What is humankind's greatest challenge?

Economic expansion is good. We just need to to use sustainable energy and greatly minimize waste and maximize resource efficiency.

I assume that all intelligent life is fallible and capable of mistakes, Cassie. There is absolutely no reason to assume that any hypothetical species isn't going to go through the same things we did for a lot of the same reasons. To elaborate on those reasons would be to derail massively on the topic at hand. Suffice to say that due to things such as scarcity of resource and basic grouping behavior, there is absolutely no reason that aliens wouldn't form societies and proceed to conquer the crap out of each other, or go through the same basic technological progression as we have on their way to the stars.

I consider it irrelevant because it doesn't matter what a hypothetical alien species thinks of us. Right now there's no alien species we're in contact with, so everything we do is based on our opinions of ourselves. It's not like everyone is ignoring the issues, otherwise we wouldn't have efforts to develop green technologies at all. We wouldn't have people trying to push efforts to help people such as welfare extensions or charities. It's not a total crapfest the world over.

Isn't that what we're trying to do though? There are too many constraints inherent in the system and I believe that we need to just do things. If Economic growth is good for the economy, and by extension everything benefiting from the system, but it's not necessarily the most efficient system.

The greatest challenge facing humanity is the education of ALL female children, especially in the (all too many) countries where that is frowned upon. And when I say education, I do not mean the ability to read and write one's own name. That this would piss off a whole lot of people, mostly men, is precisely the reason to do it. And never mind whose toes you are stepping on.

No, the reason to do it is because every person deserves a chance at a quality education regardless of gender, race, creed, orientation, income or politics. Pissing off the assholes is just a fun bonus.

Greatest challenge of humanity is to figure out how to nuke Cthulhu of course

Seriously though, I wouldn't say there is any common goal that applies to all humans that all humans have to over come Well, ok, there is ONE thing now that I think of it: Fear of death.

Overcome fear of death? How?

Before I go any further off topic, I still, still think that collective humans have to face but a few challenges that immediately concern themselves. One of them being environment, before food, logistics, health and mental state

Humankind's greatest challenge: Stage 8-7 on Expert difficulty level.

Fear of death does serve a purpose, though. Fear can keep us alive by keeping us from doing dangerous stuff.

edited 14th May '12 2:44:45 AM by Talby

I have another one: we need to learn to think on the long term. Otherwise we won't be able to do ultimately beneficial things unless they bring profit during the first 5-20 years. Or on the more extreme cases, during the lifetime of the people starting it.

This is exactly what I believe myself.

We do? I thought we were going fine other than the occasional rough patch. Unless we're talking mass mind control, I don't think there's any challenge that could be fixed in the here and now since most of the low hanging fruit has already been solved.