Obviously this can only happen when humans finally break the shackles of religion.
Religion is an outdated artifact of the Paleolithic Era, the "Early Stone Age." It teaches every tribe that they are just a little bit better than all the other tribes, because only they have the true "word of God." This gives them license to treat their neighbors as inferiors, even killing them if there's no other way to give them "the word."
Religion is waning in large swaths of the developed world, particularly western Europe, Australia and New Zealand. The same trend began in the USA in the 1960s, as part of the "counterculture" which also brought us civil rights, women's liberation, the environmental movement and many other modern ideas. Unfortunately near the end of the 1970s the Religious Redneck Retard Revival happened, and millions of former hippies began going to church. Not just "church," but fundamentalist Christian churches, the ones that deny evolution and think women should be baby-making machines.
These are the congregations that feel tremendous animosity toward other religions. The other Christian churches are "bad" enough--Catholics, Presbyterians, Mormons, etc. But their antipathy to people who are not Christians is frightening. They have particular animosity toward the Muslims, right at a point in history when Islam is growing in population, power and anger. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and (contrary to the lies perpetrated by Backward Baby Bush) 9/11 was orchestrated by Saudi Arabians with their enormous petroleum wealth.
The only other religion that the RRRs aren't too hard on is Judaism. This is hard to explain, especially since antisemitism was widespread in the USA until WWII, although admittedly we never gassed any of them or burned down their
shtetls. It's been said that Americans identify with the Jews because our founders were in religious exile from their original countries and had to build their own "promised land" here. So somehow Israel got to be America's 51st state without anybody being able to vote on it.
Anyway, the Electronic Revolution is slowly chipping away at all of these inter-ethnic quarrels. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that today everyone is only a few pushes of a button away from everyone else. And the exceptions prove the rule, because most of the violence is in places like Afghanistan where most people don't have cellphones, much less Facebook. Even Americans and Iranians know that we don't really hate each other, it's just our shit-for-brains governments who keep trying to make us believe that we are enemies.
So the answer to your question is twofold. World peace will be achieved in two ways:
- Attrition of religion. It's already underway in most of the advanced countries, so it's reasonable to assume that as the rest of the world advances, the same will happen there.
- The "wired" planet. When we no longer regard people five thousand miles away as nothing more than anonymous abstractions, but instead we send each other graduation announcements, birthday cards, recipes, music, and photos of our children.
I'm 70 so I probably won't live to see this, but it could very easily come to pass in the lifetime of you younger members.
Since I'm closer to the end of my life than most of you, let me answer that: Life has been wonderful!
- I'm a musician so I'm utterly delighted to live in an era when I can hear professionally composed and performed music anywhere, at any time.
- Science has made life richer and easier in so many other ways, like being able to travel from Los Angeles to Prague to see the land of my ancestors on my 30th birthday. I have a car and don't have to travel by horse and buggy. Movies, TV, websites, there's a cornucopia of news, entertainment and socialization out there. Foods from a hundred cultures.
- I have lots of great friends.
- I have a great job as a writer, using my favorite skill and they pay me to do it!
- And of course there are vaccines, antibiotics and all kinds of medical tricks that make my life comfortable.
Sure, there are lots of people whose lives aren't as great as mine. Nonetheless, with every passing decade, the number of people living in poverty is reduced dramatically, and the number of people killed by government violence or "war" has also been dropping precipitously, although unfortunately not monotonically. I support charities and political organizations that help them, but I also feel a sense of accomplishment that there are a lot fewer than when I was born--right in the middle of WWII, which killed fully 3% of the entire planet's population!
I can't figure out if you're talking about
all life or just
human life. Survival of the fittest is certainly not the major deciding factor for our species, just look at Stephen Hawking!
I can't deny that our species has been a little rough on many non-human species of animals, but the environmental movement is turning a corner. As people become more prosperous, the environment becomes
a commodity that we're willing to pay for. There are major campaigns to save the rhinos, the elephants and the whales. Brazil has just about halted the shrinkage of their rainforest, and ours in the USA is already
expanding.Some of the angrier members of our civilization are even ready to use lethal force against poachers and whalers! The next person who clubs a seal will probably be found at the bottom of a lake, and even the stoic Chinese are starting to complain about pollution.
The environment is not a beast. Sure, ice ages are a natural cycle and as the current one comes to an end over the next few centuries we're going to have to figure out how to move our coastal cities, where the majority of us live, about 50 miles inland. But hey, we're the guys who left footprints on the Moon! There's nothing we can't accomplish with our Buck Rogers technology.
Despite the uptick in religious fighting in the Middle East (much of which is actually political rivalry disguised as religious rivalry anyway), my earlier statement still holds true: fewer people are killed by government-sponsored violence every decade. And yes, the Taliban is a governmental organization created by Jimmy Carter to fight the nasty Russians; they have merely lost the country they used to govern.
I'm going to limit my universe of discourse to intelligent life, if you don't mind. I can't see any way to apply this argument to plants, fungi, algae, bacteria and archaea, the other five kingdoms of organisms beside animals.
And I will be a little brusque with entire taxa of animals that don't have a sufficiently complex anatomy to think or feel, including worms, starfish, etc.
Let's limit it to the chordates, the animals with spines and brains: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and cartilaginous fish. If you want to throw in the arthropods (insects, spiders, centipedes, lobsters, etc.) because they seem to have a more-than-primitive nervous system, okay.
If you're willing to make this compromise from your original premise, which I find impossible to work with because it raises more questions than it can possibly answer, I'll go for it.
