Instability

This modern world is unstable. Being an advanced, integrated economy, strongly tied to a speculative stockmarket system and greatly distanced from an agricultural base, makes it prone to collapse, and collapse of a most devastating kind.

The worldwide economic depression that began in 1929 came out of a simpler economy that had a much larger agricultural base. Were a similar depression to begin today, the results could be very much worse, for most companies today are far more interdependent (and could therefore not function at all, if the complex of supplier and customer companies were not in place)and most people are further removed from being able to grow or gather food (and the majority of food producers in the industrialized world are as interdependent as other companies).

Such a collapse might happen a year, a decade, or even a century from now; one of the dangers of a system with such inherent instability is that the collapse does not need to follow years of decline; the collapse may happen suddenly, but with the damages lasting for years, even decades.

The vitality and stability of human society would be vastly strengthened through the opening and development of a grand frontier, where growth and diversity replace the stagnation and homogenization of our current world.