Bang or Whimper?
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper. T. S. Elliot The Hollow Men
So, questions about our Expected Existential Extinction, world with end, amen.
Do you think that our species will be extinguished in the next 500 years? Why--either way?
If we are doomed, how long do you think we have?
How do you feel about the species being doomed?
If our species isn’t extinguished, do you think that we might (globally) be reduced to an earlier, primitive lifestyle without most of the cultural content we have now? (The first non-literate generation will have to reinvent writing, if they can.)
Of the various means, which do you think will most likely be the case of our demise?
ecological disaster (like but not limited to global warming)
nuclear war
a novel plague
economic collapse
Something else... Klingons? The Borg? A big rock? An angry God? Giant cockroaches? An outbreak of universal existential nausea?
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper. T. S. Elliot The Hollow Men
So, questions about our Expected Existential Extinction, world with end, amen.
Do you think that our species will be extinguished in the next 500 years? Why--either way?
If we are doomed, how long do you think we have?
How do you feel about the species being doomed?
If our species isn’t extinguished, do you think that we might (globally) be reduced to an earlier, primitive lifestyle without most of the cultural content we have now? (The first non-literate generation will have to reinvent writing, if they can.)
Of the various means, which do you think will most likely be the case of our demise?
ecological disaster (like but not limited to global warming)
nuclear war
a novel plague
economic collapse
Something else... Klingons? The Borg? A big rock? An angry God? Giant cockroaches? An outbreak of universal existential nausea?
Comments (43)
A World Made By Hand (a serious work by James Howard Kunstler) and The Last Second take place in a world which has lost all of its current technology (pun) because of EMPs, small nuclear attacks, and/or plagues. Plagues can be natural but usually are cooked up in labs and escape, accidentally or deliberately.
The Madd Addam trilogy by Margaret Atwood is an excellent apocalypse trilogy with several novel (pun) features. I recommend all of the books I mentioned except Alas Babylon and The Last Second.
One of the themes of post-apocalyptic novels is that technology wound down can not be readily wound up again.
I have asked myself this question repeatedly for a very long time.
On one hand, there is a tremendous amount of suffering, naturally and inevitably occurring by life simply being here. And a lot of the suffering humans in particular endure is caused primarily by a moral decay of sorts, where people just don't care about other people (and animals!) and treat them horribly. The history of life is a story of conflict, with the [s]strongest[/s] luckiest turning out on top, only to eventually die anyway. It's all very brutish, clunky and disappointing. From this perspective (admittedly nihilistic), I would welcome the end of the human race and life in general.
But from the other hand, there is great beauty in the world, and I have increasingly become more attuned and appreciable of it. I find that denying the beauty in the world is simply an affirmation of it, for I would not need to deny it if it did not exist.
So from an ethical perspective, I think the end of life would be good. From a purely aesthetic perspective, it might be a sad loss.
The best case scenario I can think of is one in which everyone decides to cease reproducing, which would halt worries of overpopulation, resource deprivation, etc, which would largely stop international conflict. With no fear of running out of fuel or food, we could focus all our efforts on artwork and play. The finale of the human race, its apex, would be right before it ends in a furious flurry of free artistic expression. We could leave the Earth painted and with a clear conscience.
We arose from a world without us, so if we all die, then chances are we'll arise again, on this planet, or other planets. Perhaps we already have cousins on other planets.
I don't think that will mean the literal extinction of life on earth or even of h. sapiens, but I could easily foresee events culminating in hundreds of millions of deaths through the collapse of the economic order. Damn near happened on September 18th 2008, three days after Lehmann Bros went down.
So this is a great time to be alive if you are the curious type. It is the moment in history when we finally get to see how a lot of exponential growth trends must surely end. :)
The phrase just prior to this
Eliot left out Kingdom, Power, Glory, or maybe he didn't...perhaps each of these have a fair shot at "This is the way the world ends."
How an animal dies.
On the one hand, continual growth is necessary IF high-quality standards of living are going to be maintained, and IF low-quality standards of living are going to be raised. China, for instance, has had a high rate of growth for some time, and they need every bit of it to allow a growing percentage of Chinese to enjoy something better than meagre peasanthood.
On the other hand, there is almost certainly no technical fix that will yield enough fresh water, food, housing, transportation, medical care, education etc. for the present 7 billion people, let alone the next 1, 2, 3, or 4 billion, to enhance their quality of life significantly in material terms--and that's without figuring in global warming.
Quoting Wayfarer
There is a sort of 'movement' called "Transition Town" where urban neighbors get together, fret about the present, and talk about cashing in their equity, moving to the country, and living happily ever after raising turnips, potatoes, and listening to the Moody Blues on their IPods powered by solar cells. You'd better start buying the equipment, land, and supplies you'll need. NOW. Don't forget defense devices (a double barreled shotgun with plenty of ammunition is quite persuasive) to defend yourself. And you'll need lots of skills you probably don't have, just yet.
An author you really should read, and he's a good writer, so I'm not suggesting bitter pills, is James Howard Kunstler. among his books are:
The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
Too Much Magic is what Kunstler sees in the bright visions of a future world dreamed up by optimistic souls who believe technology will solve all our problems.
World Made by Hand (Vol 1 post apocalypse novel)
A History of the Future (Vol 2 post apocalypse novel)
The Harrows of Spring (Vol 3 post apocalypse novel)
... and others
The World Made by Hand series treats at length just what a world without petroleum products would be like -- not just gasoline, but everything that petroleum makes possible, directly and indirectly. Without petroleum, we are sent back to the world of 1875.
He also is author of the Clusterfuck Nation blog, also at this site, Clusterfuck Nation dot com
As an alternative to the back-to-the-land-movement, I'm planning to join the Death With Dignity, Right Now! Movement. If I'm still alive when the crunch comes, I'll deploy the double barreled shotgun and dispatch myself. But I really would like to live long enough to see how this all plays out. Another decade is probably all I can stand, which will makes me 80 in the year 2027, well short of the Main Act in the Center Ring.
Wikipedia, of course.
It does come to mind, of course. H bombs is what I think of for "bang".
I remember reading this in 12th grade English class, I was 17--gads, 53 years ago. I liked the poem (even if it was pretty much over my head). "Here we go round the prickly pear, prickly pear, prickly pear" is a variation of "here we go round the mulberry bush, mulberry bush, mulberry bush..." "This is the way the world ends" could stand in as a verse for the children's circle singing game, though it's 1 beat short, unless one makes "world" 2 syllables -- wor-uld.
I read in the paper the other day that we have passed peak sand. Peak sand? Well, we've mixed a lot of concrete over the years, and only certain sands are really good for making concrete. They have to have the right size, the right chemistry, and the right price. Ocean beach sand is salty, and the wrong size, for instance -- so that's out. Other sands are too large in particle size, have other undesirable components, are too fine, etc. Goldilocks sand is just not that easy to get, anymore.
Yeah, I am pretty sure that a population and civilization collapse is imminent, most likely due to a confluence of factors. It may not be one of the commonly imagined apocalyptic scenarios where everything disintegrates over a few days or weeks, but even if it takes decades, it will still qualify as a crash, given our species' total lifespan (which, by the way, is still very brief compared to a typical mammalian species' lifespan of a few million years).
Will this be the end of our species? Hard to say. There will likely be a mass extinction of other species (by some measures, a mass extinction is already underway). We are at the top of the food ladder, which is bad, but we are also highly adaptable generalists, which is good. So, hard to say.
I really don't want to be the one to spoil the celebration, but I think that blowing oneself to bits with a shotgun is the exact opposite of "dignity".
By the power of gray skull.
'The end is where we start from', Eliot says in 'Little Gidding', the last of the Four Quartets, where the despondency of the hollow men has given way to a calmer, more philosophical and structured melancholy.
One sense in which this feels to me to be so, that the end is where we start from, is that forecasts for 'time future' are usually commentaries on the mood of the present, with some right-sounding evidence attached. The future focuses our present mood. Me I think there'll be both bangs and whimpers, and that homo sapiens is a species that lacks the insight to control our dazzling intelligence and curiosity. We slash and burn, sure there'll be new places to plunder over the horizon. But there comes a moment where there aren't: hence the chimeras of life on Mars or half-man-half-a.i.biscuit.
I'm just back from the funeral of an old friend though, so may be more melancholy than usual, and I'm just re-reading Eliot because the late friend was an enthusiast and so was the celebrant at his funeral. Still I'm heartened to read a line I don't remember noticing before, 'Old men ought to be explorers' Eliot writes, and:
That small quatrain is one of the few snippets of Elliot I know, but I've always found it profoundly meaningful.
Quoting Bitter Crank
There was a Foreign Correspondent feature on illegal sand mining around Mumbai, for this very reason. People are routinely murdered over it. And that's sand.
Quoting anonymous66
Never heard of it before now, but can't see any reason why not.
What can happen is some form of collapse of the present globalized World, something remiscient of what happened when Antiquity turned into the Middle Ages, when during that time the "globalized" Network collapsed and such mega-cities as Rome and Constantinople ceased in size. Yet that wasn't an extinction event. Furthermore, eradicating povetry has been the best antidote for population growth. And "peak everything"? If the global population peaks with 9 to 13 billion or more, that will be a perilous time for our growth oriented economic system as population growth is the most basic reason for economic growth. We shouldn't forget that the majority of the planets surface hasn't been mined or even searched for raw materials. Peak Oil is the perfect example of this: what basically has happened is Peak conventional Oil. As the price has gone up, so has the means to make oil from various materials. People simply forget two important things in the equation: the price mechanism and the advances in technology.
What is a real possibility that not only there isn't growth or major advances in science and technology, but even backtracking. Some could argue that we aren't advancing at such a pace as we were in the 19th and 20th Centuries (as the years 2001 and 2010 weren't like the one's portrayed in the famous sci-fi books). Yet that still doesn't mean that the human race is facing extinction in a mere 500 years.
Another favorite from Four Quartets:
"Not fare well, but fare forward, voyagers."
Why the need for a bang or for a whimper? Why not voyage on without knowing? Not well, but forward none the less?
"Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the past
Into indifferent lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think 'the past is finished'
Or 'the future is before us'.
At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,
Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)
Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
At the moment which is not of action or inaction
You can receive this: "on whatever sphere of being
The mind of man may be intent
At the time of death" - that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which will fructify in the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare Forward.
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination."
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers." - The Dry Salvages, Four Quartets
Nothing to worry about, eh?
Après nous, le déluge
I have the impression that sci-fi predictions or depictions of the future have almost always overshot the mark in a lot of ways (flying cars, usually with no discernible means of flight or propulsion, are a staple of sci-fi depictions of "the future"). The TV show Lost in Space took place in 1997, for example.
Sometimes sci-fi has underestimated certain technological developments. For instance, the film Blade Runner had Atari signs in the background, and phone booths were still in use, with no sign of cell phones.
We have a much greater impact on our own environment. At earlier times this feedback was much weaker. In addition to exhausting easily extractable resources (which has happened before, albeit locally), we can now easily trigger a mass extinction event on the global scale.
"The world" will not literally come to an end, unless a black hole stops by and vacuums it up before moving on to more pressing business. Homo sapiens will (probably) not literally vanish in 500 years, unless aliens stop by to rid the universe of whatever threat we pose to their own schemes. Eliot was writing poetry not prognostication, and I am not an extinction enthusiast.
However, we can speculate on how our species might meet its demise. It's a worthwhile exercise because we want to avoid coming close to extinction, let alone finding out what extinction feels like.
My guess is that we could at least come close to extinction through a combination of disasters, which are from "fairly" to "remotely" possible. All of them happening at once or in a maximally destructive sequence is not likely.
Disaster #1: A 'limited nuclear exchange' and the resultant firestorms cause a dramatic increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Disaster #2: Global warming becomes quite severe over the next several centuries, and a very large percentage of humans die, owing to starvation and familiar diseases.
Disaster #3: Novel viruses and/or bacteria arise and kill off a significant portion of the humans who managed to survive severe global warming.
Disaster #4: A meteorite large enough to cause large-scale damage further depletes the remaining (small number of) humans. Or, the volcanic eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera would cause the same kind of damage as a meteorite impact.
The least imaginative apocalyptic fiction call for annihilation by means of multiple, well-timed disasters. We escape to the vicinity of Alpha Centauri and continue along our merry way.
What is quite possible are disasters # 2 and # 3, and we don't escape at all. In the worst-possible global warming scenarios, feedback loops accelerate the rate of warming. Some predictions say that by the end of this century, day-time temperatures may be too high for people to work outside for extended periods (like they do in agriculture, for instance) in areas of the world that are normally hot. In subsequent centuries, the zones of 'too damn hot' will cover presently temperate areas.
Even a moderately slow rate of global warming will be too fast for environments to adapt, and many species of plants and animals will fail.
Humans probably won't die of heat exhaustion; we are more likely to die from starvation, because food production will become difficult long before 500 years is up. A starving population will fall prey to ordinary illnesses. (One can safely assume that scientific capabilities will be diminished as people die off.)
What might bring us to our needs during a period of exhaustion and starvation is a novel disease. I have no idea what that disease might be, but in the last half century several new diseases have appeared (AIDS and Ebola) or appeared in new areas (West Nile Virus and the Zeka virus). Some bacteria have become, or are rapidly becoming, immune to antibiotics.
A limited nuclear war is a real possibility. "Limited" meaning... don't know. 100 to 500 nuclear explosions in a desert would probably not result in a rapid increase in death rates over the long run. Nuclear war, however, will not result in many desert test site explosions. Most of them will occur where there are large numbers of people and structures. Those explosions would be 'dirtier' both in terms of radiation and CO2 production.
The limiting factor on oil production (which produces peak oil) is that at some point, the energy required to extract oil exceeds the energy available in the oil. When we reach that point, we're finished with that technology. There is literally no point in continuing.
Or, in the darker spirit:
Actually, 19th Century Sci-Fi did many times underestimate the technological advances. All that what now has become Steampunk. Naturally extremely rarely can people have an idea of some new technology and the way it's used before it's discovered.
The simple reason why even most serious sci-fi predictions overshot was because of simple extrapolation. Assume your living in the 1960's. Then 50 years ago humans had only the most rudimentary flying contraptions and during that decade there was a race to the moon. If you just simply extrapolate onward 50 years the same kind of progress then yes, the "overshooting" is quite reasonable. In the 1960's there's no idea (or the idea isn't popular) that natural resources would be the problem. After all, all the minerals we need are there in the asteroid belt.
Techonlogy advances rapidly at start, then stagnates and finally gets to a threshold that there basically isn't much way to improve it. Just look around your own home a look at what there is that would be there totally in the similar form (if not in design) in the 1960's. You likely have a stapler, a pencil, books, a lamp, chairs, which were reality in the 60's too. Even the fridge and the oven aren't so different.
What is telling of our time is that pessimism has taken over the Sci-Fi genre. That's the more popular view. People don't simply believe that things would be better in the future. Everything will be worse. After all, some here seem to believe that we as a species are extinct in a mere 500 years from now.
First, Hubbert's theory of Peak Oil was about the production in general.
Second, we surely haven't reach that point and likely never, ever will. Remember the ever important link here to the price mechanism that demand and supply have.
We are likely finished with the technology simply when some other form of energy production is simple far more cheaper . That's when oil falls out of favour as a source of energy production. (We shouldn't forget other things that we get from it like plastics etc.)
The real point is that Hubbert was correct assuming that the technology would not have changed. Because this is what US oil production and Hubbert's Peak Oil thesis looks like now:
That is why one speaks of Peak Conventional Oil now. The above graph is one of the best graphs showing what effect technology can have as Hubbert's forcast would have proven otherwise correct without the advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. That hydraulic fracturing technology was invented in the 1940's and licenced in the 1950's, but naturally could compete with the low oil prices of the era, btw.
If the world ever ends, it might require the converse of the Big Bang, say, a cosmological implosion, a Big Slurp.
I think it's safe to say that, oh, maybe 20,000 air bursts would generate enough widely distributed radiation and dust to cause some pretty seriously problems for the biosphere.
Your interpretation is more optimistic than mine.
No, we haven't reached the end of oil, yet. But it seems to me to be very overly optimistic to assume that oil production will continue indefinitely into the future, regardless of the energy or cash value of the oil extracted compared to the energy cost required to obtain the oil.
Can we get alone without oil? Sure we can, IF we are prepared (at some point in the not too distant future) to arrange our lives for a world where only very expensive unprocessed petroleum remains.
The most problematic scenario is the one in which we don't make timely and sufficient adaptations to other energy sources, like wind and solar. As James H. Kunstler points out, we don't have a substitute for cheap oil in the manufacture, distribution, and maintenance of windmills and solar arrays.
As I've said, how we get out from using oil is when there is a cheaper method of producing energy. Or to say it another way: when oil is so expensive to other means. Yet in the equation there simply has to be the other ways of producing energy. Because if the price of oil rises... and would still be the cheapest energy source, then you have a Giffen good.
Quoting Bitter Crank
..or we don't yet have electric passenger jets, cargo ships or electric heavy haul trucks, even if you start having electric cars. The combustion engine still rules, even if times are changing...
Yet the likely outcome for not having adequate energy or simply very expensive energy is obvious: there is far lower growth or simply stagnation. We've already seen what extremely high oil price does: it creates food riots in poor countries. Basically it's a handbrake on economic growth.
And that share of fossil fuels is still quite awesome, even if that share of renewable energy has been increasing:
Hence the idea that we'll just preserve, stop using energy, and likely the outcome is a self-inflicted economic depression, which brings social upheaval and political crises and in the end wars.
Quoting Bitter Crank
So then the question is, how much we could backtrack, stagnate in 500 years?
The only time we remember this really happening is when Antiquity turned into the "Dark Ages" with a globalized economy which was very specialized halting in it's tracks and becoming far local and less advanced and specialized. Then you could see technology going backwards.
So if 'the world' doesn't refer to the world but biological life in the world, then the idea of a decisive end to it is still dubious, because if life is possible here, then it is possible elsewhere in millions or billions of planets that orbit suns under the same or similar conditions. It is improbable that all of their biospheres would get polluted at the same time and forever.
there is a theory, btw, that the reason we haven't encountered intelligent life from elsewhere in the galaxy (or more likely, just from our arm of the galaxy) is that civilizations all eventually run into a common problem of resource exhaustion, ecological decay, and social breakdown. Such disasters prevent them from getting very far away from their home planets.
The phrase "end of the world" seemed to refer to something more fundamental than the end of intelligent life here.
The assumption of a perpetually life-sustaining local environment seems improbable anyway. But organisms adapt, and by the time our sun burns out we might have already moved to an artificial planet, or space ships heading towards other habitable planets. Likewise, it does not seem improbable that intelligent life on other planets have already found ways to adapt to a universe in which suns burn out.