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Ideas

2022: Year Of The Wake-Up Call

The signs for 2022 may appear grim right now, but at least we know what we're facing. Will we make the right decisions?

2022: Year Of The Wake-Up Call

New Year's Eve Numerals Arrive In Times Square

Jacques Attali

-Analysis-

PARIS — Since it's customary to do so at this time of year, let's try to make predictions for the next twelve months. On paper, 2022 should be a very difficult year. But by knowing that and anticipating it, we can prevent it from being so.

It is quite easy to forecast a worst-case scenario: a pandemic that evades vaccines, a collapse of financial markets, hotbeds of conflicts on the borders of Europe, large countries like Ethiopia falling apart.


There are also extremist movements, some claiming that all traces of the West’s past values should be erased from the memory of the world, while others say that all foreign influence should be rejected. All of this is possible. All of that will happen.


A Russian problem

The main risk we face this coming year across the world is governments, businesses, each one of us individually and humanity more generally losing control over the course of events — with obviously terrifying consequences.

In France in the run-up to the presidential elections this year, we can have legitimate concerns about the election of a president who would prove to be powerless, without a parliamentary majority, unable to keep their countless and inevitable electoral promises. Our country would be lost when facing a Germany that is once again self-confident, an Italy in a phase of renewal, and a world that is undergoing a major reorganization.

"Every man for himself” is the recipe for powerlessness

It would then turn into another year of disillusionment and anger, during which the country would get increasingly embroiled in conflicts over its identity, which has always been, historically, the first sign of decline.

In Europe, there’s the fear of seeing the European Union get more and more dependent on the United States for its defense, on Russia for its imports and on China for its exports. It faces a potential Russian invasion in Ukraine, and Turkey in the Balkans, as well as a wave of migration from Africa, overwhelming technological, financial and legal domination from the U.S., and China forcing its way onto the geopolitical scene. And Europe must reckon with all of this without having the means to respond, embroiled as it is in contradictory national interests.

\u200bWoman walking on an arrow on a street

Let's try to make predictions for the next twelve months

Gaelle Marcel via Unsplash

The true meaning of sovereignty 

More generally, there’s the fear that the world might be powerless in the face of a pandemic we have failed to control and in the face of climate change. Add to that the high rise in inflation, terrorist violence, waves of migration, cybercrime, and many other forces that cross borders to attack our civilizations, the human species and life itself.

In other words, we run the risk that there is no longer, in France, in Europe and across the world, a pilot in the plane, or that we even have a cockpit. And even if the steering wheel is the only thing no longer responding, this is in itself a death sentence.

Conversely, 2022 could be a chance for a wake-up call, for taking control, for open sovereignty. In France, with a bit of lucidity and calm, the electoral campaign could offer an opportunity to really learn more about the country’s major issues and the solutions that should be provided: childcare, education, the protection of minorities, social justice, secularism, security, tranquility, defense, public debt, industrial renewal, health, food, the climate, the protection of nature. Not to mention the prospect of maintaining control over our cultural, economic, financial and geopolitical sovereignty. We also need to understand that France’s sovereignty is impossible without Europe’s open sovereignty.

We can hope that technological progress at the service of altruism can still save the human species

For the European Union, partially under French Presidency in 2022, it could also be an opportunity to launch a real project of sovereignty in all sectors of life economics (health, education, food, renewable energies, mobility sustainability, agriculture, digital, defense and security).

A convergence of talents

Finally, on a global scale, we can perhaps hope that the most selfish governments will finally admit that everyone has an interest in being altruistic, and that, in particular, pandemics will only be eradicated if all human beings are as well protected as the richest among them. And we can also hope they realize that it is in everyone's interest to have access to the means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

We can finally hope that an alliance of researchers, entrepreneurs, social mobilizers and artists — all potential beneficial players in the world — will be able to make people understand that there are solutions to everything, including to problems we didn’t know how to solve (or didn’t want to) for centuries.

We can be hopeful that technological progress at the service of altruism can still save the human species and our civilizations. We can also hope that honest and rigorous media will be their heralds.

It is therefore not too late to remember the obvious, which has been hammered out for millennia by thinkers of all cultures, from the Mazdeans to the Egyptians, from the Jews to the Greeks, from Christians to Muslims, from the Chinese to the Anglo-Saxons, from the African griots to Silicon Valley gurus: “every man for himself” is the recipe for powerlessness. The condition of sovereignty is the convergence of talents.


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Future

Life On "Mars": With The Teams Simulating Space Missions Under A Dome

A niche research community plays out what existence might be like on, or en route to, another planet.

Photo of a person in a space suit walking toward the ​Mars Desert Research Station near Hanksville, Utah

At the Mars Desert Research Station near Hanksville, Utah

Sarah Scoles

In November 2022, Tara Sweeney’s plane landed on Thwaites Glacier, a 74,000-square-mile mass of frozen water in West Antarctica. She arrived with an international research team to study the glacier’s geology and ice fabric, and how its ice melt might contribute to sea level rise. But while near Earth’s southernmost point, Sweeney kept thinking about the moon.

“It felt every bit of what I think it will feel like being a space explorer,” said Sweeney, a former Air Force officer who’s now working on a doctorate in lunar geology at the University of Texas at El Paso. “You have all of these resources, and you get to be the one to go out and do the exploring and do the science. And that was really spectacular.”

That similarity is why space scientists study the physiology and psychology of people living in Antarctic and other remote outposts: For around 25 years, people have played out what existence might be like on, or en route to, another world. Polar explorers are, in a way, analogous to astronauts who land on alien planets. And while Sweeney wasn’t technically on an “analog astronaut” mission — her primary objective being the geological exploration of Earth — her days played out much the same as a space explorer’s might.

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