So in the most pessimistic of scenarios, this global systemic risk could lead to some sort of social collapse of globalization as a civilization, if you will. A civilization that has its ideology, that has its preferences, that has its governing systems. Well, imagine that collapsing. And, again, while some may be antiglobalization, if you start thinking about what this kind of collapse would lead, it's not something to take lightly because there would be very, very serious costs. And we see some of these costs in all the fiction that is devoted to dystopian futures. These are just a few of the movies, I think each one of these movies has made a lot of money because this sells. Collapse and dystopia seems to sell. There is something, perhaps in our society, that is so afraid. What are we afraid of? And we are very, very afraid of this kind of collapse and we tend to have very common stories about who gets us over the collapse. In almost all these, for example, the protagonist is a male. It's assumed it's a straight male and he is able to reignite his feelings of family with— you know, with his children and his spouse or whatever, by saving them from the collapse of the physical Earth, or the invasion of the aliens, or whatever it might be. And this is not just fiction. We have lots of examples from history. We've got the Tower of Babel. We've the conquests of the Americas. We've got World War II. We've got the Great Leap Forward in China which led to 40-50 million people starving over a space of two or three years. We've got various plagues. We have the slave trade which—if you want to talk about a collapse, think of the strains that are put on West Africa between the 17th and the 19th century as the slave economies extract this massive amount of labor and impose this kind of suffering. So it's happened before. And we've got lots of potential presents that we have to worry about. For example, we've got climate change. Okay? We've got nuclear weapons, or nuclear power. We've got deforestation. We've got hunger. We've got the collapse of some sort of civil authority and some return to warlordism. Again, we seem to be obsessed with it. It's happened before, and there's lots of possibilities that it could happen again. So this is something that we have to take seriously. Now, why is this time different? And this is a point that I've been making throughout the course. One is that we are living in this new and unprecedented level of aggregation of social space. It's very hard to run away from these crises. The crisis will follow you around the globe. And the sheer quantity and breadth of interactions almost require an assumption of interdependence. As interdependence has increased, as those links between the various nodes have increased, it makes the possibility of a node being able to avoid disaster that affects other nodes much less likely, and it also makes the possibility of some kind of disruption ever more likely. There is no global governance. We are a hyper-connected, hyper-complex, and hyper-coupled world, but we depend on authority structures not suited to a global society. We still depend on the notion of a Westphalian state, of a state with a territory and perhaps the domination of a particular ethnic group. How can we combine that— and, certainly in the last five years, we've seen this resurgence in particularism, in nationalism of one sort or another. How does that particular governance, or that particular outcome, of local or national elections start affecting the governance of globalization? Finally, there is no Planet B. Previous crises, previous droughts, previous famines, previous plagues, you could escape. There was always, in a sense, more land. Maybe sometimes you had to kill someone to get over that land, and that's a very much part of human history unfortunately, but there was some place for you to go. There is now nowhere for us to go, not for my generation, not for my children's generation, probably not even for our grandchildren's generation. Unless we get a magical visit from some very benevolent aliens, we are stuck in our planet. We're stuck here and we have to take care of it because there— again, there is no escape from a possibility of this— of a collapse of this nature, or of this size. Let's talk about—what do we mean by "collapse?" And we'll come to that next.