Lex- I am a great fan, but am puzzled by your claim that we are humans first and Americans or Chinese afterwards. Imagine that was our creed in the XXth century? Indeed it was, for communist sympathizers who thought the world would be united under a single Soviet government eventually, and for pacifists who acknowledged that Hitler was evil, but couldn't bring themselves to fight it. There is a difference between the ideals of the West and totalitarianism, and science cannot properly prosper in the long run, I suspect, under totalitarianism. <br><br>You also acknowledge there is great evil in the world right now, and I agree. I am not clear on how that leads to optimism, though. You seem to be an optimist by nature, but I believe that requires extra skepticism  about predictions, doesn't it?  I find that my background in programming makes me a bit of a pessimist... always looking for problems in code I am sure was done right. <br><br>I think we are both interested in history as well, and find the utopian tilt to your hopeful thinking about the near future troubling, given the real history of mankind and 'human nature' as we have seen it revealed in history.  I don't think we are anywhere close to 'one world.'