I Was Born in 1965. The World Has Been Ending Ever Since.
I was born in 1965.
Apparently, just in time for the end of the world.
To be fair, humanity had already been working on the problem for a while. The Cold War was well underway, thousands of nuclear weapons were pointed in various directions, and there was a very real possibility that somebody might push the wrong button and bring the whole human experiment to an abrupt conclusion.
So nuclear annihilation was waiting for me when I arrived.
Welcome to the world, kid.
Then, as I grew old enough to become vaguely aware of what was going on around me, I discovered we had another problem.
There were too many of us.
Too Many People, Not Enough Everything
In 1968, The Population Bomb warned of massive population growth, famine, and resource shortages. The basic idea was easy enough for even a kid to understand: there were more and more people, but only so much food, land, and stuff. Eventually, the math wasn't going to work. We were going to starve.
This was followed, rather conveniently, by the realization that we were also running out of resources. Oil was a particularly big one.
I remember a world of gasoline shortages, energy crises, and serious discussions about the finite supply of petroleum. Somewhere out there was the last barrel of oil, and apparently we were racing toward it.
So by the 1970s, my prospects weren't looking particularly good. If nuclear war didn't get me, starvation might. If starvation didn't get me, we might simply run out of the things necessary to maintain civilization. But there was more.
Now We're Freezing
For much of the 1970s, I lived in western Pennsylvania. So when I began hearing discussions about global cooling and even the possibility of another ice age, this was not entirely theoretical. Pennsylvania winters were cold enough already.
Scientists were genuinely studying the cooling effects of atmospheric aerosols, although the popular press sometimes took the possibilities considerably further than the underlying science warranted. There were stories about significant global cooling and the possibility of another ice age.
I was a kid, so I wasn't carefully reviewing atmospheric models. I just knew we were apparently going to freeze. Then, in 1978, my family moved to South Louisiana. If another ice age was coming, we had apparently made a sound strategic relocation. Unfortunately, before I had much time to enjoy my newfound climatic security, the environmental conversation moved on.
Now the rain was trying to kill us.
Don't Drink the Rain
Acid rain became one of the great environmental concerns of the late 1970s and 1980s.
Forests were being damaged. Lakes were becoming acidic. Aquatic ecosystems were suffering. And unlike some of the more imaginative versions of impending doom, acid deposition was a real and measurable environmental problem. Which is worth remembering. Because something else happened.
We did something about it.
Pollution controls reduced sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions considerably. Conditions improved. My father was an engineer whose company actually worked on the scrubbers installed in power plants as I recall.
The world didn't end.
Not because there had never been a problem, but at least partly because people recognized a problem and addressed it. This will become important later. But we didn't have much time to celebrate, because we soon discovered that the atmosphere itself had developed a hole.
There's a Hole in the Sky
The ozone hole was terrifying. Chlorofluorocarbons — CFCs — were damaging the stratospheric ozone layer that protects life from harmful ultraviolet radiation. This wasn't imaginary either.
Scientists identified the mechanism. Measurements confirmed the problem. Governments eventually acted. The Montreal Protocol restricted the chemicals responsible, and decades later the ozone layer is on a long-term path toward recovery.
That's actually a remarkable environmental success story.
But if you were living through the popular discussion at the time, it occasionally sounded as though stepping outside without SPF 4000 might cause you to burst into flames. We survived.
Then things got warmer.
Never Mind the Parka
By the late 1980s and 1990s, global warming had entered the public consciousness in a major way. Eventually the broader term became climate change.
Sea levels. Hurricanes. Drought. Flooding. Wildfires. Melting ice. Changing ecosystems. Ocean acidification. Some of these concerns are supported by scientific evidence, many by conjecture and biased models. Some predictions have proven better than others, not many. Some media presentations have been considerably more dramatic than the underlying scientific literature.
And somewhere along the way, something unfortunate happened to the way we talk about complicated problems. Everything became a crisis.
Then crises became emergencies.
And emergencies became existential threats. Apparently, ordinary problems weren't motivational enough anymore.
Midnight, January 1, 2000
Of course, environmental catastrophe wasn't our only option. We also had computers.
As the year 2000 approached, we learned that many computer systems had been programmed using two digits to represent the year. 99 would become 00.
Computers, we were told, might become confused. Banks could malfunction. Electrical systems could fail. Transportation could be disrupted. Financial systems could experience problems. Civilization might have difficulty remembering what year it was.
This became known as Y2K.
Considerable effort and money went into fixing vulnerable systems before midnight, which makes it difficult to know exactly what would have happened otherwise. But midnight arrived. The lights stayed on. My toaster did not revolt. Civilization continued. Chicken Little took the weekend off.
Then Came Everything Else
Since then, the menu of possible catastrophes has become impressively diverse.
Pandemics.
Superbugs.
Deforestation.
Biodiversity collapse.
Pollinator decline.
Microplastics.
Forever chemicals.
Freshwater shortages.
Asteroids.
Engineered viruses.
Sea-level rise.
Ocean-current disruption.
And now artificial intelligence may eliminate humanity entirely.
This last one is particularly awkward for me, because I, like many of us, use AI almost every day. Apparently I have decided to assist with my own extinction.
I am now approaching sixty-one, having spent more than six decades being warned about the various ways humanity might disappear. And yet, here I am. This naturally produces a certain amount of skepticism. But it also creates a problem.
Chicken Little Has a Smartphone
The old children's story of Chicken Little may be more relevant today than ever.
An acorn falls. Chicken Little concludes that the sky is falling. Panic spreads.
Only today, Chicken Little has a smartphone!
Within fifteen minutes, #TheSkyIsFalling is trending. By lunchtime there are experts explaining why the sky is falling and other experts explaining why it isn't. By dinner, politicians are demanding legislation to keep the sky where it belongs. Someone has established a nonprofit organization. Someone else is selling a SkySafe™ home protection system. Celebrities have issued statements. A corporation has changed its logo in solidarity with the sky. And by the following morning, half the country is convinced the sky is falling while the other half has decided there was never a sky in the first place.
Meanwhile, almost nobody is talking about the acorn anymore. That's where Chicken Little meets another childhood story. The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Eventually, There May Actually Be a Wolf
The lesson of The Boy Who Cried Wolf isn't that wolves don't exist. Quite the opposite. The wolf was real. The problem was that repeated false alarms destroyed the credibility of the person sounding the alarm. That may be one of the greatest dangers of catastrophism.
Fear is a powerful motivator.
Politicians know it.
Activists know it.
Advertisers know it.
Fundraisers know it.
The media certainly know it.
Increasingly, algorithms know it too.
Fear gets our attention.
And attention has value.
That doesn't mean the person warning us about something is dishonest. It doesn't mean the underlying problem isn't real. It doesn't mean there is some grand conspiracy behind every frightening headline. It simply means we should recognize that there are powerful incentives in modern society to present problems in their most alarming possible form. And eventually that has consequences.
If everything is an existential threat, then nothing is. If every decade gives us ten years to save the planet, eventually people notice they've lived through several of those deadlines. If every storm, disease, technology, chemical, economic disruption, or environmental change is potentially catastrophic, eventually a portion of the public simply stops listening. And that's dangerous. Because someday there may actually be a wolf.
Some of the Wolves Were Real
It would be easy, and wrong, to look back over this history and conclude that all of these warnings were nonsense. They weren't. Nuclear weapons really can destroy cities and potentially much more. CFCs really were damaging the ozone layer. Acid deposition really did damage ecosystems. Polluted rivers really did catch fire. Pandemics really do kill people. Human activities really can alter environmental systems. Asteroids really have struck Earth. New technologies really can produce consequences their creators didn't anticipate.
Sometimes the reason the worst prediction didn't happen is because the prediction was wrong. Sometimes circumstances changed. Sometimes human ingenuity produced alternatives nobody anticipated. And sometimes we recognized the wolf and actually did something about it.
That distinction matters. Because skepticism shouldn't mean automatically rejecting warnings. It should mean evaluating them.
The Skeptic's Problem
I consider myself a natural skeptic. That doesn't mean I assume everyone is lying. It means I want to know more.
What is the actual evidence? How certain are we? What assumptions went into the prediction? What happens if those assumptions change? Is the headline saying the same thing as the research? What are the consequences if we do nothing? What are the consequences if we act? Who benefits from the proposed solution? Does the proposed solution actually address the problem? And perhaps most importantly: What would cause us to conclude that we were wrong?
Those questions should apply equally to the people predicting catastrophe and the people insisting there is nothing to worry about.
Skepticism has to cut both ways. Otherwise it isn't skepticism. It's just another belief system.
More Than Sixty Years Later
So what have I learned from spending more than sixty years apparently standing on the precipice of human extinction?
Probably this: Be skeptical. Ask questions. Demand evidence. Distrust certainty. Recognize incentives. But don't become so accustomed to Chicken Little that you fail to recognize an actual wolf.
There are real problems in the world. There always have been. There will be new ones. Some will be manageable. Some will be exaggerated. Some will disappear because technology changes. Some will require collective action. Some will be considerably worse than we initially thought. And occasionally, we will simply be wrong.
That's okay.
What worries me more is our increasing inability to say those words. We don't know.
There is enormous wisdom in those three words. They don't mean we do nothing. They mean we remain curious.
We investigate.
We measure.
We debate.
We prepare.
We adapt.
And when the evidence changes, we change our minds.
Fear may motivate people. But fear is a poor substitute for judgment. Perhaps after more than sixty years of impending catastrophe, that's the lesson I've finally settled on.
The world may indeed end someday. Statistically speaking, I suppose it has to. But until then, I intend to keep asking questions. And if someone tells me the sky is falling, I'll listen.
I'll just probably want to see the acorn.
~ Eric
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