MANKIND IN THE BALANCE Essays on the future of humanity We live in a time of transition. Still, we can only vaguely define the scope and impact of the changes in our world in the next forthcoming decades. No scenario will draw a straight line to some new Utopia. Considerable adjustments seem inevitable, if we want to overcome the various challenges posed by new scarcity on a global scale. As we move on in the 21st Century we increasingly question some of the great projects of the 20th. And even if in the Western world we are free of the horrors of war or armed conflict, there are still fierce battles being fought elsewhere which at least in part are an immediate consequence of our historic aspirations. The essays in this book are an attempt to address the various issues which confront our civilization in a forward looking spirit. Theo E. Korthals Altes (Amsterdam, 1952) was trained as a lawyer and spent his career as a consultant in public and commercial institutions, both in the Netherlands and overseas. He regularly publishes essays on political topics on the internet. He lives in The Hague