Signals of Impending Danger

I have been unemployed on and off for the past five years. Besides the nerve wracking experience involved I have had time to read and think. I have worked in theoretical physics since 1972. I keep current on the work posted on the Los Alamos electronic repository in my field. I have followed the news since I was about ten years old, now I am close to sixty. Here I write some comments about hard times I see coming for all of us. I hope I am wrong, I rather live in a world where human ingenuity keeps finding the way out of the messes we keep getting into.

I do not want to clarify how I got in this difficult situation; I just want to state the backdrop from where I see a dark future not just for me but for all humanity. These opinions are based on facts and ideas I have read and thought.

When I was in Mexico I saw the rivers die. In the middle of the city I saw rats feeding on the garbage that people threw in there. My mother's hometwon changed from a nice picturesque place to an ugly medium size city. The whole center of the country has several times more people than when I used to live there. Mexico City and the surrounding area went from four million people when I was in grammar school to more than twenty million people now. Together Mexico the US and Canada have a population that is getting close to half a billion people. The North American continent now has half the number of people than India, this in itself may not seem alarming, but the standard of living that all of us expect in this part of the world is around five times better than what the people of India are enjoying now. Here in the Chicago area I hear rumblings of impending water shortages. India already does not have enough water to satisfy the needs of the people living there.

Besides the scarcity of resources, the refuse from energy usage, mainly CO₂ is producing something akin to a plastic bag around the Earth. Maybe my knowledge about the impending environmental catastrophes is inadequate, and I should leave the decisions on what to do to the experts; the problem is that the experts in charge produced the deterioration that I see. I lost faith in the world governments. This reminds me of what happened to me in Mexico City in 1968, up to that point I had trusted the revolutionary government that my ancestors made possible. That year on October 2^nd an unknown number of students, just like me, were killed by the army supporting that revolutionary government.

I try to reach my own conclusions based on the information on the public domain. Some signals I am following are:

• Winter conditions in the Chicago area
• Tropical diseases this far North
• Frequency of catastrophes with more than one thousand people dead
• Wars in Equatorial Africa

I am worried.