It’s been a year now since we produced our last live face-to-face event, our VIP Europe program, conducted at the Hotel Arts in Barcelona, Spain.

One of our keynotes for that event was Chris Kutarna, an Oxford Adult Education scholar and professor and co-author of the bestselling nonfiction book, The Age of Discovery.

In the book, Chris 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 putting up a map of the world on the screen, with all of the World’s major air routes and air hubs superimposed. “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.”

I should note that the CORONAVIRUS pandemic was just beginning to spread at that time, but no lockdowns were yet then in force in the Americas or in most of Europe.