Humanity is moving ever deeper into a crisis which has no precedent. It is a crisis brought about by evolution being intent on completely integrating differently colored, differently cultured, and intercommunicating humanity, and by evolution being intent on making integrated humanity able to live sustainedly at a higher standard of living for all than has ever been experienced by any. Probably ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to make it ; we do. It can only be accomplished, however, through a Design Science Revolution. Those in supreme power, politically and economically, aren't yet convinced that our Planet Earth has anywhere nearly enough life support for all humanity. They assume it has to be either you or me, that there is not enough for both. Those with financial advantage reason that selfishness is necessary and fortify themselves even further.

A crisis is taking place in the contemporary world in a variety of forms, cutting across the realms of culture, ethics, politics, and so forth. At the ground of these problems is the fact that the essence of being human has turned into a question mark for humanity itself.

At the beginning of the last two decades of our century, we find ourselves in a state of profound, world-wide crisis. It is a complex, multi-dimensional crisis whose facets touch every aspect of our lives – our health and livelihood, the quality of our environment and our social relationships, our economy, technology, and politics. It is a crisis of intellectual, moral, and spiritual dimensions; a crisis of a scale and urgency unprecedented in recorded human history. For the first time we have to face the very real threat of extinction of the human race and of all life on this planet.

In the last few decades, it has become increasingly clear that humanity is facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions. Modern science has developed effective measures that could solve most of the urgent problems in today's world--combat the majority of diseases, eliminate hunger and poverty, reduce the amount of industrial waste, and replace destructive fossil fuels by renewable sources of clean energy. The problems that stand in the way are not of economical or technological nature. The deepest sources of the global crisis lie inside the human personality and reflect the level of consciousness evolution of our species.

We — mankind — stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device — our consciousness of the crisis — as our unique contribution.

Humanity is undergoing, in the post-Cold War era, an economic and social crisis of unprecedented scale leading to the rapid impoverishment of large sectors of the world population.

The crisis in the world is not economic, military, or political; essentially, it is a moral crisis. It is a reflection of man's growing inhumanity to man, which finds its most horrible expression in the total destruction now made possible by the H-bomb. I believe our problem is a reflection of the fact that there is a growing and most serious moral and cultural gap between the progress we have made as a people in the physical sciences, and our lack of progress in the human and social sciences. We know much better how to work with the machines than we know how to live with people.

Until now, the vast majority of humanity has decided that competition is the only way forward. That belief is driving us to a totally untenable position. Today the major expression of that tension is in the political and economic fields. Humanity is going through a great spiritual crisis which is focused through these areas of activity and must be resolved in them. If it is not so resolved, we will destroy all life on the planet.

Our world is going through a crisis of dehumanization, breakup of family life, a general loss of moral values.

I have been saying for a long time that the crisis in the world is not economic or political or military. Essentially, the crisis in the world is a moral crisis. It's a reflection of man's growing immorality to himself, of man's growing inhumanity to man. The H-bomb is the highest and most terrible destructive expression of that growing inhumanity. And in a sense our crisis in America—the crisis in education, the crisis in civil rights—is not political, it is moral. But we haven't demonstrated the moral courage to step up to solving these problems, and this is our basic problem. America is in crisis, not because it lacks the economic resources, not because it lacks the political know-how, not because we don't know how to do the job of squaring democracy's practices with its noble promises. We just haven't demonstrated the moral courage. And until we do, we will not meet this basic crisis in civil rights and in education.

Will we solve the crises of next hundred years? asked Krulwich. “Yes, if we are honest and smart,” said Wilson. “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” Until we understand ourselves, concluded the Pulitzer-prize winning author of On Human Nature, “until we answer those huge questions of philosophy that the philosophers abandoned a couple of generations ago—Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?—rationally,” we’re on very thin ground.

The ecological crisis we find ourselves in is in fact a crisis of human relations, with each other and with the entire planet. It is a crisis created by a set of false assumptions about reality, the same assumptions that drive all systems of oppression. That greed and domination are the inherent driving forces of human existence and, therefore, that warfare, conquest, enslavement, exploitation, the looting of other people and of the entire ecosystem are natural and inevitable, and therefore must be okay.

Humanity is now experiencing history's most difficult evolutionary transformation.

We are now at the most critical crossroads in the history of humanity.