And it's shockingly not a new idea.

The overall international response to evolving pandemics has been shockingly slow and remains shamefully underresourced.

It is the art of the possible. If so, then Europe s deconstruction or, worse, its collapse would be a shockingly fearful and painful business.

If the world s center of gravity shifts to Asia, however, Americans will be woefully unprepared. Many Americans remain shockingly unaware of how much the rest of the world, especially Asia, has progressed.

Despite increasing incomes, Russians are less educated and less healthy than they were when Putin came to power they still die at a shockingly young age. Russian involvement in world affairs is tainted by poison and corruption.

So, in favor of the proposition, possibly shockingly, is one of, truly, the founders of the environmental movement, a long standing TEDster, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, someone we all know and love, Stewart Brand.

With vibrant video clips captured by submarines, David Gallo takes us to some of Earth's darkest, most violent, toxic and beautiful habitats, the valleys and volcanic ridges of the oceans' depths, where life is bizarre, resilient and shockingly abundant.

Many of you will realize that I'm ripping a bit off of the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge's notion of a technological singularity, where a number of trends accelerate and converge and come together to create, really, a shockingly new reality.

Pregnant HIV infected IDUs transmit the virus to their babies, and sometimes shockingly often in Russia abandon their newborns, relinquishing them to the state. The people infected by IDUs also can infect others sexually, further fortifying the bridge into the general population.

Shockingly, Russia argued that it had the right to attack a country that harbored people to whom it had just issued passports, scaring all countries with Russian minorities. By recognizing the independence of the two occupied territories, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Russia turned the whole world against it.

I am talking, of course, about cheap trendy fashion. I'll visit a Zara or Hampamp M, or, now that I am in the United Kingdom for the summer, the amazing Primark and snap up items that are cute, effectively disposable, and so shockingly inexpensive that one does a double take.

Twenty five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and more than a decade after the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), shockingly little is being done to stop these abuses, and the prospects of the victims ever getting justice, let alone bringing the perpetrators to account, seem ever more remote.

It points to a stark truth In a shockingly short time, we have become completely dependent on the Internet, a frontier we are only beginning to comprehend, let alone map and regulate. Important debates such as freedom versus security, privacy versus piracy, and cyberspace s impact on democracy are far from being resolved.

Globally, the poverty line is defined as a daily income of 1.25, adjusted for PPP a line that many criticize as shockingly low. But what is truly shocking is that nearly one billion people including more than 80 of the populations of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Liberia, and Burundi live below it.

The third point is more diagnostic The shockingly anemic pattern of post crisis US consumer demand has resulted from a deep Japan like balance sheet recession. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that the 12 year pre crisis US consumer spending binge was built on a precarious foundation of asset and credit bubbles.

As a result, unemployment is averaging 10 this decade and has not been below 8 for 20 years. And, while the overall level of unemployment has remained stable albeit at a shockingly high level the unemployment rate among young men (in the 16 24 age group) jumped from 15.3 in 1990 to 21.4 in 2005.

The film An Inconvenient Truth won an Academy Award, led to a Nobel Prize for Al Gore, and attracted huge international attention to the disastrous impact of climate change. But Countdown to Zero, an equally compelling documentary, made by the same production team and making shockingly clear how close and how often the world has come to nuclear catastrophe, has come and gone almost without trace.