It has been a year now since we produced a live face-to-face event, our VIP Europe programme, conducted at the Hotel Arts in Barcelona. One of our keynote speakers for that event was Chris Kutarna, an Oxford Adult Education professor and co-author of the bestselling nonfiction work, Age of Discovery.
In the book, Kutarna draws parallels between what was going on during the Renaissance in Europe at the time of Michelangelo, and what is going on in our world today.
He began his session by displaying a map of the world on the screen, with all of the world’s major air routes and air hubs superimposed on it. “95 percent of the world’s population now lives within 200 miles of a major airport hub,” he noted. “We are entering,” he said, “an age of pandemics.”
In an excerpt from the book, which Kutarna wrote with Oxford University professor Ian Goldin, the authors outline how recent computer simulations have shown that a contagious airborne path
