Astrophysicist Martin Rees: Our final Hour

If you want a simplified breakdown for the current 'proxy wars', which are essentially based around a now initiated Cold War 2. The basic formula is (regarding the middle east) Shia v's Sunni, which is essentially China + Russia (Iran and Syria = Shia) x oil production.  US + Europe (Saudi Arabia, UAE = Sunni) x oil production.  The main strategic players of the region are of course Saudi Arabia (supplying oil to America) and Iran (suppling oil to China, Russia would love Saudi's oil production crimped).  The use of tribal and religions (medieval) disputes as the precursor can be utilized with gusto in the 21st century.  Hence the wars in Syria and Iraq.  So all conflicts, originate and/or orchestrated to control energy resources.  More so a strategic advantage in an oil and food scarcity world.  The Ukraine and Russian conflict in all it's nationalist melodrama, is basically a West (America/Europe) and East (Russia) "cold war" to control a very strategic and commercially plentiful region of Europe;  Ukraine's "bread basket"

Astrophysicist Martin Rees article Denial of Catastrophic Risk via ScienceMag.org, summarizes the 'risks' for all of us in an interconnected world (dangers from every corner) and our reliance on resources, all the while, we are balanced precariously on the grace of human sanity.   

The main threats to sustained human existence now come from people, not from nature. Ecological shocks that irreversibly degrade the biosphere could be triggered by the unsustainable demands of a growing world population. Fast-spreading pandemics would cause havoc in the megacities of the developing world. And political tensions will probably stem from scarcity of resources, aggravated by climate change. Equally worrying are the imponderable downsides of powerful new cyber-, bio-, and nanotechnologies. Indeed, we're entering an era when a few individuals could, via error or terror, trigger societal breakdown.

Some threats are well known. In the 20th century, the downsides of nuclear science loomed large. At any time in the Cold War era, the superpowers could have stumbled toward Armageddon through muddle and miscalculation. The threat of global annihilation involving tens of thousands of hydrogen bombs is thankfully in abeyance, but now there is a growing concern that smaller nuclear arsenals might be used in a regional context, or even by terrorists. We can't rule out a geopolitical realignment that creates a standoff between new superpowers. So a new generation may face its own "Cuba," and one that could be handled less well or less luckily than was the 1962 crisis.

What are some new concerns stemming from fast-developing 21st-century technologies? Our interconnected world depends on elaborate networks: electric power grids, air traffic control, international finance, just-in-time delivery, and so forth. Unless these are highly resilient, their manifest benefits could be outweighed by catastrophic (albeit rare) breakdowns cascading through the system. Social media could spread psychic contagion from a localized crisis, literally at the speed of light. Concern about cyberattack, by criminals or hostile nations, is rising sharply. Synthetic biology likewise offers huge potential for medicine and agriculture, but in the sci-fi scenario where new organisms can be routinely created, the ecology (and even our species) might not long survive unscathed. And should we worry about another sci-fiscenario, in which a network of computers could develop a mind of its own and threaten us all? 

Below is the TED talk from 2014