Interstellar technology, awesome but still in its infancy, has taught us that our common home, smaller than a speck of dust relative to the visible universe, floats in space at the mercy of gravity and other celestial events that we don’t fully understand or control. In fact, our level of ignorance is such that we don’t even know precisely what gravity is, and we’ve nowhere else to go.

One would think that sentient beings in a predicament of this magnitude -isolated and helpless- might eagerly and humbly seek, by default, a stasis of cooperation, justice and reasonable equality for all on the self-evident assumption that only thus might the species hope to survive.

But no. There are those among us who think they’re entitled to impose their will on others. Their ambition, lust for power and sheer evil is indeed primeval. Sacred and historical books round the world, irrespective of religion, language or civilization, testify to this. The difference is that prior to 1945 alpha humans did not have the power to destroy life on the entire planet. Since then, not only has technology improved exponentially, the efficiency of weapons of mass destruction and their proliferation have expanded to nations that were not even independent at that time.

It is not the weapons that threaten us with extinction; they’re inert unless expressly activated. It is our universal urge, to different degrees, to use them to dominate others, to make them sweat in our stead so we can lead charmed lives of leisure at their expense. This in the age of the internet, satellites, artificial intelligence, drones, robots, and evermore sophisticated sources of energy.

Proliferation of knowledge, individual brilliance, and the courage to seek justice at any cost cannot be compressed and confined into a modern-day Pandora’s Box. Accordingly, leaders of nuclear armed nations should understand that they bear the awesome responsibility to prevent the extinction of the species. And the only way to do so is to graduate to an enlightened stage of mutual cooperation, justice and reasonable equality so weapons of mass destruction can be eliminated. No less luminaries than Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan and Gorbachev, among many others, agreed.