Sir
Over the next 50 years, the world will see great change and where on its present path, if it does not change how it addresses and manages Mother Earth, our future generations will be steeped in conflict and problems that they cannot solve. At the heart of our future mess (not that far away in reality) is the decisions that are presently been made by the political classes and their advisers.
Ten years ago, the institution that I represent was created to help solve the world’s emerging problems. The philosophy behind this thinking was so that nations could come together through humankind’s foremost minds. There, was considered to be the solution, for if the world’s greatest minds in concert could not deliver the solutions, basically no one could. Glenn Seaborg, the founding president and unique in that an Element (Element 106) was named in his honour while he was still living (all others had this bestowed posthumously on them including even Einstein), drew his conclusions while being the adviser to 10 presidents of the United States. This wisdom was, therefore, created from the knowledge of the inner sanctums of the greatest economic power over nearly 60 years.
Yesterday, WIF honorary member professor Dr Gerhard Ertl was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. In this respect over the past 10 years since the WIF’s inception, our members have been awarded the Nobel Prize in either medicine, physics, chemistry, peace or economics. This we believe shows the great inner strengths of the WIF and what it is potentially capable in concert of doing for humankind. We also believe that the world needs the concerted help of great creative minds to solve its growing problems. In this respect now within the WIF’s 3500 global members there are 92 Nobel Laureates and who in concert together, can be brought to bear on any physical problem in the world today.
The problem is that politicians in the West (this is different in the East) and their advisers do not wish to have the world’s foremost minds tell them what they should be doing to avert the impending major catastrophes across the globe. This creative and innovative neglect by the political classes will eventually prove the undoing of humankind and provide many of the problems that we shall all have to face together.
Therefore great change has to be introduced now before it is too late to do anything about them. Overall, the writing is clearly on the wall for humankind in this respect with more than a billion extra mouths to feed every decade (some predictions now stating 12 billion plus by 2050), reduction in all the major resources that allows life to exist, bird flu/pandemics with the propensity to kill hundreds of millions and climate change that has the potential to extinguish human life all together in this present century. Politicians have therefore to wake up to the realities, for their families are not immune either.
Dr David Hill
World Innovation Foundation
Bern, Switzerland
