There are so many things to do, so how can we determine priorities? Musing on it, I thought it useful to make a tree of concerns, so that any concern can be added to the tree and put in context.
The concerns must scale from the personal to the universal. So here's my list:
The concerns must scale from the personal to the universal. So here's my list:
- Decide: determine what to do
- Individual decisions
- Shared-value decisions (e.g., most organizational decisions)
- Value-exploration decisions (values/objectives are up for debate, e.g., in democratic governance decisions)
- Survive: as an individual, family, tribe, race, or species
- A supervolcano eruption, solar super-flare, gamma ray burst, asteroid-hit or comet-hit wipes out life on Earth's surface
- Global warming destroys lots of humans (the carbon cycle) caused by mismanagement of agriculture, energy, and transportation technologies
- Disease destroys lots of humans
- Bad civil engineering leads to public health impacts (e.g., from bad water, bad sewage, road accidents, building collapses, malaria-breeding-ponds, etc.) ... often hidden inside data on deaths caused by infectious diseases such as malaria, TB, etc.and deaths from large-scale accidents (homes collapse in an earthquake because they weren't up to code, floods occur because of badly designed water management systems, etc.
- Bad chemical engineering leads to public health impacts (e.g., from chemical pollution, etc.) ... sometimes visible in cancers and hormonal diseases
- Bad public health management ... often hidden inside data on deaths caused by infectious diseases and lifestyle diseases (cardiovascular, liver, diabetes, respiratory, digestive, sexually transmitted diseases, etc.)
- Bad energy & environmental engineering (causing air, land, and water pollution) ... deaths lurk inside lung disease, heart disease, and cancer statistics
- Antibiotic resistance
- Anti-vaccine idiots cause a resurgence of old diseases
- New mutant diseases (H1N1, super-flu, etc.)
- War, Insurgency, Murder, Manslaughter, Judicial Decree, Terrorism
- Murder, Manslaughter, and Terrorism
- War, Organized Crime, Civil War, and Insurgencies
- Judicial decree (the death penalty)
- New weapons (biological, nanotech or AI/drone) that may make existing conflicts more grievous
- Famine (the nitrogen & phosphorous cycles, non-sustainable agriculture, monoculture crop wipe-out by disease, ecological breakdown, etc.)
- Water shortage (mostly stupid water-wasting projects)
- Accidents
- Road (traffic) accidents
- Industrial accidents
- Domestic accidents
- Natural disasters: earthquakes, floods, volcanoes
- Suicide
- Personal (biological) lifespan extension
- Thrive: to improve the standard of living in various different ways
- Sufficient food, clothing and shelter for everyone
- Access to energy, healthcare, education, transportation
- Removal of parasitic losses in provision of goods and services (where funds or goods are diverted before they reach the beneficiaries, such as free state services becoming unavailable due to absenteeism and low productivity of state employees, siphoning of funds from state projects, electricity transmission losses, deliberate bad loan origination by banks, etc.)
- Better health
- More leisure time
- Better food and drink
- Better enjoyment & entertainment
- Nurture: to help others (including other species or objects) to survive and thrive
- Pets and domestic animals
- Plants and animals of agricultural, commercial, and aesthetic value
- All life on Earth
- All life in the Universe