The words of John Lennon 's famous peace song "Imagine" could become reality before the middle of this century.
The British authors of a new book believe we are on the brink of a major global change which could wipe out serial killers and lead to a more civilised world.
Lennon's 1971 single - ranked the third greatest song of all time by Rolling Stone magazine - foresaw a world where everyone lived in peace.
And almost half a century on it seems the Beatles legend was not such a "dreamer" after all.
Famous writer and philosopher Colin Wilson and his son Damon claim a dramatic decline in violent crime over the last 500 years is set to continue despite the global war on terror.
Colin wrote in their book An End To Murder: "I believe that it is entirely possible, in the next decade or two, that the 21st century serial killer will go the way of the 18th-century highwayman - driven to functional extinction by the forces of civilisation, and by social and scientific development.
"The recent fall in violent crime, and the absence of global conflict for over two-thirds of a century, may indicate that our educated intelligence may at last be edging us ahead of our catastrophically brutal inclinations.
"Developing police forensic techniques, general education and the various environmental factors I describe in the book, are pushing the violent death figures steadily downward.
"There will always be murders - by people who lose control of their tempers, or governments who 'have to make tough decisions' - but the sheer scale of homicide has fallen dramatically and steadily, across the planet, since the Middle Ages.
"It was over a hundred times more dangerous to live in medieval Oxford than it was to live in modern London, as parish records make plain.
"The very rapid drop in violent human death in the last two decades is just a sharper decline in an already firmly downhill slope. Even the world wars, when taken into account with the greatly increased human population of the world, were just small and (obviously) temporary upward blips on the graph.
"The shortage of vital resources that might result from man-made global weather chaos (aka global warming) might kick us back to what the Vikings called 'an axe age, a sword age'.
"But if civilisation and mass communication survives the coming crisis, I believe that the civilising process will continue as it has: slowly and, for most people, imperceptibly, but as steady as the erosion of mountain ranges."
Author Damon, aged 50, from Norfolk, completed the book started by his dad Colin who died, aged 82, in Cornwall two years ago.
He believes a decline in lead pollution, legalised abortion and the spread of computer games have all been factors in the decline in violent crime since the 1980s.
The book suggests one per cent of people are "pure sociopaths" - prone to extreme anti-social behaviour and attitudes - equating to 73 million of the 7.3billion global population.
But Damon writes: "Any social or evolutionary change will affect them and their lifestyles, just as such things affect the rest of us; they are just statistically more likely to harm themselves or others.
"We are mentally almost unrecognisable from forebears only a generation or two in the past. The overall effect of modern technology, coupled with universal education, is giving the human mind the impetus to evolve, just as dad predicted.
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"Xenophobic nationalism - the bane of the 19th and most of the 20th century - is withering under the glow of the worldwide web. My kids simply can't understand, let alone condone, the racism and parochial attitudes that were all but lauded when I was a child.
"That is a revolution, but not one that is overtly noticeable."
Damon argues the world is moving towards being towards a more civilised era even in the face of global terror attacks.
He told the Mirror: "The recent upsurge in violence in the Middle East - especially in and around the bandit nation that calls itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant - is nothing astounding to anyone with a little historical knowledge. And neither, sadly, are the recent terror attacks in Paris, Lebanon and Mali.
"As I point-out in the book; ISIS is essentially a fascist state, inspired by religious prejudice, and ruled by an army of homicidal juvenile delinquents. Their world-view is painfully simple: that anyone who disagrees with them, or owns anything that they want to steal, or crosses them in any way, deserves to die or be enslaved. In other words, the typical fascist attitude to life, here tinged by Sunni religious fundamentalism.
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"It is tempting to see the terror attacks recently carried out by ISIS, and their affiliates, as being similar to the IRA's terror campaign, carried out in Northern Ireland and on mainland Britain during the 70s, 80s, and the early 1990s.
"But the IRA were never anything more than a terrorist group. ISIS is a state - however much we may hate to admit it - so their attacks are not acts of terrorism, but acts of war.
"Our attempts to bomb them into submission simply won't work ~ just as bombing alone couldn't have defeated the Axis powers during the Second World War. To defeat a state one must put 'boots on the ground' and beat them on the battlefield - preferably, in this case, by a military alliance, properly sanctioned by the United Nations.
"And how does all this reflect on the opinion of my late father and myself: that the world is rapidly becoming more civilised? That we are beginning to see 'an end to murder'?
"Thirty years ago the ISIS crisis would have been a threat to everyone on the planet, because such an explosive conflict in the Middle East might easily have started a war between the Soviet Union and the NATO powers. A 1980s ISIS could have tipped and overthrown the delicate 'balance of terror': the fear of mutual destruction that contained our most aggressive inclinations and thus saved us from nuclear annihilation throughout the Cold War.
"Today we only face a conventional war, aided by former Soviet nations, to smash a bandit state that virtually everyone on the planet finds detestable. Then the real battle will begin: to engage millions of disaffected and desperate Islamic youths, around the globe, and prove to them that they have an equal stake in a shared, forward-looking and multi-belief future.
"It may all sound impossible; but, in 1939, so did the idea of civilising Nazi Germany. Yet the world stood up and did it."
- An End to Murder is published by Robinson, price £10.99.
