But first we shall have to survive the next ice age; and, before that, other dangerous climate change (both spontaneous and human-caused), and weapons of mass destruction and pandemics and all the countless unforeseen dangers that are going to beset us. Our political institutions, ways of life, personal aspirations and morality are all forms or embodiments of knowledge, and all will have to be improved if civilization – and the Enlightenment in particular – is to survive every one of the risks that Rees describes and presumably many others of which we have no inkling.
