The increase of population may lead to further and ever more disastrous wars, and improved technical means of offence may totally destroy the technical foundations of our existence and therewith destroy our civilisation. In actual fact, civilisations have been destroyed, so that the survivors of great civilised nations, few in number, have been reduced to barbarism and have had to rebuild civilisation anew. The question arises whether such a breakdown in universal human civilisation be not now imminent. The uniqueness of our situation is such that, even though civilisation were utterly destroyed in one or more continents, in other regions the accumulated knowledge handed down from the past might enable our brethren to save the future of the race; but there is an evident danger that no such reserves of civilisation would persist after a disastrously world-wide war, if civilisation, itself become world-wide, were to fall in ruins.

— Karl Jaspers