Take care you may say when departing from your friend, or at the end of a letter, in the hope that you'll meet again. A philosopher, reflecting on the present times, is inclined to say the same. Our world is threatened by disaster, which is caused by ourselves. Take care might thus mean that you (me, we, and they, who are also we, although they seem to live in another world) should make sure to avoid the disaster.

Persian-German author Bahman Nirumand points to the most man-made of the disastrous tendencies in the present in his book book Die drohende Katastrophe (2005). This is the threat of a new world war, which could be ignited by the collision of the fundamentalists of Washington and Teheran.

Remember what Albert Einstein said about World War III. If it happens, it will be the last because the of the weapons of mass destruction which have been stockpiled precisely with that event in view. The remedy is nuclear disarmament, which, as the world political situation stands today, would have to start from Europe.

Is it likely that the peoples and governments of Europe, who started the two world wars of the previous century, would finally listen to M.K. Gandhi, the wise man of India? Perhaps not. The governments of Britain and France, with their new nuclear arms deployment and modernization programs and doctrines, are firmly set on the disastrous course. The NATO and the EU are as fixated to missiles and star wars as ever. The anti-nuclear consciousness of the peoples of Europe, which woke at the insane arms race of the 1980s, went to sleep again after the INF agreement (1987) and the end of the Cold War. Either we will have a new, large and victorious political movement for END, that is European Nuclear Disarmament, or we will probably have the end, meaning the final man-caused catastrophe.

The looming break-down of the world's finances is a second, and equally human-fabricated catastrophic tendency. "We are at an end of an era", writes historian Gabriel Kolko,

living through the worst financial panic in many decades. Now begins global financial instability. In the opinion of many informed observers, especially the Financial Times, ' the entire > financial system and the way it operates will have to: be reconstructed-radically-and that is unlikely to occur. It is impossible to speculate how long today's turmoil will last-but there now exists an uncertainty and lack of confidence that has been unparalleled since the 1930s-and this ignorance and fear is itself a crucial factor. What is very clear is that losses are massive and the entire developed world is now experiencing the worst economic crisis since 1945, : one in which troubles in one nation compound those in others. (http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-10/16kolko.cfm)

The consequences of a world-wide financial crash would not in themselves be as definite as the result of a third world war. On the other hand, the financial crisis is no more than an aspect of the world political crisis. The money is just a mirror of our intentions and expectations and of the existing relations of power between the various fractions, groups and classes of mankind. Thus financial crisis, war and revolution have conditioned each other and coincided at various moments throughout history. Now, with the Internet, and as a consequence of the financial globalisation, it is just a little bit more evident than before that the values of the dollar, euro, yen and their derivatives are mere mirrors of our social relations and inner lives.

The radical reconstruction of the world's financial system might be as unlikely as European Nuclear Disarmament. Yet it must be achieved. It is necessary to build a new public financial system of the world.

Certainly, the economic order ''"is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality" ', as F.A. Hayek summarized in an essay from 1945 (http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html). However, scientific knowledge and its technological applications have created radically new conditions for the economic management since the time of Hayek. Take, for instance, radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags which can make the availability and position of literally every thing visible on the Net. The digitalization of the information about the money (which is, in itself, a kind of information) illustrates another aspect of the issue. The information about the money is nowadays centrally available from global financial notaries like Clearstream, SWIFT etc. Today's existing digitalized economic and financial databases and information networks have come about in just a couple of decades. Their potentialities are still largely unknown to the national governments, let alone to the public at large. They need to become fully utilized in the effort to build the world's public finances.

The third overwhelming problem, in addition to war and financial break-down, is the climate crisis. This is not the result of internal conflicts within mankind, and the break-down of our economic abstractions may well be come one of its consequences, but it is not one of its causes. Global warming is caused by mankind,but the earth's climate does not obey Man's will. (Man cannot control the lifespan of the sun and the movement of the stars either.) Yet disarmament and a publicly controlled financial system are the necessary first steps to counteract the man-made climate crisis.