I first read this piece some time ago, hidden in the back of one of his collected works volumes (VI: Games, Astrophysics, Hydrodynamics and... Meteorology) wher

I first read this piece some time ago, hidden in the back of one of his collected works volumes (VI: Games, Astrophysics, Hydrodynamics and... Meteorology) where I didn't quite expect to find an essay summarizing the predicament of humanity. It always amazes me how prescient and profound it is. It seems to me the title was a rhetorical question, von Neumann does not think that we will make it. Even if the precise topics he covered are colored by the tensions of the day (global nuclear war) his argument was more universal: "the effects that we are now beginning to produce are of the same order of magnitude as that of the great globe itself". Essentially what we now call the "Anthropocene". He casually points out (remember, it is 1955!) "The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's burning of coal and oil-more than half of it during the last generation, may have changed the at atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit". He argues effectively that against the altered biophysical reality unleashed by technological "progress" we don't really have sufficiently powerful feedback and control mechanisms and he doesn't think it is possible. "All experience shows that even smaller technological changes than those now in the cards (the 1955 cards!) profoundly transform political and social relationships. Experience also shows that these transformations are not a-priori predictable and that most contemporary "first guesses" concerning them are wrong. His pessimistic attitude is, I believe, hidden in the final paragraph: "The most hopeful answer is that the human species has been subjected to similar tests before and seems to have a congenital ability to come through, after varying amounts of trouble". Did he really think that our past will always be a good predictor of our future? Technology changes the possible states of the world. Some of them may be terminal. Will the "amount of trouble" always be manageable?