Tom got this email:

Dr. Barnett,

Professor Stephen Hawking recently posted the following question on Yahoo! Answers: "In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?"

Perhaps you should consider visiting Cambridge to discuss “a future worth creating” with arguably the most brilliant thinker of his generation. Maybe he could be convinced that continued strides in economic connectivity, along with many attendant changes, have us staring not into oblivion but into a world filled with unprecedented promise, where more than half of humanity is ready to emerge from relative poverty and the threat of great power war can be all but eliminated.

My questions are simple: If you could choose one word to answer Prof. Hawking’s question above, what would it be? What one word would you select if the question read, “how can the human race fail to sustain another 100 years?”?

Great email.

From what I know of Tom, I'll take a stab at answers for fun:

1. connection

2. China

Easy. Ingenuity.

Scientists do this a lot in old age: they get scared and think that the ingenuity of their generation was unique and will never be repeated again. It is complete bullshit, and arrogant to boot.

But somehow humanity not only gets smarter, we constantly reinvent ourselves and this world.