The Darwin Award For Self-Extinction Goes To…

When a young Edwin Hubble started looking out into the universe at the beginning of the 20th century experts thought that this universe was only tens or maybe hundreds of millions years old (most people thought the world was less than 10,000 years old). Now, on a 4 1/2 billion year old Earth in a 13 billion year old universe, the odds against the end of the world today or tomorrow are astronomical. (Unless you belong to a willfully ignorant cult like the President.)

But don’t make fun of the end of the world catastrophists. And don’t be overly optimistic about the resilience and adaptability of our civilization, profoundly misunderstanding the challenge facing us today.

In man’s long history – ten thousand years since the innovation of agriculture and civilization; seventy thousand years since the bottleneck where geneticists have determined that only around ten thousand humans out of a global population of tens of millions survived a ‘volcanic winter’; and back at least hundreds of thousands of years to taming fire, learning language and the dawn of religion and culture – it has been only in the last century that we have had the ability to alter the surface of the Earth so that human life was in jeopardy.

Twice (at least) in the past century we have created a possibility of our own accidental extinction: nuclear winter and depletion of the ozone layer.

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