End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World
Page 34
There is another photograph of our son, attached to a corner of the refrigerator. It is an ultrasound, taken when he was around twelve weeks past conception. My wife had suffered three miscarriages before this pregnancy, three times hopes raised and denied. We had never made it this far before. The day that ultrasound was taken at the obstetrician’s office, and every day after until Ronan was born six and a half months later, we worried. Neither of us had ever known we could want something so much. As I write these words, Ronan has passed his first birthday. He still has the button nose that was visible in that first image, and he’s just as restless as he was in the womb, when we rejoiced with every kick. He is walking, and soon he will run his own race. He is the future made flesh, our own mark on the cosmos. One day my wife and I will be gone, and I pray that he will still be here. It would have seemed strange to hope for that before. Now nothing could seem more natural.
The present seems dark, the future seems darker. Yet I hope still. It may not line up with my reason or my research, but I do have hope. I have hope that we human beings can do what we have always done before and find a way to keep going, whether through innovation or through sacrifice or through some mix of both. I hope because the alternative is too grim to bear. I hope for him, and I hope for all of us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book wouldn’t have been possible without the love and encouragement of my wife, Siobhan O’Connor. She supported my decision to leave Time magazine to work on what became End Times and pushed me during those periods—which were not few—when I experienced doubts. She is the first person to hear my ideas—the good ones and the bad ones—and is the smartest writer and editor I know. She cares, deeply, about writing and books—which is why the one you’re holding in your hands right now exists at all. Thank you for everything, love.
Our son Ronan was born a few months before I began working on End Times in earnest. Studying the end of the world doesn’t make for easy thoughts, but knowing Ronan was here helped give me the strength to see this project through—even on those nights when he wasn’t sleeping so easily. Now I get to watch him grow up, day by day, and every day I count myself lucky.
Todd Shuster, my agent at Aevitas Creative, took a chance on a thirty-nine-year-old would-be first-time author. He and his team—especially Justin Brouckaert—worked closely with me to refine my book proposal to the point where it was ready to be sold, and they’ve been with me every step of the way. And thanks as well to my Time colleague and Carroll Gardens neighbor Steve Koepp, who put me in touch with Todd in the first place.
Krishan Trotman, my editor at Hachette, saw the potential in End Times from the very beginning. She helped me refine my idea, guided my research and reporting, and provided invaluable insight all the way to publication day and beyond. Carrie Napolitano stepped in ably at the end to help push the manuscript through copy edits.
My publicity and marketing team at Hachette—Michelle Aielli, Sarah Falter, and Odette Fleming—brought End Times out into the world. You’re reading this book in large part because of their efforts.
When I was looking for a fact checker to run through the finished manuscript, I had one person in mind: Barbara Maddux. Barbara worked closely with me as chief of reporters when I was the international editor of Time magazine, and without her help, I doubt we would have closed a single issue. I knew End Times would be in good hands when she brought out her red pen. My other former colleagues from more than fifteen years at Time, in New York and abroad—including Nancy Gibbs, Richard Stengel, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Jim Frederick, Jeffrey Kluger, and Radhika Jones—helped make me the writer and journalist I am today. A 2017 cover story I wrote in Time on pandemics helped form the foundation of my chapter on infectious disease, while another cover on synthetic biology the same year, commissioned by Matt McAllester of Newsweek magazine, did the same for the chapter on biotechnology.
There are too many people in the broader field of existential risk to thank individually, but I’m indebted to Phil Torres, Seth Baum, Olle Häggström, Milan Ćirković, and Nick Beckstead for taking the time to walk me through the basics of the subject in long conversations. Rachel Bronson of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists gave me invaluable insight into how the Doomsday Clock is set. Eric Christensen at the Catalina Sky Survey agreed to host me for a night of asteroid hunting, and Greg Leonard patiently answered my questions atop Mount Lemmon. NASA’s Lindley Johnson took time away from defending the planet Earth to explain to me how we should be defending the planet Earth.
Jim Eckles at the White Sands Missile Range gave me an off-hours tour of the Trinity Site, and plenty of stories about the men and women of the Manhattan Project. Daniel Ellsberg and William J. Perry shared their experiences of the Cold War and nuclear near misses with me. Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman hosted me at Harvard University and helped shape my thinking about the extreme downside risks of climate change. Samuel Scheffler taught me about what we owe the people of the future, and Alexander Rose of the Long Now Foundation gave me a little bit of hope, as did Klaus Lackner and his carbon-sucking machines.
A trip to Cameroon for Time magazine in 2011 with the virologist Nathan Wolfe helped me understand the porous microbial border between animals and humans, while the work of my Time colleagues during the 2014 Ebola outbreak—led by Siobhan O’Connor—gave me incredible insight into the global threat of disease. Tom Inglesby and Marc Lipsitch explained the threat that some new tools of biotechnology could pose to the human race, while George Chuch took time to illustrate some of the unexpected pitfalls of these advances, as well as their benefits. Ginkgo Bioworks CEO Jason Kelly let me tour around his biological factory in South Boston, led by creative director Christina Agapakis.
Roman Yampolskiy broke down the fiendishly clever existential threat of advanced artificial intelligence, and the writings of Nick Bostom and Elizier Yudkowsky were key to the larger chapter. Seth Shostak at the SETI Institute welcomed me into his office to explain his lifelong search for intelligent life, Robin Hanson walked me through the Great Filter, and Adam Frank shared his thoughts about the possibility of interstellar climate change. David Denkenberger laid out the diet for a post-catastrophe world—heavy on the rats and the bacteria.
My friend Ed Finn—whom I first met working on the Princeton Tiger in the fall of 1998, before he moved on to bigger things—welcomed me to Arizona State University’s Emerge festival, one of many initiatives he has spearheaded at the Center for Science and the Imagination. Mike Gardner provided me with a welcome ear as a fellow writer, and Paul Griffin was Paul Griffin. I wouldn’t be doing this without my parents, and my brother Sean Walsh and sister-in-law Caroline Walsh.
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NOTES
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1: ASTEROID
CHAPTER 2: VOLCANO
CHAPTER 3: NUCLEAR
CHAPTER 4: CLIMATE CHANGE
CHAPTER 5: DISEASE
CHAPTER 6: BIOTECHNOLOGY
CHAPTER 7: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
CHAPTER 8: ALIENS
CHAPTER 9: SURVIVAL
CHAPTER 10: THE END