Australia's Covid-19 response shows we can confront major crises. Threats to our planet should be next | Ian Chubb

During the pandemic, we saw ideological nonsense and prejudice mostly put aside - and we saw what we could accomplish when it was

Carl Sagan - one of my heroes and a scientist with a gift for communicating complex ideas in accessible ways - wrote back in 1994: If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves ... If we become even slightly more violent, shortsighted, ignorant, and selfish than we are now, almost certainly we will have no future."

Clearly I don't know what he would write if he were alive today. But he could hardly say that in the intervening 26 years we have become even slightly less violent, shortsighted, ignorant and selfish; I suspect that he would be dismayed at how much worse we have become; and how much more power has been accumulated without wisdom.