The world’s ending/beginning

 

This present moment used to be the unimaginable future.

Stewart Brand

Threshold

There is no lack of doomsday attempts. It is as if the trumpets of the Apocalypse were playing the background music. The end of the world is becoming more and more certain every day.

But change the sense of omen for a moment: what if, instead of being at the end of humanity, we were just at the beginning of its dawn? What if we, the conceited people of the 21st century, turned out to be the primitive origins of a long history of the species? Let’s see. Over the last seventy thousand years we have filled every corner of the planet, and there is no place on Earth that has not been disrupted by us. However, the lot of things we have done - all that which we call culture and civilization - is much more recent: our history is only a span of less than ten thousand years, which is a mere blink of an eye, a whisper in the time frame of our own generative existence, let alone in the greater context of the existence of earthly life. Moreover, in geological terms, the passing of sapiens is an insignificant spark. We are an odd and very young type of bug, only recently spat out into the world by evolutionary processes. Even among the hominins - the primates with upright posture and bipedal locomotion - sapiens have only just appeared. Let's compare. Sharks, the cartilaginous fish that inhabit the oceans to this day, have evolved over the last 450 million years, which means they have survived the five mass extinctions that have devastated the biosphere. We know that the poor dinosaurs were not so lucky, but they lasted a solid 165 million years. Mammoths were around for about five million years. The Ardipithecus, already proud hominins, appeared about 5.8 million years ago and managed to stay active for more than a million years. Even the homo neanderthalensis, close relatives of the sapiens, managed to stay alive and part of the earth's fauna for about 400,000 years. What about us? Well, we arrived quite recently, about 200,000 years ago. So, newcomers and perhaps on the verge of leaving for good?

Sunday

Although the viral tide has calmed down for now and the pandemic wave seems to give us a break, apocalyptic concerns are still raging. And it's not unjustified. Looking at the short term, one cannot pretend not to see the storm clouds that presage vicious storms, disasters, calamities, catastrophes and misfortunes on a global scale... Just on Saturday, March 26, Mr. Biden had the nerve to declare that, when facing "nuclear risk", diplomacy is necessary to solve the conflict in Ukraine... Ah, how nice! However, he continues to provide arms and military training to the Ukrainian government... The septuagenarian president - in November he will become an octogenarian - also said that. Putin, the president of Russia, should not remain in power because he is a "criminal", "a butcher". So much for the US president's diplomatic skills, so much for his desire to stop the war... And, well, it is understandable: in just the first two weeks of the war in Eastern Europe, the US arms industry earned a trifle over 80 billion dollars. The main issue, as we know, is that if anyone decides to throw the first atomic punch, that's it for us... I mean, sooner or later, it’d be the end of all of us.

A day later, Sunday the 27th, I spoke with El Grillo Bravo. He is in his hideout in Teotihuacán de Arista, I am in Mexico City. He can see the Pyramid of the Sun from his window, I can see the WTC. Thanks to mobile telephony, we were able to talk for more than an hour about a variety of issues that interest us, others that frankly concern us. There was even an opportunity for him to sing a song -he couldn't remember if it was by Fito Paez or Charly Garcia- and play his tlapitzalli for a while. At one point, El Grillo Bravo said: "We humans have destroyed everything, all we have left to do now is to destroy ourselves". That very same day, in his biweekly column in La Jornada Semanal, the master Agustín Ramos had accurately outlined in a few words the critical situation that our species is going through: "The dilemma -increasingly closer and unavoidable- will be war or life. Because the only viable path for life on our planet, will be a new renaissance" Agustín is not exaggerating one bit. Chomsky, like many other contemporary philosophers, has not ceased to warn us about the great risks humankind is facing: on one hand, capitalist militarism and the threat of nuclear (self-)annihilation, and on the other, the climate crisis and the ultimate environmental holocaust. Kill each other or burn the house down. Yes, there are (unreasonable) reasons to believe that we are about to disappear from the biosphere.

The worst threat Humanity has ever faced is humanity itself. Besides the risk of self-annihilation, the possibility of the evolution of the species, no longer biological but technological, is no longer science fiction nonsense. Yuval Noah Harari claims that technological disruption, particularly Artificial Intelligence and bioengineering, has the potential to decimate us. "If we start an arms race in artificial intelligence and genetics we will be guaranteeing the destruction of humanity," he said in an interview a couple of years ago. And even if that doesn’t happen, the Israeli sociologist maintains that you and I, contemporary people, are most likely part of "one of the last generations of homo sapiens. In a century or two, the Earth will be dominated by entities that will be more different from us than we are from Neanderthals or chimpanzees, because in the following generations we will have to learn how to intervene in the engineering of our bodies, brains and mentalities.

But what if we don't, what if we put the brakes on, what if we steer the wheel and choose the path of renaissance?

Ancestors and modern-day people

Even in the midst of the end-of-the-world rumblings, there are still some noble optimistic souls. Max Roser, founding director of Our World in Data, published a few days ago a paper rooting for humanity's intelligence: The future is Vast: Longtermism perspective on humanity's past, present and future. His whole approach is based on an optimistic premise: " If we keep each other safe – and protect ourselves from the risks that nature and we ourselves pose – we are only at the beginning of human history."

The author considers the estimate made by demographers Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub, according to which 109 billion sapiens have been born and died over the last 200,000 years. Considering that there are currently 7.9 billion of inhabitants in the world, in total, around 117 billion human beings have been born. Therefore, us modern- day humans, the people who populate the Earth nowadays, make up a little less than 7% of all the women and men who have ever inhabited the world. Currently, 140 million babies are born each year —about as many as the current population of Mexico (131 million), Costa Rica (5 million) and Ireland (5 million) together— and 60 million people die —the total population of Ukraine (43 million), Portugal (10 million) and Paraguay (7 million) altogether. 

Descendants

In astronomical terms, we have time. The Sun has fuel left for about 7.5 billion more years, of which it will remain as it is today, fusing hydrogen in a steady-state, for about five billion years. In biological terms the picture is different, but we still have some time: "A way to estimate how long we might survive is to look at how long other mammals have survived. The life span of a typical mammal species is about a million years." From this perspective, we have some 800,000 years ahead of us -given that humans have been around for 200,000 years already-. Now if, as the UN estimates, the world population stabilizes at 11 billion sapiens at the end of this century, and if a life expectancy of 88 years is assured for everyone, then, according to Max Roser's calculations, about 100 trillion humans will have lived for the next 800,000 years.

Of the three premises that support the previous estimation, surely the weakest is the one that supports the idea that we sapiens are typical mammals. In reality, we are the most atypical of living beings, the only ones to have created a symbolic and cultural reality overlapping natural reality. Roser stresses that, if the technology we have developed is capable of annihilating us, it is also capable of saving us, not only from common diseases but from many disasters that other species did not stand a chance against. For example, nowadays, the possible impact of potentially catastrophic asteroids is monitored. So, the life expectancy of our species may not be determined by its mammalian condition, but by the expiration of our habitat. If we survive as long as the Earth is habitable - approximately one billion years - 125 billion children will be born, according to Roser's estimates.

Today

Beyond the potential of science and technology that we have so far, beyond our vast cultural heritage, it is mind-blowing to imagine the possibilities that would come with so many people over such a long period of time. Look at what we have done so far, keep in mind that cultural evolution has accelerated only in the last five thousand years — 2.5% of our existence —...

If we do not make a fatal mistake today, the people who might live in the future will be as human as we are. Max Roser defends the notion of ‘Longtermism’ , “the idea that people who live in the future matter morally just as much as those of us who are alive today. “ When we ask ourselves what we should do to make the world a better place, a longtermist does not only consider what we can do to help those around us right now, but also what we can do for those who come after us. ” Our potential future is immense: we could be the pioneers of mankind, we could be living the beginning of the world.

Just as we can see today the vestiges of the Great Temple of the Great Tenochtitlan, the ancient Mexicas saw the Teotihuacan pyramids as ruins, gigantic witnesses of a world that came to an end. Today we cannot allow ourselves to let our civilization collapse, to let our world end, because such an end would most likely be definitive. The only other alternative to the end of the world is the beginning.