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.
Experts 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
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
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’.
The collapse of infrastructure, political systems and the rule of law put these societies at the mercy of drought, wildfires, an earthquake or tsunami, floods, war and disease – events that could normally be weathered but here become the final death blow to civilisation.
It’s a nightmarish vision. What makes it so compelling and frightening is the proof Kemp supplies, in a thick volume, that this pattern is an ancient one far older than the Bible itself.
He traces it back to the earliest farmers, where the boom-and-bust cycle of primitive agriculture led to the rapid growth of towns that would be abandoned when famine struck.
Kemp, a senior research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, argues that throughout much of history, the collapse of a society brought benefits for many as well as localised death and disaster.
Peter Thiel, the brains behind online purchasing system PayPal, has a private jet on standby to take him to his bunker in New Zealand should Doomsday become reality
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has revealed that he and Peter Thiel have a deal whereby, if societal collapse looms, they will board a private jet and fly to the bunker together
Empires that grew fat on slavery – for instance, the Greek and Roman civilisations – helped new technology to spread. When one society fell apart, another grew up in its place, after a period of readjustment, and took advantage of the lessons from the past.
But when the globalised Goliath of the 21st century is destroyed, there might be nothing and no one left to take its place.
And that destruction, Kemp warns, seems imminent.
In the 1950s, nuclear weapons were our sole existential threat. That has not gone away: an estimated 10,000 such warheads are stockpiled, controlled not only by the superpowers China, Russia and America, but by India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea, as well as France and the UK.
Iran was also close to building a nuclear bomb and detonator, until its underground facilities were targeted in US strikes in June.
But weapons of mass destruction are no longer the only nightmare – nor even the worst.
In the past, diseases such as the Black Death, which killed between a third and half of the British population in the 1300s, were limited by the speed of spread, no faster than people could travel.
Now, a novel virus such as Covid, engineered in a biowarfare laboratory using gain-of-function technology, can move around the world as fast (and in as many directions) as passenger airliners.
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.
And in 2023, hundreds of AI scientists, including the bosses of leading developers such as Google DeepMind, issued a statement highlighting real fears that the software they were trialling could become virulently hostile… capable of enslaving or obliterating us.
Fear of death by tech is nothing new. In 1924, Winston Churchill published a pamphlet entitled Shall We All Commit Suicide?
Writing 21 years before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and a century before drones were used in warfare, his vision seems extraordinarily prophetic: ‘Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings – nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?
‘Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession on a hostile city, arsenal, camp or dockyard?’
The fact that humanity has not so far been consumed in a conflagration is not proof, Kemp points out, that it will not happen.
The only question is how bad it will be.
He defines ‘societal collapse’ as the failure of a state combined with economic breakdown and mass deaths. Anything less than global decimation – that is, the death of 10 per cent of the planet’s population – does not qualify as total societal collapse on a worldwide scale. It has happened before, and humanity recovered.
But beyond that, there is a spectrum of catastrophic risk, all the way to 100 per cent annihilation – human extinction.
A worldwide disaster that wrecks the delicate network of telecommunications and food distribution, for instance, could quickly turn civilisation into chaos. Kemp cites the Carrington Event of 1859, a massive ejection of electromagnetic solar flares from the sun which, if it happened today, would fry much of our electrical infrastructure.
Without satellites, computers and the internet, our banking system, health service, phone networks and many vehicles, from cars to warplanes, would cease to function, quite literally in a flash. The best estimates put the probability of this at 20.3 per cent per decade – or 50/50 by the midpoint of the century.
How quickly this would turn Britain’s towns into slaughterhouses is anybody’s guess.
The panic that gripped millions of people at the onset of the pandemic in 2020, with supermarket shelves emptied within hours, is not cause for hope.
Little optimism exists among the billionaires who have benefited most from computers and the internet. Many are active super-preppers, getting ready for the end of the world as fervently as religious extremists awaiting the End Of Days.
Peter Thiel, the brains behind online purchasing system PayPal, has a private jet on standby to take him to his bunker in New Zealand. In 2011, he purchased a 477-acre former sheep station on the South Island as a safe haven against Doomsday.
He also arranged New Zealand citizenship for himself, despite having spent just a dozen days in the country (the usual requirement is 1,350 days).
The island’s location, deep in the southern hemisphere, makes it well placed – in theory, at least – to weather the worst of global radiation fallout if a nuclear war escalates to ‘mutually assured destruction’. It would also be relatively isolated in the event of another pandemic.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has revealed that he and Thiel have a deal whereby, if societal collapse looms, they will board a private jet and fly to the bunker together.
Indeed, that day will see a wholesale exodus of the super-rich. Kemp points to ‘an entire industry of reinforced, luxury bunker-manors with pools, wine vaults, artificial gardens for sunbathing in simulated sunlight, and underground hydroponic farms, from Texas to the Czech Republic… in one case, with a dozen ex-Navy special forces SEALs’.
The former cryptocurrency tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried, once reckoned to be the richest man in the world aged under 30 before he was jailed for fraud last year, wanted to go one further and buy the Pacific island of Nauru, in Micronesia, as a refuge for himself and his fabulously wealthy family and friends.
But a heavily defended bunker comes with its own problems. One frequent worry for super-preppers is: ‘How do I maintain authority over my security force after civilisation collapses?’
After all, the people guarding the billionaires will be the ones with the guns and the military training. An armed coup might not be far behind. Proposed solutions included electric ‘zapper’ collars for staff, and AI robots instead of human bodyguards.
Such a dictatorial mindset is at the core of why societies break down, Kemp argues. Rule by coercion never survives for long. Since the Stone Age, human networks have prospered only when they are built on trust and mutual respect for an agreed set of laws. Once that disintegrates, everything else falls with it.
But even a bunker-world founded on the most altruistic principles is unlikely to survive the apocalypse.
Isolated pockets of humanity never do last long. Because they are geographically confined and unable to trade with other groups, they are inevitably reliant on localised food supplies – and when these fail, starvation follows.
The mega-rich might be able to prepare for a global collapse, but it is the very poor who stand the best chance of living through it.
If the world’s industries shut down, highly developed countries that depend on food imports will be hit first.
Then, as the supply of fertilisers and pesticides runs out, the major producers of North America and Europe, China and India will see their output crash. Wheat, rice, corn and soybean yields will all drop by at least 75 per cent.
In Africa, where subsistence farmers use far less chemicals, rice production might fall by as little as 25 per cent and soybean by just 5 per cent. There will be hunger, but not on the scale suffered in richer countries.
Developing countries, on the other hand, are most at risk from climate change. About 30 million people currently live in places on the planet where average yearly temperatures exceed 29C.
But if greenhouse gas emissions carry on at medium to high levels, it is expected that by 2070 around 2 billion people will be living in those sweltering conditions. This will drive mass migration to cooler climes, but it will also devastate agriculture. The amount of land viable for corn and wheat crops would be halved.
Even the solutions Kemp proposes come with their own apocalyptic risks.
One is stratospheric aerosol injection, which involves pumping the upper atmosphere with chemicals such as sulphur dioxide to reflect sunlight.
This mimics volcanic eruptions and could be done at a cost of about £7.5billion a year.
Kemp and a colleague, Dr Aaron Tang, carried out a study in 2021 and found this massive chemical release could have unpredictable effects on rainfall patterns.
But a bigger problem is one of ‘termination shock’. These chemicals wash out of the atmosphere within six months. They have to be constantly replaced – and that might be impossible if, for instance, solar flares or another pandemic grounded all the world’s planes.
The planet would start to heat up again, this time even faster than before. The warming we have experienced over 250 years, since the start of the Industrial Revolution, could be repeated in just a couple of decades.
Every option comes with near-suicidal implications. Think back to that imaginary game of Russian roulette, and now imagine that every threat to human existence is another bullet in the chamber of the revolver.
Nuclear war… climate catastrophe… misanthropic AI… geo-magnetic storms… man-made viruses.
How many bullets before we no longer have any chance at all?
Goliath’s Curse: The History And Future Of Societal Collapse, by Luke Kemp, is published by Penguin/Viking
