Where are we?

"Perth is in the middle of nowhere." He said. "Nobody wants to visit the isolated city for tourism."
He is from Australia.
I told him a newly leaned piece of information from a NHK program. "I heard the city is prosperous because of natural resources mined nearby. Iron, Coal, Uranium..."
"Is it?" he said.
"From what I heard the city is now leading Australian economy."
"Oh, I did not know."
I am not sure if he represents an average Australian, but it's funny he still believes Australia is a country of tourism and its economy totally depends on it.
"I've lived in Tokyo for 4 years and that could be why." he said. He had worked as an IT engineer with Mitsubishi Electric and made programs for TV image contol system. By the way, he quit the company last year because it didn't fit him. There were so many nerds (otaku) in his department, he said.
Perhaps he is right. The world is changing at a speed we can hardly catch up with. The change seems to have accelerated in the past 5 years. Lehman Brothers went broke. Stock market in the world collapsed. I am afraid we are now approaching the limit of capitalism. All the civilizations develop following a tangential curve. It blows up to a plus infinity when the time comes and then starts again from minus infinity. I hope we are not coming near to the threshold of the divergence. It is hard to tell... always... where we are now. Only history could tell us where we WERE.