Many people have high expectations of human society. They expect everything to work perfectly. The politicians must be incorruptible, the healthcare must be top-notch, the streets must be clean and shine like silver or gold, etc. This is too optimistic. Would you expect gorillas or chimps to make a good global society? I didn't think so. Well, we share 96 percent of our DNA with chimps. All the good things of human civilization today, come from the remaining 4 percent. It is unreasonable of us to expect us humans to get everything working perfectly.

         Indeed, we of the 21st century should be deeply grateful for the things that humanity has accomplished and the problems it has solved. We have colonized the world, we have sent men to the moon, we have invented computers and the Internet, and we have sequenced our own genome. Most of us no longer farm or hunt our own food, we buy it from the market. This has prevented billions of us from starving. We have eradicated many diseases, like polio and smallpox. It is now possible for nearly any adult human to go to nearly any country in the world, through the use of the airplane. Violence is also down from prehistoric and medieval times. We now have endless entertainment in the form of video games, the Internet, television, movies, and porn. This is all impressive, given that we are just apes with oversized brains.

      None of this is to say that we should stop solving the world's problems. There are still many challenges left for humanity to overcome, if we are to build a flourishing global civilization. But we should not have unrealistic expectations for ourselves. And we should never forget how remarkable it is that one species of ape climbed out of the trees, walked upright, and built a global civilization.