The failure of any information system to provide all of the appropriate information (and no more) to the appropriate users (and no others) at the appropriate time (and no other), at the appropriate place, in the appropriate medium and at a cost affordable to the recipients and viable for the providers, is the superordinate problem underlying many others and impeding appropriate decision-making towards their solution.
In many ways the relationship of humanity to Earth is like that between an eighteenth century physician and his patients. Humanity shares with him a vast ignorance illuminated only by an instinct that warns us not to act precipitately, for such action is potentially as disastrous as inaction.
Today it is more difficult to form a synthesis of the various disciplines of knowledge and the arts than it was formerly. For while the mass and the diversity of cultural factors are increasing, there is a decrease in each man's faculty of perceiving and unifying these things, so that the image of "universal man" is being lost sight of more and more. Nevertheless it remains each man's duty to retain an understanding of the whole human person in which the values of intellect, will, conscience and fraternity are preeminent. (Second Vatican Council. Gaudium et Spes, 1965).