End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World

by Bryan Walsh

  Scheffler is the author of books with dire titles like Death and the Afterlife, but for an ethicist he’s actually something of an optimist. In his spare and neat office off New York’s Washington Square, he explained to me that we’re more connected to future generations than we may appear. Much of what we do in the present day only has meaning if there is a future that continues beyond our own deaths. “If I’m trying to find a cure for cancer, and in fact the human race is going to die out in thirty years, that activity really won’t be very valuable,” he said. We will never know the far future, but we depend on its existence. Take it away and you take away something essential about being human. You lose value in the present day—perhaps all value.

  To demonstrate what it would feel like to lose the future, Scheffler pointed to the example of a novel, The Children of Men, by the English writer P. D. James. (It later became a brilliant 2006 film by the director Alfonso Cuarón.) The book is set in England in the year 2021, in a world where some years before, global sperm counts mysteriously dropped to zero. Humans can no longer reproduce, and science is helpless. The last people—known as Omegas—were born twenty-six years before the start of the novel. As a result, the human race is slowly dying out.

  If you were forced to pick an extinction event, you could do worse than the one in Children of Men. No one is killed violently in a supervolcanic eruption or an asteroid strike. No one watches their children die of an engineered superflu. The climate is much as it is today. The world loses no money, nothing that it already possesses—except, of course, the future. And as James deftly shows, the future turns out to be everything.

  Society slowly collapses. People retreat into puerile pastimes, and the pursuit of justice and art and truth—the pursuit of the timeless—withers away. “Without the hope of posterity,” writes James in the voice of her narrator Theo, an Oxford history professor with no students left to teach, “for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins.”95 It is a world that may live for a time, but is already dead.

  In Children of Men, the end of the world is simply happening, and humanity is helpless to do anything about it. But with climate change, and with the other existential risks in this book, we may well be choosing extinction, through our actions or our inactions. This is another reminder of how important our moment is for everything that might come after us—or might not. Previous generations may not have cared much more about the future than we do now, but there was also much less they could do to affect the future, negatively or positively. Our thought experiment notwithstanding, there was nothing the ancient Romans could have done or not done that would have led to the end of the world. But we have that power. That is an awesome and terrible responsibility—to provide the best and the safest space for the future in an age of escalating existential threats. But it’s one that we too often ignore.

  We’re asleep to the future—and Alexander Rose wants us to wake up. Rose is the executive director of the Long Now Foundation, a San Francisco–based collective dedicated to fostering long-term thinking. And I mean really long—Rose and company, which includes the musician Brian Eno and Wired magazine cofounder Kevin Kelly—are pondering the next ten thousand years of humanity, longer than civilization has so far existed. The group holds talks and conferences, and it even has its own bar in San Francisco’s Fort Mason—the Interval at Long Now, where, true to its focus on time, you can get six different versions of an Old-Fashioned. It holds a series of long bets—wagers that will play out over the course of decades, like one betting that the human population will be smaller in 2060 than it is today. The Long Now Foundation is building a library of human knowledge meant to be archived over the next ten millennia, with much of it placed on “Rosetta disks”—palm-sized disks of solid nickel that contain thirteen thousand pages of information engraved in a microscopic font.

  The members of the Long Now Foundation believe that whereas we once looked to the far future with anticipation—dreaming of moon colonies and rocket packs—we’ve since become consumed with the ever-present now, fearful that the human story might be coming to an end but helpless to do anything about it. Rose, whom I met for a coffee one bright March afternoon at the Interval, is realistic about the existential risks that humanity faces—including climate change—but he worries that our anxiety keeps us from dreaming about tomorrow. “A lot of people think of ourselves as being at the end of a ten-thousand-year story of human civilization,” he told me. “But we’re arguing that we should think of ourselves as being in the middle of a twenty-thousand-year story. How would we act differently, how would we feel about ourselves and about civilization?”

  The Long Now’s grandest project is a symbolic one: a timepiece. The 10,000-Year Clock, as it’s called, is being built inside a mountain in western Texas. It will be some two hundred feet tall, a giant mechanical computer that will mark out the days and centuries over the next ten thousand years. Each time the clock’s chimes ring over those ten millennia, it will play a tone it has never played before. It will be a monument, but not to its creators—the clock will contain no references to the individual leaders of the Long Now. Its point is its endurance—if we can build a clock that can ring for ten thousand years, perhaps humanity can last that long as well. And just as the first photographs of Earth from space helped us realize that we all shared the same fragile blue marble, the clock is meant to restore the idea of the future to a civilization stuck on the present. “The only message that we are trying to get across is that there are long-term things that matter, and you get to decide what those are for you,” said Rose, who serves as the project manager of the clock.

  Planning for the far future doesn’t have to mean obsessing over it, and it doesn’t automatically mean sacrificing the good of this generation to preserve those who will come next. Rose and most of the other members of Long Now are optimistic about the future, which is part of the reason they’re building the clock in the first place—because they believe there will be humans alive in ten thousand years to hear it chime.

  To those of the Long Now, what we owe the future, more than anything else, is our respect. We now have the beginning of the ability to predict the future, and it is easy to become convinced—as many environmentalists are—that we know exactly what to do today to ensure the best tomorrow, if only we have the will and the political power to do it. But in truth we see the future as if through a glass darkly, and we only need to look to the past to see how quickly political, cultural, and scientific certainties can be overthrown. Instead of trying to control the future with our choices, we should endeavor to give the people of tomorrow the maximum amount of space safe to operate. That means we shouldn’t bequeath them a climate so ruined that a flourishing civilization is all but impossible, or biodiversity so drained by extinction that the Earth is left irrevocably impoverished. But we also shouldn’t lock the future into certain choices around technology because we might find them questionable or even repellant today. (Among the sci-fi-like projects that the Long Now has been involved with is Revive & Restore, which aims to resurrect extinct species like the woolly mammoth using cutting-edge genetic engineering—one novel solution to the extinction crisis.96) Instead we should embrace the power of science to repair what we’ve lost and ensure that our descendants are as wealthy and as strong as possible, because we have faith that they will be smarter and fairer than us, just as we are smarter and fairer—for the most part—than our ancestors. “We trust that future,” said Rose, “so try not to make decisions that limit our choices or the choices of future generations.”

  Conservationists want us to preserve the past as much as possible—the climate as it was, the environment as it was. But while I don’t share Rose’s degree of confidence that the future is necessarily going to be better and smarter than the past, I agree that we must act as if there will be a long term,
and we have to embrace the change and disruption that will come with it, as scary as it is. Our history has been one of growing, making a mess, inventing new technology or politics that can clean up that mess, and then repeating the whole process over and over again. Long before humans began burning fossil fuels, we had already unrecognizably reshaped the planet through the creation of farms and cities.97 It’s a tightrope walk—and we may have already passed the point of no return for the climate—but it’s the only way we know to go forward. There’s a line from Long Now cofounder Stewart Brand—who went from being a 1960s radical to a Whole Earth Catalog hippie to the godfather of modern Silicon Valley—that sums up our existential challenge around climate change and other technological risks: “We are as gods—and have to get good at it.”98

  I don’t believe the solution to saving ourselves from climate change is embracing total sacrifice in the present, in part because I don’t think human beings can be convinced to do so, and in part because I agree with Rose and Long Now that the best way to help the future is to ensure that we keep growing in the present. But that path may well leave us dependent on a scientific long shot to save the climate and ourselves. It’s called geoengineering, and if nothing else, it is most certainly the stuff of gods.

  It might be the German accent, but Klaus Lackner has a way of speaking that lends an air of authority to his statements, even when what he’s suggesting seems to be science fiction. “If you asked me fifteen years ago,” Lackner told me from his lab in Tempe, Arizona, “I would have said we need to figure out how to stabilize what we’re doing to the atmosphere by reducing carbon emissions. Now I’m telling you we’re way past that. We have to change carbon levels directly.”

  Lackner is the director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University and an academic leader in the most important field you’ve never heard of: carbon capture. Lackner is working to build machines capable of capturing and storing carbon dioxide in the air, a process called carbon sequestration. While most climate policy focuses on cutting future carbon emissions by replacing fossil fuel energy consumption with zero-carbon renewables or even nuclear power, Lackner aims to reduce current levels of carbon dioxide directly by sucking the gas out of the air. If it can be done—and if it can be done economically—it would be nothing less than a technological miracle. And as Lackner himself says, we’re at the point where we need miracles.

  Emissions of greenhouse gases lead to warming because over time they add to the carbon concentration in the atmosphere. During humanity’s preindustrial history—when the climate was like Little Red Riding Hood’s last bowl of porridge, not too cold and not too warm—carbon levels were around 280 parts per million (ppm). By 2013 they had passed 400 ppm and will only continue to rise. Even if future emissions are vastly reduced, the time lag of man-made climate change means that carbon concentrations will continue to grow for a while, and the climate will continue to warm. But if Lackner’s invention works, we could bring carbon levels down, perhaps closer to that original 280 ppm—even if it proves politically and technologically difficult to reduce carbon emissions from energy consumption.

  This would be geoengineering in action—using technology to manually fine-tune the climate, the way we might adjust the picture quality on a television. And in some form it will be necessary. Of the more than one thousand scenarios for future climate change and climate action the IPCC has considered, only 116 actually see us keeping warming below the 3.6-degrees red line—and of those 116, all but eight require carbon removal, or what’s also called negative carbon emissions.99 That’s in part because we’ve already baked so much future warming into the climate with the carbon we’ve already emitted, and in part because the fossil fuel habit is so hard to break, especially for those parts of the developing world that depend on rapid economic growth and the energy use that accompanies it. The only way to square that fact with the equally pressing need to keep warming below 3.6 degrees is to bake in a technology that doesn’t yet exist commercially.

  In 2011, a team of experts reported that pulling CO2 from the air would cost $600 a ton,100 which would make the bill for capturing the 37 billion tons of CO2 emitted in 2017101—one year’s worth—a cool $22 trillion. But progress is being made—in June 2018 a team of scientists from Harvard and the start-up Carbon Engineering published research indicating they might be able to bring that price of capturing a ton of CO2 down to between $94 and $232.102 That would mean it might cost between $1 and $2.50 to capture the CO2 generated by burning a gallon of gasoline, less than the amount of fuel taxes British drivers currently pay.103 Lackner believes that if he could get 100 million of his carbon capture machines running, he could reduce carbon levels by 100 ppm, taking us out of the danger zone.104

  If that price keeps going down—a big if—we might be able to save ourselves. And effective and cheap carbon sequestration would have the added effect of sweeping away many of the moral and political conflicts around climate change. If emitting the carbon that causes climate change is a crime, then we are all criminals. But if carbon dioxide is just another form of waste that can be disposed of safely, then we wouldn’t feel any worse for emitting carbon than we would for producing our garbage bag full of household trash. Treating carbon emissions as waste to be removed defuses the psychological dissonance that can hinder climate policy—the guilty gap between all that we know about climate change and the little that we actually do about it.

  “I would argue by making carbon emissions a moral issue, by saying that the only way to solve the problem is by donning a hair shirt, you actually invite people to resist you,” said Lackner. “They just stop listening to you.”

  Let’s hope that carbon capture becomes a reality—although know that Vaclav Smil himself has estimated that sequestering just one-fifth of global carbon emissions would require building infrastructure twice the size of the worldwide oil industry. And that’s assuming that carbon capture ever becomes a feasible product—many would-be world-changing technologies have expired in the valley of death between the lab and the market. What’s more likely is that we’ll need to do geoengineering the old-fashioned way: by shrouding the Earth and cutting off the sun.

  Supervolcanoes and major asteroid impacts—and for that matter, nuclear war—share the same killer app: rapid climate cooling. Massive amounts of particulates are blown into the atmosphere, where they shroud the planet and block sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface. Temperatures plunge overnight; photosynthesis grinds to a halt; life dies. But the same chemical process that causes drastic climate cooling could theoretically be controlled to offset the warming created by greenhouse gas emissions. It’s called solar radiation management (SRM), and it may be the only realistic, economic strategy we have to avert the worst, most potentially catastrophic effects of climate change.

  Unlike carbon capture, we know how SRM will work because we’ve seen it happen in nature as recently as 1991, when the volcano Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines. The resulting cloud of sulfate aerosols temporarily reduced global temperatures by nearly 1 degree.105 A possible solar radiation management plan already exists, in fact. Gulfstream business jets with customized military engines and the equipment to disperse fine droplets of sulfuric acid would fly around twelve miles above the Earth. The sulfur would combine with water vapor to form sulfate aerosols, which would then be dispersed around the world by wind patterns. Together the aerosols would reflect about 1 percent of incoming sunlight, enough to at least partially offset the effects of man-made global warming.106

  And it would do so cheaply—according to the calculations of David Keith, a professor at Harvard University and a leader in geoengineering research, by 2040 it would take about eleven jets delivering a quarter million tons of sulfuric acid to offset the warming we can expect from rising levels of CO2, all at the cost of about $700 million a year.

  Like any deal that seems too good to be true, there’s a catch. All the other negative effects of increased CO
2 levels—ocean acidification, for example—would continue unabated. Solar geoengineering is imprecise—if scientists have their climate models wrong, we could overshoot or undershoot our targets on warming. Seeding clouds with sulfuric acid causes acid rain, which is toxic to plants and animals. We would have to keep geoengineering going indefinitely. Assuming the world kept emitting carbon, if we stopped, all that delayed warming would hit us in a sudden, catastrophic wave, what’s known as a “termination shock.” Most of all, solar geoengineering would force us to take responsibility for the planet’s climate in a way we may simply not be ready for. Even Keith, who has planned to launch one of the first field trials of solar geoengineering, is on record saying that he hopes we never have to use it.

  Yet I believe we will, for the simple reason that the strategy fits who we are. We are not a species that plans deeply into the future. We are not a species that is eager to put limits on ourselves. We are a species that prefers to stay one step ahead of the disasters of our own making, that is willing to do just enough to keep going. And we are a species that likes to keep going. Solar geoengineering won’t answer the question of what we owe the future, or prove that we’ve somehow matured. But it will provide an insurance policy against the worst, most catastrophic effects of climate change, that fat-tail risk that could bring extinction in its wake. It will prove we’re just smart enough, even if that means we might yet prove too smart for our own good.

  DISEASE

  Twenty-First-Century Plague

  The existential threats I’ve covered in this book are either historical or theoretical. I haven’t lived through an asteroid strike or a supereruption or a full-scale nuclear war—nor has any other human being—and the full shape of risk to come from new technologies like synthetic biology or artificial intelligence is unknowable. But there is one existential threat that I’ve encountered face-to-face: infectious disease. And that encounter is how I came to a moment, sitting on the sofa in a borrowed studio apartment in Hong Kong, when the thought occurred to me: I might die. We all might die.