Oxford scientists’ nightmare prediction’: ‘The world will end in 25 years, humanity will die and towns will become slaughterhouses: – ‘Multiple existential threats’ including ‘rampant climate change’ – Warnings from ‘from highly respected scientists, not kooky doom-sayers’
https://archive.ph/OqFmv#selection-549.0-549.128
By CHRISTOPHER STEVENS, TV CRITIC
Excerpt:
In a game of Russian roulette with a standard Colt revolver, the chances of instant death are one-in-six.
Terrifyingly, that’s the same as the odds of humanity being wiped out within 75 years – everyone dead in a cataclysmic and total breakdown of civilisation, according to Oxford University futurologist Toby Ord, an expert on the threat of artificial intelligence.
Does it sound impossibly bleak? His colleague Nick Bostrom is more pessimistic still. He rates the possibility of human extinction by the next century as one in four.
Pulitzer prize-winning writer Jared Diamond is even less hopeful, predicting our species’ chances of survival beyond 2050 – just 25 years away – are no better than evens, or 50/50.
Not so long ago, only oddballs in sandwich boards and evangelical cult leaders seriously believed ‘the end of the world is nigh’. The phrase itself was a comic cliche, so gloomy it was funny.
But the voices now warning of our impending extinction come from highly respected scientists, not kooky doom-sayers. They point to multiple existential threats faced by the human race: not only nuclear weapons, but rampant climate change, artificially engineered viruses and even malevolent AI capable of manufacturing its own super-weapons.
In a chilling new book, Cambridge academic Luke Kemp draws a ghastly conclusion. Human societies and empires always collapse, he warns, because they are fuelled by unsustainable greed.
Dr Kemp dubs them ‘Goliaths’, after the giant warrior in the Old Testament who appeared invincible until a single stone from a slingshot felled him.
Every civilisation in human history has been ‘self-terminating’, he says. The pattern is always the same, beginning with an inequality in wealth between the powerful few and the mass of ordinary people. This leads to an imbalance in decision-making, as those in power – whether emperors, presidents or chief executives – rewrite the rules to suit the elite few.
Goliath societies are rapacious. They suck up all the available wealth and funnel it to the ruling class. When the rest of society starts to starve, a violent reaction sets in. Weak Goliaths are overthrown easily. Stronger ones fight back, using military dominance to cling to power.
And the harder they fight, the harder they fall.
Their civilisations are gradually hollowed out, by corruption, infighting among the rulers, over-expansion, degradation of the environment and what Kemp calls ‘immiseration of the masses’.
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Climate change is taking place at an unprecedented rate – ten times faster than the global warming that triggered the greatest mass extinction in the planet’s history: the Great Permian Dying, which wiped out between 80 and 90 per cent of all life 252 million years ago.