according to all the information we know now, the East will catch up to the West in about 2103. But, only if western society stays the same as it is. Morris chooses this estimate because of past trends. He uses an elaborate scoring system that gives a rough estimate to show the amount of change now as opposed to the past. And he concludes that change has occurred 4 times faster now than social development in the past. The world is changing very dramatically and he calls the 21st century of period of time called the singularity. The singularity is the theory that innovations are occurring so fast that it appears to be instant and that we will transcend technology. With advancement in nano-technology, biology will be forever changed in the next 100 years. This is accelerating all the time in alarming ways. After explaining the positive aspects of humanity, Morris changes his focus to the demise of civilizations. He calls it Nightfall, and there are 5 parts of this apocalypse. Every single time there is a big collapse there are five parts the lead to their destruction. One of them is mass uncontrollable migration, another is the failure of state organization, the third is large scale famines, the fourth is pandemic diseases, and the fifth is large scale climate change. The fifth part of Nightfall is relevant in every collapse in society. These are five of the major things people read all the time and are the five major concerns of the 21st century. Morris claims that in

the 21st century that it is plausible that another great collapse could happen if things turn out for the worse.
The fact is, we now have weapons for the first time in history that can kill everyone on the whole world in a split second. We have already come very close to an all-out nuclear battle in the cold war. Fortunately for us all, the men who actually made the decisions in the Soviet Union and United States in the 1950s realized that the only way to handle nuclear weapons is through a mutual agreement that if one nation were to set of nuclear weapon then all nations would be involved.
But, humanity has an even bigger problem to worry about and that is climate change. The fact of the matter is humans have been stripping the Earth of its resources for some time now. At the rate of pollution, the planet is getting warmer than ever before. For the first time in Earth’s history, carbon dioxide rates are the highest with 393 ppm clocked in 2010. It is estimated that the average temperature will rise 5 degrees by 2050 and that carbon dioxide rates will be at 550 ppm. Even if we stopped pumping out greenhouse gases tomorrow, there is already so much carbon in the air that warming will carry on. We have changed the atmosphere’s chemistry. Whatever we do now, the North Pole will melt, Conservative estimates, suggest that the ice will be gone by 2100; the most radical think they will be gone by 2013. Most scientists come to about 2040. As the poles melt, the sea levels will rise. The waters already are a good 5 inches than what they were in 1900. But despite all the icy melt water, the seas will keep getting warmer as they absorb heat from the atmosphere, and because the oceans cool off less in the winter, storms will be longer and fiercer. Wet places will be more wet, with more violent storms and floods; dry places drier, with more wildfires and dust storms.
As humanity also competes for the world’s vast resources, more of Nightfall will present itself. Morris consistently repeats the importance that if humans are going to survive and prosper, we must find new solutions to safe and efficient energies as well as has a stable world government. He uses a quote that Einstein once said in a given interview after the drop of the first atomic bombs. “The only salvation for civilization and the human race lies in the creation of world government.” Einstein had a good understanding of how to predict the future because without any form of set government, the world would truly be in chaos. In the end though, there is only one prediction we can rely on: neither Nightfall nor Singularity will win the great race, because the race has no ending. Morris suspects that if humanity can hold off the predicted end by 2045, that humans will evolve completely into something more. Looking at this in a really long perspective, the threats that scare us so much today seem to have a lot in common with the kinds of forces that have repeatedly pushed evolution into high gear in the past. Time after time, relatively sudden changes in the environment have created conditions in which mutations