Building and maintaining a global federal government won’t be easy: plenty of things could go awry along the way, and plenty more could go sour even after the government was up and running. The world’s peoples may respond to severe climate change by retrenching into regional or national enclaves. The global legislature could become gridlocked in a manner similar to the UN during the Cold War. One nation or group of nations could succeed in gaining unilateral control over the global government, resulting either in an Orwellian superstate or in a catastrophic planetary civil war. These scenarios form a perfectly real and plausible possibility for our collective future – and the coming generations will need to be ever-vigilant in their efforts to prevent them from happening.