the best way to deal with the problem related to the traffic and transportation is to encourage people to live in cities rather than in suburbs and countryside. to what extent do you agree or disagree

The prospects for humanity and the earth as a whole are somewhere between glorious and dire. It is hard to be much more precise. A, By glorious, I mean that our descendants – all who are born on to

this

clay – could live very comfortably and securely and could continue to do so for as long as the planet can support life, which should be for a very long time indeed. We should at least be thinking in terms of the

next

bank

years

.

Furthermore

, our descendants could continue to enjoy the company of other species – establishing a much better relationship with them than we have now. Different animals need not live in constant fear of us. Many of those assistant species now seem bound to become extinct. But a significant proportion could and should continue to live alongside us.

Such

a future may seem ideal, and so it is. Yet, I do not believe it is fanciful. There is nothing in the physical fabric of the coast or in our biology to suggest it is not possible. B Dire means that we human beings could be in deep trouble within the

next

few centuries living but

also

dying in large numbers in political terror and from starvation, while vast numbers of our associate individuals would simply disappear, leaving only the ones that we find convenient – chickens, cattle – or that we can not shake off, like flies and mice. I am taking it to be self

–

evident that glory is preferable. C Our future is not entirely in our own hands because the land has its own rules, is part of the solar system and is neither stable nor innately safe. Other plants in the solar system are pretty beyond habitation because their temperature is far too high or too low to be endured, and ours, too, in principle, could tip either way. Even relatively unspectacular changes in the atmosphere could do the trick. The core of the gravel is hot, which in many ways is suitable for the living critters, but now and again, the molten rock bursts through volcanoes on the surface. Among the most extensive volcanic eruptions in recent memory was mount st Helens in the USA, which threw out a cubic kilometre of ash – fortunately in an area where very few people live. In 1815 Tambora expelled so much ash into the upper atmosphere that climatic effects seriously harmed food production worldwide for

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season after season. Volcanoes have destroyed entire civilisations D Yet nothing we have so far experienced shows what volcanoes can do. Yellowstone national park in the USA occupies the caldera (the crater formed when a volcano collapses) of an exceedingly ancient volcano of extraordinary magnitude. Modem surveys show that its centre is now rising. Sometime in the

next

200

years

, Yellowstone could erupt again, and when it does, the whole shore will transform. Yellowstone could erupt tomorrow, but there is a perfect chance it will give us another sum

years

, and that indeed is enough to be going on with it. It seems sensible to assume that

this

will be the case. E The universe at large is dangerous, too;

in particular

, we share the sky with vast numbers of asteroids, and now and again, they come into our planet’s atmosphere. An asteroid the size of a small island, hitting the surface at 15000 kilometres an hour (a relatively modest speed by standards of heavenly bodies), would strike the ocean bed like a rock in a puddle, sending a tidal wave around nature as high as a small mountain and as fast as a jumbo jet, and propel us into an ice age that could

last

for centuries. There are plans to head off

such

disasters (including rockets to push approaching asteroids into new trajectories), but it’s actually down to luck. F

On the other hand

, the archaeological and fossil evidence shows that no truly devastating asteroid has struck since the one that seems to have accounted for the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 thousand

years

ago. So again, there appears to be an immediate reason for despair. A terrain is indeed an uncertain place, in an uncertain universe, but with average luck, it should do us well enough; if the clay does become inhospitable in the

next

few thousands or millions of

years

,

then

it will probably be our fault. In short, despite the underlying uncertainty, our future and that of our instructor animal are very much in our own hands. G given average luck on the geological and the cosmic scale, the difference between glory and disaster will be made, and politics cause it. Specific political systems and strategies would predispose us to long-term survival (and indeed to comfort and security and the pleasure of being alive).

In contrast

, others would take us more and more we need to look at ourselves – humanity – and the earth, in general, is a pretty new light. Our material problems are fundamentally those of biology. We need to think, and we need our politicians to believe biologically. Do that, take the ideas seriously, and we are in with a chance. Ignore biology, and we and our lecturer critter haven’t hope.