Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

by Tom Phillips

  Cryptocurrencies don’t have any intrinsic value, and by design most don’t have any kind of central authority to regulate and control their flow. The only limiting factor is the cost of the computing you need to do to create and exchange them. But the belief among some people that they’re the currency of the future has led to many cryptocurrencies surging in value, as everybody agrees that they’re worth something—or, at the very least, that there’ll be another sucker along in a minute who thinks they’re worth more than you do, until all of a sudden there isn’t. So their value has become wildly volatile, depending entirely on the mood of the market. It’s a classic financial mania, bubbles forming and bursting over and over again, as everybody tries to not be the one left holding a suddenly worthless parcel when the music stops.

  But like most manias, it has real-world effects. It’s not just Australia reopening a power plant: in the rural west of America, 170 years after the gold rushes first brought people flooding west, tempted by the prospect of overnight riches, there’s a new gold rush happening. Lured by cheap power and cheap rent and space to build, cryptocurrency firms are investing hundreds of millions creating huge, power-hungry crypto-mines in small country towns across Washington, Montana, Nevada and more. Residents of one town where these twenty-first-century prospectors have moved in complain that the around-the-clock roar of the servers is keeping them awake, affecting their health and driving away local wildlife.

  By the end of 2018, one estimate predicts that Bitcoin mining alone will use as much energy as the entire country of Austria.

  This book has been about the failures and mistakes we’ve made in the past. But what about the mistakes we’re making right now, and the ones we’ll make in years to come? What shape might the fuck-ups of the future take?

  Making predictions is, as we’ve noted, a sure-fire way to make yourself look stupid to historians further down the line. Maybe the decades and centuries ahead will see humanity commit a whole series of completely original, novel mistakes; maybe we’ll find a way to stop making mistakes at all. But if you were of a mind to put money on it, a sensible bet would be that we’ll probably carry on making the exact same mistakes as we have in the past.

  Let’s start with the obvious, then.

  Of all the stuff we’ve just casually dumped into the environment on the grounds that, eh, it’ll probably be fine, it’s the carbon we’ve been merrily burning up since the Industrial Revolution kicked off that’s going to really spoil everybody’s good times.

  That man-made climate change is real, and potentially an existential threat to many communities around the world and many aspects of civilization, is so well established as a scientific fact by this point that it seems kind of dull to run over the evidence again. We’re way beyond the point where this might all be another polywater or N-ray-type situation that everybody’s going to be embarrassed about in a few years’ time. And yet apparently there are still plenty of people who have enough reasons to deny it—financial, political, the sheer bloody-minded joy of being a contrarian knobber—that we keep getting dragged back to the “debate about whether it’s real” stage every time it looks like we might make some progress on the “actually do something about it” stage. It’s pretty much the playbook the manufacturers of leaded gasoline used back in the day: you don’t need to disprove something, you just need to be able to claim the jury’s out long enough to keep raking in that sweet, sweet profit.

  And so we’re doing the collective version of “lalalalala can’t hear you,” when instead we should probably be running around in a panic like our house was on fire, which...it sort of is. Seventeen of the hottest eighteen years on record have occurred since the year 2000. For the first time in our geological epoch, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere crossed the threshold of 410 parts per million in April 2018. The last time it was this high was during the mid-Pleistocene warm period, around 3.2 million years ago—right when Lucy was falling out of her tree. In case you’re thinking, oh well, if it’s been that high before, it can’t be too bad, at that time sea levels were over 60 feet higher than they are today.

  Oh, and climate change isn’t the only thing that carbon dioxide is doing. In fact, one of the things keeping a check on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is that the oceans absorb some of it. Good news, hey? Turns out not. Ocean water, much like your boyfriend, is fairly basic—which is to say, it leans very slightly more toward the alkaline than the acid. But absorbing all that CO2 turns it more acidic, and the more acidic the ocean is, the greater the knock-on effect on marine life, from tiny mollusks to big fish.

  Oh, also that gets worse if it happens in combination with the oceans warming up. Which they are. If you want an example of just how bad things are getting in the water, the Great Barrier Reef—one of the actual wonders of the actual natural world—is dying at an alarming rate, with two years in a row of massive “bleaching” events killing corals across large sections of the reef.

  Guys... I think we might have fucked this up a bit.

  Of course, that’s far from the only doom we’ve been energetically and determinedly setting ourselves up for. We’ve given ourselves options here, people. For example: in May 2018, it was reported that scientists had detected a sharp rise in chlorofluorocarbon emissions. Somewhere in the world, likely in Asia, someone’s started manufacturing Thomas Midgley’s supposedly banned invention again. It could set the ozone layer’s recovery back by a decade. Good work on the “learning from our mistakes” front, guys.

  Or take antimicrobial resistance. Antibiotics and other antimicrobial medicines were one of the greatest steps forward of the twentieth century, saving countless lives. But, like the people of Easter Island cutting down their trees, we used them too much, too often. The thing is, every time you use an antibiotic, you’re increasing the chances that one of those microbes will be resistant to it—and then you’re just killing off their competition. It’s accelerated evolution, as our actions breed new strains of antibiotic-resistant superbugs that have the potential to bring all the bad old diseases of history flooding back (and it doesn’t even need the tundra to melt to do it).

  As a result, the world is rapidly running out of effective antibiotics—and part of the problem is that antibiotics simply aren’t profitable enough for drug companies to invest sufficient resources into creating new ones. One estimate suggests that already 700,000 people every year die from antimicrobial-resistant diseases.

  Or maybe our downfall will come because we keep outsourcing our decisions to computer algorithms, in the hope that this somehow makes them better and wiser, and that it won’t be our fault when they go wrong. The algorithms that control self-driving cars are just one example: elsewhere algorithms are deciding what stocks to buy and sell, what news we see on our social media, and how likely it is that someone convicted of a crime will reoffend. We like to think that these will be more rational than humans; in reality, they’re just as likely to amplify all the biases and faulty assumptions we feed into them.

  The worry about outsourcing our decisions to computers doesn’t stop there, as research on artificial intelligence progresses apace. The fear here is that if we do manage to create an AI that’s far smarter and more capable than humans, we might be mistaken in thinking it’ll be on our side. It might be able to manipulate us to its own ends, it may see us as a threat and destroy us or it may simply fail to recognize that humans are important, and we’ll end up being little more than fodder for its goal of creating as many paper clips as possible (or whatever other task we’ve set it). The prospect that we might Frankenstein ourselves into oblivion may seem remote, but a worryingly large number of supposedly smart people appear to be taking the prospect quite seriously.

  Or maybe we’ll just blow ourselves up in a nuclear war before any of this happens.

  Or perhaps the fuck-up won’t be as dramatic as that. Maybe we’ll just quietly doom ourselves to a crappy future thro
ugh our own laziness. Ever since we slipped the surly bonds of earth and entered the space age, our approach to stuff we don’t need anymore in space has been pretty much the same as our approach to all the other rubbish we create: we just throw it away. Space is very big, after all, so how much would it matter?

  That’s where Kessler syndrome comes in. This was predicted by NASA scientist Donald Kessler way back in 1978, and yet it hasn’t stopped us chucking stuff away in space. The problem is that when you dump things in orbit, they don’t really go anywhere. It’s not like throwing a potato chip bag out of a car window, to be immediately forgotten about—space rubbish stays orbiting at roughly the same speed and on the same trajectory as the thing it was thrown out of. And sometimes it will collide with other bits of junk.

  The trouble with that is that, because of the speed objects in orbit are moving at, a collision becomes incredibly destructive. A single collision with the smallest piece of material can be catastrophic, destroying satellites or space stations. And those deadly collisions produce, that’s right, thousands upon thousands more pieces of space junk, all of which can cause more collisions. This is what Donald Kessler predicted: that eventually space will become so crowded that this process will reach a tipping point, where each collision creates more and more collisions, until our planet is surrounded by an all-enveloping cloud of high-velocity garbage missiles. The result of this: satellites become useless, and launching into space becomes a deadly risk. We could become, effectively, earthbound.

  In some ways, it feels like it would be a weirdly poetic end to the journey that Lucy failed to begin all those millions of years ago. All that exploration, all that progress, all those dreams and grand notions, and that’s where we end up: trapped on our planet by a prison we’ve made from our own trash.

  Whatever our future holds, whatever baffling changes come along in the next year, the next decade and the next century, it seems likely that we’ll keep on doing basically the same things. We will blame other people for our woes, and construct elaborate fantasy worlds so that we don’t have to think about our sins. We will turn to populist leaders in the aftermath of economic crises. We will scramble for money. We will succumb to groupthink and manias and confirmation bias. We will tell ourselves that our plans are very good plans and that nothing can possibly go wrong.

  Or...maybe we won’t? Maybe this is the moment that we change, and start learning from our history. Maybe all this is just being pessimistic, and no matter how dumb and depressing the world today may sometimes seem, in actuality humanity is getting wiser and more enlightened, and we are lucky enough to live at the dawn of a new age of not fucking up. Maybe we really do have the capacity to be better.

  One day, perhaps, we’ll climb up a tree and not fall out.

  * * *

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I couldn’t have written this book without the help of a lot of people. My thanks in the first place must go to my agent Antony Topping, without whom I would very literally never have written it. Alex Clarke, Kate Stephenson, Ella Gordon, Becky Hunter, Robert Chilver and the whole team at Headline were a delight to work with, and I’m very sorry about the deadlines. I’d also like to thank Will Moy and the wonderful people of Full Fact for, among other things, waiting too long.

  My family—my parents, Don and Colette, and my actual proper historian brother, Ben—were supportive throughout. Hannah Jewell provided funny history book inspiration, insight and a shared understanding of ghosts. Kate Arkless-Gray offered canny advice, a sympathetic ear and also, crucially, a really cracking housesitting opportunity. Maha Atal and Chris Applegate offered stimulating discussion and numerous suggestions; Nicky Reeves likewise. I also have to thank the historians of Twitter for being reliably great and supportive—in particular Greg Jenner (who I loosely paraphrase on page 9) and Fern Riddell; please buy their books, too. Just going to keep adding people now to make it look like I have lots of friends. Damian and Holly Kahya, James Ball, Rose Buchanan, Amna Saleem and many others provided wise words and pints. Bumping into Kelly Oakes repeatedly while in the final stages of writing was exactly the motivation I needed to keep going. I’d also like to thank Tom Chivers for the lunch we never had, sorry about that. The band CHVRCHES released a strong album during the writing process; I include them in this section merely in the hope that someone will distractedly skim it for names but not really take in the context, and as such will think my life is a lot more glamorous than it seems. On that basis, my thanks also to Beyoncé, Cate Blanchett and Ghost David Bowie.

  It goes without saying that any failures in this book are mine alone, and do not reflect on any of them. Except for Ghost David Bowie.

  FURTHER READING

  There are a number of books that I want to acknowledge that I leaned on particularly heavily for certain sections of the book. (Some are already referenced in the text.) All of them are well worth reading for a deeper dive into some of the issues and events that the space in this book only allowed me to touch on.

  Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is mentioned in the section on cognitive weirdnesses, and underpins a lot of our understanding of how our minds operate. Meanwhile Robert E. Bartholomew’s A Colorful History of Popular Delusions is a great read on manias, crazes, fads and panics.

  Jared Diamond’s Collapse is also mentioned in the text, and heavily informed the section on Easter Island (moreover his influence is clear throughout that whole section).

  Volker Ullrich’s Hitler: Volume I: Ascent 1889–1939 was a source for much of the Hitler material (and fans of elegant literary subtweets will also recognize the central conceit of Michiko Kakutani’s spectacular review of the same book).

  Another one that’s referenced a couple of times in the text is Douglas Watt’s The Price of Scotland: Darien, Union and the Wealth of Nations, which is an insightful and meticulous unpicking of William Paterson’s folly.

  Frank McLynn’s Genghis Khan: The Man Who Conquered the World and Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World were important for the Khwarezm section.

  I also want to shout out a pair of books that trod similar ground before this one: Bill Fawcett’s 100 Mistakes That Changed History: Backfires and Blunders That Collapsed Empires, Crashed Economies and Altered the Course of Our World and Karl Shaw’s The Mammoth Book of Losers, both of which were delightful reading and introduced me to several excellent fuck-ups I wasn’t previously aware of.

  PICTURE CREDITS

  Getty Images: Chapter 2, image 1 (PhotoQuest); Chapter 2, image 2 (Bettmann); Chapter 2, image 3 (© Jim Xu); Chapter 3, image 1 (Bettmann); Chapter 3, image 2 (© Walter Astrada/AFP); Chapter 4, image 3 (© Robert Preston/Age Fotostock); Chapter 6, image 1 (Keystone); Chapter 7, image 1 (Hulton Archive); Chapter 7, image 2 (Historical Map Works LLC and Osher Map Library); Chapter 9, image 2 (Corbis Historical); Epilogue, image 1 (© Nicholas Kamm/AFP)

  Alamy: Chapter 4, image 1 (SOTOK2011); Chapter 4, image 2 (World History Archive); Chapter 8, image 1 (Granger Historical Picture Archive); Chapter 10, image 2 (Granger Historical Picture Archive); Chapter 10, image 3 (IanDagnall Computing)

  Bridgeman Images: Chapter 8, image 2 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris [MS Pers.113.f.49]); Chapter 9, image 1 (Académie des sciences, Paris/Archives Charmet)

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tom Phillips is a journalist and humor writer based in London. He was the editorial director of BuzzFeed UK, where he divided his time between very serious reporting on important issues, and making jokes.

  Over his career Tom has been a member of a very briefly acclaimed comedy group, worked in television and in Parliament, and once launched an unsuccessful newspaper.

  He studied Archaeology and Anthropology and the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, and is pleasantly surprised to have written a book that actually makes use of them.

  INDEX

  The pagination of this digital edit
ion does not match the print edition from which the index was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your ebook reader’s search tools.

  Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations.

  Abubakari II (emperor of Malia), 170

  acclimatization societies, 87–89

  Afghanistan, 211

  “Africanized” bees, 82–83

  Age of Discovery. See European exploration

  agriculture

  animal domestication and, 76

  environmental changes and, 55–61, 64–65

  in Great Plains of US, 55–57, 58

  inequality and, 96

  negative consequences of, 54–55

  rise of, 53–54

  Ahmed I (Sultan of Ottoman Empire), 109–10

  airplanes, 265

  air pollution, 136

  Ala ad-Din Muhammad II (Shah of Khwarezmian Empire), 212–18, 219

  alcohol and Battle of Cádiz, 144–45

  al-Farghani, Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir, 167

  al-Nasir, 217

  al-Qaeda, 211

  Alulim (Sumerian ruler), 96

  Álvares Cabral, Pedro, 168

  American Acclimatization Society, 87–89