"Only the good news gets into the newspapers...."

Oleg Kalugin, retired KGB Major General, personal communication with World Affairs Monthly

There are two powerful forces now operating in the world, and it would not be an exaggeration to argue that they are working together to usher in a new era in the history of the world. These two forces have certainly always existed in some measure, but today they hold unprecedented power -- and they represent unprecedented opportunity.

These two forces -- competition and consilience -- are joining together to blow away the world of the past, the obsolete world, the world that we know restrains us and limits us. Our vision is surely forward-looking, but the structures of the past conspire to destroy our dreams.

They are creations of nature itself, and the so-called laws of the natural world, but they are also creations of the all powerful computer we call the human brain and nervous system. Centuries and centuries of competition and consilience are reshaping our world, and steering the human species into an entirely new direction -- on a path that will be characterized by an exponential growth in technology and scientific knowledge. The famed feedback loop will also be in operation: competition and consilience will lead to more technology and knowledge, and this new technology and knowledge will intensify the pressure of competition and consilience. The outcome is surely to possess an awesome and indeed frightening power.

The mystery of life -- and the mystery of the universe -- is still as yet unfathomable, but we, the human species, can now claim some mastery over the Earth and its teeming life. Indeed, our own species is extraordinarily fecund, and this is in large part due to our fascination with, and protection of, female fecundity. The male does indeed possess the power, the ultimate power. At the beginning of the 20th century there were some 1 billion humans; now there are more than 6 billion. We are witness to an ever intensifying competition and consilience, and indeed our rapid population growth is a direct outcome of both competition and consilience.

Competition identifies and isolates the adaptive and intelligent from the maladaptive and foolish; and consilience -- a word used by biologist Edward O. Wilson to describe the phenomenon of knowledge finding natural links and unifying into one single body -- identifies and isolates the real from the illusory.

Our brains will, in the decades ahead, relentlessly increase in power, in processing power. The human species will undoubtedly achieve extraordinary heights, and dominate the planet Earth and perhaps even portions of the universe, but our numbers will also surely shrink. Technology and scientific knowledge will of course be weaponized. This will be the outcome of both competition and consilience. Billions of human beings cannot indefinitely be maintained on the planet; a shocking and indeed dramatic reduction of the human population is inevitable, and perhaps even imminent. This is indeed a new era, an extraordinarily violent era, in the history of the world.

Nonetheless, the editor of World Affairs Monthly has identified five other outcomes of this intensifying competition and consilience, and they are listed below. They will be the prominent features of the new era:

1. We will see investigative journalism overwhelm and indeed subsume the business of the collection of intelligence by governmental and private espionage organizations. Very small corporations will specialize in collecting and analyzing information, data, and knowledge, and their impressive efficiency and high performance will totally discredit and destroy the large, unmanageable, and inefficient government espionage agencies and media conglomerates.

2. We will see information and knowledge quickly move to the internet, and be sold with extraordinary efficiency, low cost, and speed to a global public for a modest monthly or annual fee. Thus, all publishing will be conducted principally on the net, though publishers will likely still continue to offer versions of their publications in printed form. In all probability, some 200 individuals will operate their own distinctive web sites and information/knowledge business online, and these individuals will find this business to be rather lucrative. They will have a global audience. At the next tier below them will be another 2000 individuals, operating the same information/knowledge business, but at a much lower level of quality, and as such they will fail to operate profitably. Everything else on the TV, radio and internet will be characterized as political (and deceptive) rhetoric and gibberish, titillating violence, and pornography.

3. We will see the disintegration and ultimate destruction of the university. "There will be no universities in 25 years," Professor Eric J. Chaisson, a prominent astrophysicist at Tufts University in Massachusetts recently told the editor of World Affairs Monthly. Chaisson predicts that competition and of course consilience will drive this transformation of learning. Higher education will all be conducted online, and there will be no departments, no disciplines, no divisions whatsoever, only a consilient body of knowledge about our world and universe, argues Chaisson.

4. We will see the business of disseminating and analyzing information and knowledge become truly global in nature and scope. The exponential growth of information and knowledge will in turn stimulate the creativity of hundreds of millions of people around the globe; and these people, who will all be online, will swiftly create an extraordinarily dynamic world, and add their output to an increasingly affluent global civilization which is relatively free of borders, dogma, and censorship.

5. We will see large institutions die and disappear -- corporations, governments, nation-states, and large agencies. "The average size of new corporations [will] start shrinking toward one person plus millions of computers," writes Gregory J. E. Rawlins, the American computer scientist and author, in a book which is still in progress and has yet to be published. Brilliant individuals, aided by powerful technology and robots, will take on and obliterate large and unwieldy institutions. One man, or woman -- or a small group of highly talented people -- will find the world waiting to be conquered or even destroyed.

What will be the ultimate outcome of this new era, and of an ever intensifying competition and consilience? The world will change, dramatically and irrevocably. The future will be virtually unrecognizable. But the ultimate outcome will be that the Truth emerges, and begins, for the first time, to rival the power of the Lie. The Truth will destroy the arrogant, the foolish, and vile expressions of humanity. The Truth will conquer the world and the universe. The bad news will become exalted, and the good news entertainment.