Image: NASA
Share your thoughts on how the world will end at our Science Not Fiction blog. Which of these doomsday scenarios do you find the most likely? Which obvious Armageddon did we miss? Also see the rest of our 30th-anniversary coverage.
Fashions come and go in all human endeavors—even eschatology, the study of the end of the world.
Back in the 1980s, our planet seemed sure to perish in a nuclear barrage, and songs about atomic apocalypse were at the top of the charts: Cue Prince’s “1999” (“Everybody’s got a bomb/We could all die any day”). By the 1990s, death by asteroid impact was all the rage. After 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks, worries turned to a bioweapon unleashed by a terror group. The latest obsession is plague, delivered in the metaphorical form of vampires and zombies—especially zombies, since vampires have developed an unseemly fondness for chaste romance.
In truth, all these possible ends only scratch the surface, as I learned a decade ago while working on my article “20 Ways the World Could End” for DISCOVER’s 20th-anniversary issue. And I quickly found that I was far from the only one with a fascination for such gloomy things. Soon after came a flurry of similar end-of-days TED lectures, books, and television shows.
We are fascinated by speculation about the end of the world, I think, because it paradoxically makes us feel safe. Global destruction is so grand, so overdramatic, that it doesn’t feel connected to our lives the way more immediate worries like cancer or Alzheimer’s are. We can dabble in morbid fantasies about our demise while believing that we won’t be the ones fated to see them realized. Then again, lots of people bet that they wouldn’t be the ones left holding overpriced Florida homes when the real estate market collapsed. We might lose this bet as well.
For DISCOVER’s 30th anniversary, the time seemed right to revisit the science of doomsday. As with every sequel, this time it delivers more, more, more. So my latest list goes to 30: 10 brand-new possible ends, along with updated odds on the original 20.
30 INFORMATION OVERLOAD Futurist Ray Kurzweil talks expansively about the coming “singularity,” a moment when human and machine intelligence become indistinguishable and the pace of progress accelerates unimaginably. If minds could be transferred to computers, Kurzweil argues, death would become meaningless. And if humans merged with their machines, the world as we know it would no longer exist. In the evolutionary sense, this could represent the emergence of a new species—Homo singularity?—that would be mostly technology driven. (And don’t ask what happens if the power fails.) Linguist Stephen Pinker dismisses this whole vision, likening it to the old predictions of domed cities and nuclear-powered cars. But Kurzweil claims he can provide the date when the singularity will arrive: 2045, just in time for DISCOVER’s 65th anniversary. ODDS: indeterminate, but likely—human-machine merging is starting already.
29 GENETICALLY MODIFIED SUPERHUMANS The debate over human germ-line engineering—reworking genes in the sperm and egg to create inheritable new traits—sputtered out early in the last decade after gene therapy had a series of notable failures. The revival of that research (see page 31) suggests it is time to resume the conversation. Soon it could be possible to design babies whose DNA has been rewritten to give them greater mental and physical abilities. Such “transhumans” might eventually be a true breed apart, able to mate only with others of their kind. In a Hollywood blockbuster, the transhumans would include a cackling villain who turns against his progenitors, but there is no need: If they are truly superior, they might outcompete us by benign means, marking the first synthetic transition from one homi-nid species to the next. Odds: high, since germ-line modification seems nearly inevitable in the long run.
28 SPACE COLONY UPRISING From America to Angola, colonies have a history of rising up against the nations that founded them. If we ever establish self-sustaining colonies on other worlds, the social and political pressures will probably be much the same. (In 1973, the crew of the first American space station, Skylab, went on strike to protest their working conditions.) As with the American Revolution, the separation could be violent without being catastrophic. But an interplanetary conflict opens some grim possibilities. A self-sustaining colony could afford to unleash a planetwide attack, such as an unstoppable bioweapon, since the consequences on Earth would have no effect on the attackers. Odds: high that there will be a political separation; low that it will be catastrophic. England colonized half the world and is still standing.
