In 2003, one of the most decorated scientists of his generation put the odds at a coin flip. Sir Martin Rees, the UK's Astronomer Royal, wrote that he saw "no better than fifty-fifty" odds that our present civilization would survive to the end of this century1. Seventeen years later, the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord ran the same question with more precision and arrived at roughly one chance in six that humanity does not survive the next hundred years2. Not civilization as we know it. Us. Two serious people, in two different decades, staring at the same century and reaching for the language of a coin flip.

In 2025, during my graduate studies at Columbia University, I facilitated and heard Adam Day talk about the book "The Forever Crisis" he had just finished. Afterward, he generously gifted me a copy of his book and signed it. Under his name, he wrote one line: "Looking forward to solving these crises together." Then, simply, "Adam."

That line has stayed with me. Day has spent years working within the United Nations system on the very failures he writes about, and The Forever Crisis is the clearest account I have found of why those failures keep recurring. This is my attempt to carry that line forward, in my own words, for readers who will not have a semester to spend inside the book itself.

Start with the word itself. In 2022, Collins Dictionary named "permacrisis" its word of the year3. A life lived in permanent crisis, one emergency dissolving into the next without ever quite resolving. That is not a mood. It is a structural feature of how we have chosen to govern ourselves, and it will not lift on its own.

The distinction underneath all of this sounds almost too simple to carry the weight it does: the difference between something complicated and something complex. A car engine is complicated. It has many moving parts, but predictable ones. If it breaks, you find the broken part and replace it, and the engine runs again exactly as it did before. A human immune system is complex. Its behavior emerges from millions of interactions happening at once; it adapts as it goes, and there is no single faulty component to locate and swap out. You do not fix an immune system. You influence it, and then you watch, carefully, what it does next.

Global governance has been treating complex problems as though they were merely complicated ones, using tools inherited from a much older and traditional, much simpler idea of cause and effect. The instinct traces back to Descartes, who taught generations of thinkers to solve problems by breaking them into their smallest constituent pieces. It is a method that works beautifully on engines. It does not work on an immune system, a financial market, or a planet's climate. And yet it is still, overwhelmingly, how we design the treaties, summits, and emergency funds meant to manage exactly those things.

Three reflexes keep this cycle turning, and once you see them named, you start noticing them everywhere. The first is crisis and fix: patch the gap directly in front of you and hope the underlying pattern that produced it does not simply produce the next one. The second is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) panacea: the belief that if we just build enough scientific consensus, action will naturally follow, when in practice consensus-building is slow by design and the world does not wait politely for it to finish. The third, and the most emotionally satisfying, is the Leviathan instinct: the conviction that if we could just build one big, sufficiently powerful global authority, it could finally get ahead of these problems. When tested across climate, security, cyberspace, artificial intelligence, and long-term human survival, all three prove not merely insufficient. They are answers to the wrong question.

The most literal version of the Leviathan instinct already exists, and most people have heard of it without knowing how frozen it actually is. The United Nations Security Council was built in 1945 to prevent exactly one kind of catastrophe: direct war between the great powers. Its five permanent members are, not by coincidence, the victorious powers of the Second World War, and not one of them has given up its veto in eight decades. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Security Council sat paralyzed by that same veto, because the aggressor held one of the five keys to the room. During the war between Israel and Hamas, major powers spent months arguing over the wording of ceasefire texts in what Day calls an increasingly irrelevant Security Council chamber4. Africa is the largest regional bloc in the United Nations, with 54 member states, and has never held a permanent seat. In 2024, the UN Secretary-General himself said the world cannot accept that the organization's preeminent peace and security body lacks a permanent voice for a continent of well over a billion people5. Council reform has been formally on the agenda since 1992. Not one permanent seat has changed hands since 1945.

This is worth sitting with rather than nodding past. The claim is not simply that climate change or pandemics behave like complex systems. Plenty of people have made that observation before. The sharper, more uncomfortable claim is that global governance itself has become a complex system, largely by accident, through decades of unplanned institutional accretion rather than conscious design. A hundred years before any of this, Emile Durkheim found something similar studying suicide rates6. No individual death is predictable, yet a whole city's suicide rate is startlingly stable year over year, because something happens between the individual and the collective that neither psychology nor policy alone can fully explain. Karl Popper put a version of the same insight more starkly. The world, he wrote, is no longer best understood as a causal machine, but as "a world of propensities"7. Global institutions, layered treaty on top of treaty, mandate over mandate, were not designed with that world in mind. You cannot fix a system like that by adding one more centralized fix on top of it. You must redesign it to behave the way complex systems behave: many actors, open to their environment, self-organizing, producing outcomes that no single actor fully controls or predicts.

That claim holds up with unnerving consistency across real domains, and the numbers have only sharpened since the book went to print. In security, violent conflict itself behaves like an attractor, a self-reinforcing pull toward escalation that, once triggered, narrows a society's options until war looks like the only path left, the pattern researcher Peter Coleman has documented across protracted conflicts worldwide8. The 1994 Rwandan genocide remains the starkest case: decades of accumulating tension collapsed into mass violence within months once that attractor took hold. By 2025, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project recorded more than 205,400 violent events worldwide, resulting in roughly 244,700 fatalities and exposing 17 percent of the world's population, one in six people alive today, to conflict. Political violence now averages more than 550 incidents a day, what the researchers tracking it now call a new normal9. Global military spending reached 2.9 trillion dollars in 2025, its eleventh consecutive year of increase and its highest share of world output since 2009, driven mainly by a 14 percent rise in Europe10. Our tools for de-escalating conflict have barely moved since the Cold War, and one of them has been sitting almost entirely unused. A 1950 resolution called Uniting for Peace lets the General Assembly step in exactly when the Security Council is deadlocked. It has existed for seventy-five years and remains underutilized.

In cyberspace, chasing an impossible global treaty that rival states abandon the moment it becomes inconvenient makes far less sense than building something closer to a digital immune system: early detection, distributed response, the ability to isolate an infected part of the network before it spreads. Global cybercrime is now projected to cost the world over 10.5 trillion dollars a year, an economy larger than every country on earth except the United States and China11. In artificial intelligence, waiting on one binding global regulator that great powers have no incentive to agree to in time makes even less sense. What is emerging instead looks more like gravitational pull: a critical mass of shared technical standards, flexible enough to keep moving as the technology itself keeps moving. Global corporate investment in AI more than doubled in a single year, from 253 billion dollars in 2024 to 581.7 billion dollars in 2025 12. No treaty process on earth moves at that speed.

And in climate, the picture is no longer one bad year. The World Meteorological Organization confirms that 2015 through 2025 are the eleven hottest years ever recorded, with 2025 itself landing as the second or third hottest year on record, 1.44 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average13. Ocean heat content, which absorbs more than ninety percent of the planet's excess warming, hit a fresh record the same year, and Arctic sea ice shrank to its lowest or second-lowest extent since satellite tracking began. Fossil fuel carbon emissions hit their own record high in 2025, and the remaining global carbon budget for holding warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius is, in the words of the scientists who track it, virtually exhausted: at current emission rates, about four years of it are left14. We have crossed the line while still debating how to build the fence.

What ties all of this together is a single underlying idea, one Day borrows from a researcher who studies planetary-scale systems: a planetary nervous system, in Dirk Helbing's phrase, a way of letting information move fast enough, and transparently enough, that a system can sense trouble and adjust before a shock cascades out of control15. The same principle is at work in every domain above. Not a bigger machine. A more alert, more responsive body.

I keep returning to a fact cited almost in passing in the book's introduction: in a 2021 BBC survey, nearly two-thirds of young people said they were seriously worried about the future16. I was one of the two-thirds before I had the data to confirm it. What this book gave me was not comfort; it is not a comforting book, but something more useful than comfort: a vocabulary for why the worry felt so intractable, and a genuine, tested argument for why it does not have to stay that way. The people inheriting these systems are, structurally, the ones who did not design them and who will live the longest with whatever they produce. That is precisely the gap MESA exists to close, not by waiting for a seat at a table built for someone else, but by learning to build tables of our own, the kind that can hold the weight of what is coming.

Adam Day signed my copy with a promise, not a compliment. Looking forward to solving these crises together. I do not think he meant that as something he alone was going to do while I watched from the audience. I think he meant it as a description of the only method that has ever worked on a complex system: many hands, constant feedback, nobody waiting for permission to start. Stop looking for the one broken part that will fix everything. Start tending the system we actually have, the way a gardener tends something that is alive and always growing, not a repairman with a wrench, waiting for the one part that will finally make it stop breaking down.

That is the crisis he named. It is also, I think, the invitation.

1. Martin Rees, Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 8.

2. Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (London: Hachette Book Group, 2020), 167.

3. Collins Dictionary, 2022 Word of the Year: "permacrisis," cited in Adam Day, The Forever Crisis: Adaptive Global Governance for an Era of Accelerating Complexity (Abingconsensus-buildingdon: Routledge, 2024), Introduction, n.2consensus-building

4. Adam Day, The Forever Crisis: Adaptive Global Governance for an Era of Accelerating Complexity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2024), Chapter 4, "Violence as a Disease."

5. “Security Council: Africa Deserves Permanent Seat at the Table, Says Guterres," UN News, 12 August 2024.

6. Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. J.A. Spaulding and G. Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1979).

7. Karl Popper, A World of Propensities (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1990), 18 to 19.

8. Peter Coleman, "Navigating the Landscape of Conflict: Applications of Dynamical Systems Theory to Addressing Protracted Conflict," in The Non-Linearity of Peace Processes: Theory and Practice of Systemic Conflict Transformation, ed. Tobias Debiel et al. (Opladen: Verlag Barbara Budrich, 2011). 

9. Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), "A New Normal Emerges as Worldwide Conflict and Political Violence Top 550 Incidents Daily," Conflict Index & 2026 Watchlist, 11 December 2025, acleddata.com/conflict-index-2026-watchlist.

10. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, "Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2025," SIPRI Fact Sheet, April 2026.

11. Cybersecurity Ventures, 2025 Official Cybercrime Report (projected global annual cost of cybercrime).

12. Stanford Institute for Human Centered AI, The 2026 AI Index Report, "Economy" chapter, 13 April 2026. 

13. World Meteorological Organization, State of the Global Climate 2025 (Geneva: WMO, 2026).

14. Global Carbon Project, Global Carbon Budget 2025, Earth System Science Data (13 November 2025).

15. Dirk Helbing, Thinking Ahead: Essays on Big Data, Digital Revolution, and Participatory Market Society (Cham: Springer, 2015), 37.

16. Roger Harrabin, "Climate Change: Young People Very Worried, Survey," BBC World News, 14 September 2021.