This website was launched by Peter Baldwin, a former Australian Labor politician,  with the aim of addressing a range of issues bearing on the relationship between long term trends affecting our civilization and current political issues.

However, in the past eighteen months there have been dramatic developments in the geopolitical and technological realms that, taken together, pose a number of issues that are existential, in the first-order sense that they threaten the survival of life on earth.

Moreover, the confluence of these developments raises the prospect of, if not the destruction of life on earth, the defeat or marginalization of the global liberal-democratic order, and the emergence of a much less benign dispensation.

After the Putin regime invaded Ukraine, it was common to hear claims we are at a historical turning point, or inflection, or discontinuity, or hinge point, including the German equivalent used by Chancellor Schoder, Zeitenwende, with extraordinary and possibly decisive implications for the long-term future of humanity.

Over the coming weeks I will be posting a series of articles that aim to address these issues comprehensively. These articles will form a coherent set, progressing towards a final item that draws some tentative conclusions bearing on what this means for current political and ideological debates.

This article, Our moment in time, provides an overview of the main themes to be covered in the coming months. These themes will be elaborated in a series of articles to be posted on successive Fridays, starting in September 2023, according to the following schedule:

1. The Hinge of History Debate (1 September)
2. The Landscape of Existential Risk (8 September)
3. The Artificial Intelligence Precipice (15 September)
4. The Rise of the Autocratic Orchestra (22 September)
5. The West’s War on Itself (29 September)
6. What Matters Most, Right Now? (6 October)