Just having eight billion people filling virtually every available niche on this planet makes us global whether we like it or not. We can no longer run our affairs in isolated groups, while even a fraction of us might do things that affect everyone: besides disease, there are greenhouse gases, ozone-depleting chemicals, overfishing, financial instability, pollution, deforestation, cybersecurity, nuclear weapons—the list goes on. To even try to get ahead of the cascading failures that can result—like pandemics—we have no choice but to organize on a global scale as well. If the pandemic doesn’t
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