Evidence mounts each decade that suggests we in the early part of the 21st century face a global death spiral. Well, perhaps not so much a death spiral but rather something that resembles an attempted suicide, like taking one’s chances on downing a cupful of Jonestown punch. In some academic quarters, experts conclude that we are already on life support with little hope for recovery. Truth is, though, we cannot be certain, no matter what the medical chart reads, whether we will survive into the 22nd century.
Without sounding overly pessimistic, I admit the long arch of human history has often presented us with end-of-days menaces—Biblical plagues, bubonic plagues, global weather threats, world wars, and so on. But as resilient as life on earth has proven to be, the dangers have grown as well as the odds that we will not survive much longer. Perhaps this beautiful world and its contents may last a couple of hundred years, maybe a thousand, but the odds do not look good for a healthy world over the long run. Minds far more insightful than mine have weighed the likelihoods of just how much longer our planet will sustain life, as we know it.
One such predictor, The Doomsday Clock, suggests that we are close, just a couple of figurative minutes before midnight when we all turn into dust, when we destroy our civilization with dangerous technologies, chiefly nuclear weapons. Threats are numerous and put to us clearly: climate change, paucity of water and resources to support a burgeoning worldwide population, endless wars fought with catastrophic weapons of mass destruction, evolving pathogens for which medical science has no antidote, an astronomical event for which there is no defense.
The full list of “risks that threaten human civilization,” according to Global Challenges Foundation:
Extreme climate change
Nuclear war
Global pandemic
Ecological catastrophe
Global system collapse
Major asteroid impact
Super-volcano
Synthetic biology
Nanotechnology
Artificial intelligence
Unknown consequences
Future bad global governance
Steven Hawking said: "Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years," he [Hawking] told the BBC. "By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race."
It is hard to envision a real-life Star Trek exodus from this neat solar system to some distant and future home/world for humankind. And since an ark will not play into the narrative this time, what will we do for a supporting cast: dogs, trees, fish, insects, birds, all those important environmental co-inhabitants that make living here on earth so magical? The landscape, seascape, heavenscape, all settings will be altered.
These wild speculations are not fanciful if we consider all the damage life on earth has suffered (five extinctions over the history of our blue globe). But we should face the conclusion that another endgame, possibly engineered by humans, is as inevitable as fire feeding on fuel.