The End of the World (and what to do while you’re waiting)

We are all doomed. Humans will be exterminated by bio-engineered pathogens and hyper intelligent AI as the environment collapses by the light of nuclear Armageddon, until the mushroom clouds are choked by the darkness blasted into the atmosphere by the asteroid impact that triggers a supervolcano, just before the sun implodes and destroys everything. If something else doesn’t get us first.

Spending the week with experts in global catastrophe at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) has been interesting. I might be paraphrasing slightly, but over a sufficiently long period of time the likelihood of each of the threats outlined above is 100 percent.

So, time to go and cry in a darkened room?

No.

Existential threats and hope

These potential global catastrophes can be a cause for hope, and a motivation for change.

That’s because the impact and outcome of these events is not certain, nor is the timing. And by choosing hope – by choosing collaboration, investigation and imagination – we can create resilient systems capable of coping with these crises, even as their development reduces the potential severity and pushes back the arrival.

By acknowledging and understanding these existential threats, we can make better decisions about how our science, technology and social structures evolve. The forces that threaten catastrophe – and the human activity that contributes – can be re-examined and reimagined.

Optimism isn’t enough. Hope for the future must be mixed with realism; hard-won understanding of the barriers to change – political, cultural, environmental, economic and all the rest. But the threat of world-ending crises can trigger creativity, exploration and experimentation, not nihilism.

I’ve never felt more uplifted by a room of people telling me how the planet is likely to be destroyed.

Day jobs in the face of disaster So, what now?

Not everyone spends their days examining existential risk. Most organisations – and the people in them – have more immediate concerns.

Falling income trumps asteroid impacts. Staff retention is more pressing than ocean acidification. Improving the supporter database is more valuable than defining the ethics of killer robots.

So much already needs our time, money and attention. There are things we know are broken and need to be fixed. There are structures and strategies to update, and lessons to be learnt from the past. And there is always a massive backlog of work and not enough people to do it.

If we do look to the future – beyond the words trapped in annual plans – we tend to call it innovation. We pull together a small team of creative, passionate people and beat it out of them with underfunding and micromanagement. A few ideas might limp out the other end but barely any scale.

Motivation in catastrophe

How is raising the possibility of global destruction going to help?

Firstly, it puts things in perspective. Nothing sharpens the senses like the threat of death and destruction. Are we prioritising the right work and advocating for the most impactful changes in the area we can influence? Or are we lost in internal politics and bickering over departmental territory?

Secondly, it stops us looking backwards. Humans learn from experience, spinning the future from the threads of the past, and failing to spot new challenges as emergent trends interact.

By asking what the world might be like in three, five, ten years plus, we can open new space for real innovation and effective transformation. Foresight becomes a valuable tool.

Systems thinking

Thirdly, it makes us think about systems. Many of the existential threats outlined by CSER are caused – or exacerbated – by human action. Even when we do good in one area, we might be causing issues in another: I’ve seen life-saving humanitarian organisations churn through single-use plastic at a terrifying rate in the coffee room, unthinkingly contributing to crises which threaten more lives, for example.

By looking beyond our immediate area of responsibility and expertise, by looking for root causes before symptoms, collaborators before competitors, we can be more impactful.

New networks

Fourthly, it breaks down barriers and creates new networks. No individual or organisation can solve a crisis on its own, or sufficiently alter the world to avoid the worst consequences of these existential threats.

Looking outwards, building communities of purpose, seeking out diverse perspective and experience, are critical to finding robust solutions and routes to a better future.

Fifthly, it gives us renewed purpose. All charities are driven to change the world. Many businesses aspire to a positive impact on society. By examining existential threats, we can reconfirm our common purpose, and sharpen our own commitment to being a net contributor to progress.

Future inheritance

As asteroids hurtle through space and nuclear weapons sit silent in siloes, computers solve problems that have occupied humans for centuries. Pressure builds in magma chambers and genes are redesigned. Temperatures climb as saws whine in the rain forest.

All the threats are in play, but the future is not fixed. We can’t predict what will happen. But we can examine the possibilities and make choices, we can decide what future generations will inherit from us.

It is just possible that by examining the colossally catastrophic we uncover new opportunities, new solutions to immediate problems and new ways to thrive on a complex, living planet laced with human intelligence and industry.