The race is on. Bow down Conquest, War, Famine and Death – as a humanity we now have a cornucopia of diverse ways for The End to arrive. I don’t know if I should laugh or cry about the fact that the mere civilization collapse actually seems to be the least of evils. We now have way worse ways to go.
The fade-out
Some of you may have read a blog of mine where I likened the end of civilization to my grandmothers’ old Volvo. It never went out with a bang, but with increasing whining. In terms of societal collapse that means nothing dramatic, just the crumbling of everything due to Business-As-Usual.
The temperatures get warmer, the livable areas shrink, the species and ecosystems go extinct, but life itself inches along. We face increasing unemployment, civic unrest, crumbling social security (like healthcare) and institutional structures (with the military last to go), food and water shortages, increasingly expensive energy followed by shortages, followed by energy regulation, followed by all but muscle powered energy becoming too rare to waste on anything non-essential for human survival.
Accompanied with this we see an increasing sense of meaninglessness coupled with increasing awareness of the necessity of self-subsistence. Polarization increases with the well-to-do with chances of avoiding the truly life-threatening problems longer than others. There will be dancing on this Titanic with some survivors to carry out the tale.
This is the best case scenario.
The nuclear holocaust
On top of the trajectories evidenced in the fade-out apocalypse, the geopolitical turbulence can become even worse. We have managed to put some seriously unstable individuals in positions where they can, with a press of a button, literally wipe out not only a bunch of annoying other humans, but also the possibility of any life for quite some time.
We cannot even rely on their self-preservation instincts, as not only are they old enough to in any case have only few years to witness what they wrought, but deep enough in their denial and surrealism that they might consider themselves as separate from the life sustaining processes our planet provides them with. Being the epitomes of the colonial mindset with all its accompanying sense of god-given superiority, they are probably deluded enough to believe some white-winged creature swooping down from the heavens to save them from any minor inconveniences a nuclear holocaust might cause for the rest of the humanity.
Yes, we have managed to create a situation where the cock-measuring of a few old dudes may well kill off most of the planet. Well done us.
AMOC gone amok
The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation is one of the main components of the planet’s climate system. It is in big part responsible for the temperatures and weathers we are used to taking for granted in diverse regions of the globe – and not only we, but all of the biosphere. Us and the rest of the nature have evolved regionally to live in the specific climates of that region. Should the AMOC collapse, the North would literally freeze in winter (with temperatures around -50C°) and burn in summer (the global warming would still continue), whereas the South would become arid and dry. These problems, however, would pertain only to the part of population not yet drowned in the coastal regions sunk under the raising seas.
The odds are good that we reach the tipping point, a.k.a the point of no return, in 2040-2060, with the actual current collapse taking a few decades, maybe even a century, to materialize. This is not one of the worst endings – at least some of us might have time to wield our superpower: adaptation.
A choking planet
The Amazonian rainforests have been referred to as the lungs of the planet. We are now either a few years or few percentages of deforestation away from reaching the tipping point, after which the jungles turn savannah. When that happens, climate warming takes a leap, arctic ice melts, rain stops in Northern America and agriculture becomes more or less impossible in the South America. No coffee for us Finns anymore, which is an apocalypse of its own.
This ending feels somewhat similar to both the fade-out and the amok AMOC. The speed of the end is however a bit more rapid. The food runs out sooner, and the climate becomes intolerable faster. There would be time to pack up the bags and head for the hills, however, some of us would make it.
AI to end it all
This is not science fiction. I wish it was.
There are two main ways for the development of AI to result in human extinction, with the other option including the extinction of more or less all life. And these don’t even include any Terminator-like self-aware entities.
The less likely, but more familiar threat is akin to the nuclear holocaust – we create something with the power to kill all of us and forget to add suitable controls to the mix. Someone somewhere enters a command, which the black boxed artificial intelligences interpret in their own way and launch drones, nukes, cyber attacks to nuclear power stations, or something else fun. Human error combined with global internet connectivity, dependence on digital infrastructures and inhuman lack of reflection is all it takes.
The more likely, but less known threat emerges from the mainstream paradigm of the Silicon Valley based AI developers: they are transhumanists, or more aptly TESCREAL. The acronym refers to a worldview that combines 1) the aspiration of enforcing the evolution of humans to the point where all can be digitalized, made alive in a virtual environment, 2) the ambition to develop technologies that would enable harnessing limitless energy from Sun to power megacomputers (built from all natural resources extractable first from our planet, then others) on which the virtual humanity would live and from which they would conquer the universe (i.e. harvesting any star and planet to power the megacomputers housing billions and billions human consciousnesses), and 3) an eschatological worldview where humanity is predetermined to escape its “meat-sack” existence and biological extinctions into a virtual paradise of our own making.
The threat to life does not so much hinge on the possibility of us ever being able to create such technologies that would enable the described outcome, but on the fact that this mindset is shared with a notable chunk of the most powerful and wealthy humans. Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ray Kurzweil, Jeff Bezos, the list goes on. There is currently a staggering amount of money (and thus power) poured into this endeavor with absolutely no care about the impact of this pursuit on the planetary processes.
As long as our civilization stands in its current form, this machinery of death (they see as pursuing virtual life) has the might to worsen all of the environment driven planetary collapses. The further they get before our society collapses, the worst off are the survivors on this planet, be we humans or other species. Quaintly, the warnings we now read about in media pertain to the first category of AI driven demise, a discussion promoted by the TESCREAL cult, because when we, the Terminator movie educated middle class, are too scared of what the AI might do, we ignore the impacts of the pursuit of the second kind of apocalypse.
To put it simply: no AI Terminator will come and wipe us out. Instead, in pursuing everlasting digitalized life for themselves, the rich and powerful few are willing to destroy as much as they can of the biological life and its enablers in their atavistic dread of ceasing to exist.
Race to the end – which apocalyptic rider should we bet on?
Our civilization is at an end. However, depending on how we go out, the survivors will have very different starting points. The worst would be a radioactive planet where little of any scale can live. Probably some life would survive, but it would be anyone’s guess how many millions of years it would take for sentient multi-cellular life to again evolve.
The next worst scenario follows from the unlimited pursuits of the TESCREALists, as their actions would surely bring about the amok AMOC, lungless planet and a number of other environmental calamities caused by hyper-intensive extractivism. Being busy building shelters, artificial islands, floating cities, bunkers or bases in Mars for themselves, in this scenario the culprits would probably be the ones to survive longest. Whether or not it would be a sufficient punishment for them to then ultimately fall short of their everlasting existence aims is a moot point, as there would be few of us left to do the gloating.
Looked at this way, it seems that a rapid societal collapse is actually our best bet. We can hope that the financial system fails soon, as that would effectively remove the power base of the TESCREAL billionaires. The sooner our industrial infrastructure goes, the less harm will we continue doing to the planetary processes. The sooner we need to learn again the skills needed to feed ourselves without the centralized and globalized industrial machinery, the more there will be those in need of those skills, the survivors.
While our civilization is beyond surviving, the same cannot be said of us humans and still many of our fellow living beings. What we might now start working on, is to refocus our sustainability efforts to realizing the least bad apocalypse.
Whatever that then means for each individual in their respective life situations, I cannot say. All I can do is to try to paint the picture as I see it – to just take a comfortable position in my armchair and prepare to witness the race. I cheer for the horse of the fade-out, but the wise money is probably currently on the horse ridden by the TESCREAL cult.
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The author has just launched a site in Substack with the idea of to pool her collapsology related writings there. This is one of the blog posts you can find there, and for the duration of BIODIFUL project, some of the blogs will continue to be posted in both sites. However, most of Milla’s stuff will be found from now on at Crazy Old Dog Lady
