Apocalypse When?
Welcome to Surviving the Future
In the Sierra Diablo Mountain Range in West Texas, on land owned by the Amazon founder and space enthusiast Jeff Bezos, a 500-foot vertical shaft has been sunk into the rock.
This imposing range has seen excavation before—a gold and silver rush in the 19th century brought many men and women to hack away at the rock in search of riches. But this time, engineers are putting something back in—a clock.
Conceived in the 1980s by computer scientist Danny Hillis and the product of decades of design and testing, the Clock of the Long Now is designed to keep time for 10,000 years, without human intervention.
A counterweighted brass prototype of the clock sits behind a glass case in the Natural History Museum in London, facing a gallery of miscellaneous objects from the past two hundred years. There is a kind of grim irony in its placement, that the items around it, the throbbing steam engines that powered the industrial revolution, through to the plastic consumables of the twentieth century, could well be the reason why, ten millennia from now, there will be no one to hear its last ever chime.
There is already one clock that watches over humanity’s survival. In January 2012, the doomsday clock, created in Chicago in 1947 to warn the world of the impending devastation of a nuclear war, ticked up to five minutes to midnight. While atomic war may seem a far more distant prospect today, the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences made the assessment in the early part of the twenty-first century that, coupled with the failure of the international community to make progress on nuclear arms reduction, climate change poses an existential threat to humanity. The clock’s hand is still there, at 11:55, closer to midnight—extinction—than for most of the Cold War era.
The term was probably coined by the late ecologist Eugene Stoermer, but the seeds for the Anthropocene were sown centuries, if not millennia ago. Humanity has moved rivers, cored mountains, filled in seas and cultivated deserts; cut down giant forests and hunted, fished or out-competed entire species out of existence.
Today, the Ethiopian government is pushing forward with aggressive plans to dam the Nile, sparking fears of drought and desertification upstream, where that river has supplied food and water to human civilization almost from its earliest days. In Nicaragua, $40 billion is being spent cutting a new ship channel, a rival to the Panama Canal, to link the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean, literally carving a hole between continents.
In our spread across the planet we have found new ways to grow crops and stave off the Malthusian crisis caused by our exploding population, we can move huge distances at great speed and mass produce things of no evolutionary value whatsoever, from reality television to Bruce Willis-themed perfume—with each, borrowing time from future generations by burning fossil fuels.
Sometimes our influence has been invisible—at least at first. It is almost universally acknowledged that it is human action, principally through carbon emissions, that has caused a progressive rise in the temperature of the earth, forever altering its weather and climate.
Now, having blown holes in the ozone layer, warmed the planet with our carbon emissions and hunted or polluted species to extinction, should we use the same ingenuity that got us here to undo the damage? What if our solutions turn out to be more dangerous than the problem?
This collection hopes to pose questions about mankind’s relationship with its habitat and about its future: Can we maintain the pace of social progress in the face of these environmental and demographic challenges? Can we simply keep reacting, building bigger defences against the weather, curing new diseases as they come and clearing up the aftermath of extreme weather, or will we have to be proactive and re-engineer the planet to our design? Can we rebuild ecosystems from scratch or create entirely new ones?
Drawing from the worlds of engineering, climate science, conservation, politics, business and the arts, Surviving The Future hopes to look at the ways that mankind can reshape the planet, forecasting, warning and giving hope in turn that we, as a species, can avoid the worst consequences of our social evolution.
