The scariest, most boring Armageddon.
And what we can do about it.
Human history is worse than nuclear winter.
Most doomsday scenarios have the end of humanity occur in a big bang, all-at-once event that wipes us out completely. Elon Musk fears a planet killing asteroid, Sam Altman fears an A.I super-intelligence, and during the cold war everyone was afraid of (and believed in) imminent and total nuclear annihilation. Sometimes people are afraid of some combination of these things and you get Terminator 2 where an A.I super-intelligence wipes us out using nuclear annihilation.
I'm afraid of something different. I think the big-bang Armageddons are all a little bit far fetched. I'm terrified of a completely different scenario. I'm terrified that we've already trapped ourselves in an airtight box and we’ll slowly, as a species, suffocate to death.
The fact is, for the vast majority of history, humanity was terrible at improving our quality of life. Not a lot changed for anyone from the invention of agriculture until basically the 1400s, or roughly 5,000 years of recorded human history. Total global population was basically flat. Total productive capacity was basically flat. Life was mostly awful for most people, then they died.
Then suddenly, and almost miraculously, from about 1760 onwards we've improved our situation dramatically. Since then we've gotten much better at knowing how to improve it. The industrial revolution was predicated on many factors aligning, and was built on enlightenment thought and relative political stability that allowed for the creation of an industrial base. There are a lot of factors that were quite important.
But the really big, most important thing that allowed all this progress to happen and compound on itself was cheap, easy access to the resources that fuelled it. Coal. What the industrial revolution was really about was humanity starting to efficiently use resources to power production, instead of animal and human muscle as it had relied on for every part of history before then.
Doomsday.
So here’s the doomsday scenario. Something happens that would be a setback, but not wipe us out completely. Think more, Spanish flu or bubonic plague or collapse of Rome than planet killing asteroid. We fall back into a pre-industrial era but humanity is still around and all our biology works pretty well. But the resources that allowed us to get to the post-industrial era just aren't there any more — sure there will be coal and oil left over, but they’re now too hard for our newly pre-industrial society to access.
We’re stuck in the same cycle of short, miserable, awful lives most of humanity had before the invention of the steam engine.
I think at that point, some people might welcome the atomic bomb scenario, or the gentle annihilation of our molecules being reassembled into more nano-bots in the grey goo scenario. Hell, at least the asteroid would look kind of cool. This scenario looks like mud-hovels and death during childbirth, until the next almost-killed-us event actually does wipe us out.
Remember, this was the default state of humanity for the vast majority of human history. This was a real thing that already happened.
Death by A.I super-intelligence is not a credible scenario. Asteroid strike is very unlikely. Even climate change, as bad as that looks like it’s going to get, probably won’t be extinction level bad. But this scenario — all humanity cut off from any ability to improve our living conditions until the end of time — this is very real.
The economics of doomsday.
We’re already moving away from exploiting the easily available resources that a pre-industrial society would need to rebuild the industrial revolution — advances in solar electricity generation have pushed the price down toward the level of thermal coal and natural gas. At the same time, advances in battery technology and a decrease in the need to own your own vehicle are pushing down demand for oil.
On the surface this looks like a good thing, but as resource prices fall, the only resources that can be profitably exploited are those that are easiest to get. The price mechanism ensures that the most easily exploitable resources are cheapest to exploit and are therefore depleted first.
I don’t know whether or not we've reached the tipping point yet, where the resources available to humans as a pre-industrial society have all been exhausted or not. Maybe we substitute away from them fast enough that the market for clean burning thermal coal collapses before we use up all the cheap reserves. I don’t want to gamble on that.
What can we do about it?
Ultimately making sure we can recover from disaster will take some kind of insurance policy. Much like Elon Musk regards a Mars colony as a ‘backup’ of humanity for his particular variety of improbable disasters, we need a robust ‘backup’ of humanity’s ability to exploit energy sources available on earth and rebuild an industrial society, should that become necessary.
We could stockpile resources, but that’s at best a temporary solution — if civilization is undergoing the sort of total collapse that would push us back to the pre-industrial era, it’s very unlikely that these stockpiles could remain unexploited and sufficiently well guarded to fulfil their purpose.
So we need a way for a pre-industrial society to be able to exploit the energy dense resources they need to bootstrap industry, in a way that our current civilization is able to, that is robust to the kind of cataclysm that would make it necessary. It might be the case that these are unsolvable constraints.
This era might be our only shot we have at ensuring the continued improvement of people’s lives into the deep future.
As an engineer, that’s scary prospect — we’re running a very complicated system that has essentially zero redundancy, and no chance of a reset. But it’s also a helluva challenge.
