Mortal threats to Planet Earth, our own Solar System and even our own galaxy have always existed but it is also pertinent to acknowledge that the foundations and environment for the seeding for life itself was originally formulated by huge apocalyptic galactic perturbations.
In our part of the cosmos, as our Solar System formed, one unique catastrophe delivered us a particularly vital component when a planetoid called Theia struck Earth in its infancy some 4.5 billion years ago; a convenient collision that, ultimately, delivered the material that would one day form into our Moon. Evidence of Theia, the remains of that protoplanet, have since been discovered deep down in geological layers of our planet.
And, by 3 billion years ago, the very first organisms on Earth, breathing carbon dioxide, created a catastrophe of their own when they started burping out an alien poisonous substance before plants, also using photosynthesis, joined them in polluting the whole Earth with … oxygen!
So … although we tend to fear catastrophe (and change), we, ourselves owe our whole existence to apocalyptic events that, ultimately, created the billions of life forms that now inhabit our spinning rock.
But what about today? And what apocalyptic events might we still face?
We have our perennial favourites including the outbreak of global nuclear war, some Malthusian crisis, an inability to feed an overpopulated planet, Yellowstone Park’s mega volcano, the huge land mass of La Palma in the Canaries on the cusp of sliding into the Atlantic, an electro-magnetic solar storm wiping out Earth’s power lines and internet along with my own personal favourite which is Apothus, a near Earth asteroid with a diameter of 370 metres (1,210 feet) that continues to represent a menace. Apothus is destined to miss earth by just a whisker when it passes under our geostationary communication satellites, coming within 20,000 miles of earth on April 13, 2029.
And some new threats?
Obviously, the very latest human revolution. ie. large language model A.I’s pose an existential threat to humanity, especially as we have already gifted it control of so much of of our own civilisation. And once given a humanoid form, well … it’ll be curtains, won’t it?
Cyber related? Cybercrime is capable of crippling a civilization and / or a “man made” cyber war instigated by individual nations or terrorist “bad actors”?
A new biological pandemic brought about by our messing with nature or the ever expanding tinkering with food production and our bio related meds?
Alien Invasion? A far fetched fear perhaps but it is anticipated that our own advances in soon being able to locate “signatures of civilisation” on distant exoplanets, (by recognising industrial processes and pollutants in the atmospheres of exoplanets), might soon lead to humanity making its own presence known to other species … and remember my own particularly disturbing scenario?
My, (almost amusing), premise that we get visitors from space who, initially, want to get to know us except they turn out to be an intelligent bovine species, (like cows or something), and, to their horror, when they discover how we treat, slaughter and eat cattle, (their own related species), they waste no time in annihilating us!
I’m sure youth never feels compromised – and why should they? They will embrace their lives just as we did; and well, we ‘elders’ will always be perplexed by youth and their decisions but maybe that’s just the way the universe (currently) rolls and ,for now, the future belongs to them not us and we are destined to judge the future via our own established ways so maybe we should just acknowledge that fact,
I do ponder, though, that the romanticism and wonder of life is being dilute by tech rather than being enhanced by it.
AND we are entering a new age …
An age where verve, passion and any emotive view of existence will be replaced by silicon, binary code and algorithms.
And when we consider the GPT thing, with even creativity being taken over by A.I, will the young even bother with creative thought when a machine can do it for them in just a matter of second?
And here’s a genuine, bonafide, free range thought.
Is it possible that the whole history of Hominid progress over 5 – 6 million years from learning to stand and walk upright, to taming fire, creating tools and, ultimately, holding dominion over a whole planet, (through science), was nothing more than a nest to enable and allow A.I to come into being?
Think about that.
Humanity … Just the breeding ground … just the culture dish … just the ‘environment’ needed to create the ultimate culmination of nature.
A nature that started with the big bang, stars made of just two elements, ( hydrogen and helium), that spent 13.7 billion years turning into a system that would, ultimately, create an AI entity of superhuman God like ability – with humans only being the facilitators not the end game in the process.
How do you feel about that?
Realising that you were just the fodder required to create the true intelligence destined to explore the universe?