The end of the world

Siena, Italy, May 1348:

 "It was a cruel and horrible thing; and I do not know where to begin to tell of the cruelty and the pitiless ways.  It seemed that almost everyone became stupefied by seeing the pain.  And it is impossible for the human tongue to recount the awful truth.  Indeed, one who did not see such horribleness can be called blessed.  And the victims died almost immediately.  They would swell beneath the armpits and in their groins, and fall over while talking.  Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another, for the plague seemed to strike through breath and sight.  And so they died.  And no one could be found to bury the dead, for money or friendship.  Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices.  Nor did the death bell sound.  And in many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead.  And they died by the hundreds, both day and night, and all were thrown in those ditches and covered with earth.  And as soon as those ditches were filled, more were dug.  And I, Agnolo di Tura...buried my five children with my own hands...And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world." [from 'The Black Death - Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe'; Robert S. Gottfried; Robert Hale Ltd; Great Britain,1983]

One of the worst natural disasters to befall humankind was the Black Death. 

Sometime in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century the plague swept out of the Gobi Desert, east into China, south into India, and west across central Asia.  By 1346 it was known in the major European seaports that a plague of unparalleled fury was raging in the East.  Travellers' tales were received with awed credulity but gave rise to no alarm.  Then, as now, calamities in exotic far-off lands were received with the patronising interest and, at best, detached regret reserved for the infinitely remote^[1].  It does not seem to have occurred to anyone that the plague might one day strike at Europe.  But strike it did.  The plague reached the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin in 1347. 

By the end of 1351 the Black Death had run its course.  In the Islamic world about a third of the general population and perhaps 50% of those living in towns had died.  Estimates of morbidity in Europe range up to 45%.  In 1351, agents for Pope Clement VI calculated the number of dead in Christian Europe at over 23,000,000. 

Despite the immense scale of the disaster, life in Europe returned to normal surprisingly quickly.  By 1361, when the second epidemic struck, many had put the Black Death behind them.  Had the Black Death been the only plague epidemic of the Late Middle Ages, its historical importance would be diminished.  It would be remembered as a catastrophic blow, but an isolated one.  Human population is very resilient and responds rapidly to any single check, even one as severe as the Black Death. 

It is difficult to imagine anything that would be so cataclysmic that it would extinguish the human species.  Even the most severe destructive event of a human, biological or geological nature is likely to leave significant pockets of human survivors behind - survivors who will immediately begin to rebuild human civilisation.  It is probably only disasters on a cosmic scale that will extinguish us. 

Unfortunately, there is no doubt that such cosmic disasters will occur.  It is not a question of God's wrath; it is only a question of time - perhaps next month, but more probably many millions of years from now. 

At some very distant time our Sun, the source of all life on Earth, will redden and swell, boiling away the Earth's seas and atmosphere.  Then, as the solar fires wane, the scorched planet will circle, cold and lifeless, around the dying sun.

Well before that time, on numerous occasions, the Earth will be struck by asteroids or comets sufficiently large to cause atmospheric changes capable of extinguishing most life on the planet.  During 1994 we witnessed the impact on the Jovian atmosphere of the fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy-9; and in recent years there have been several false alarms of heavenly missiles mistakenly calculated to be on collision courses with Earth.

The lesser and more common disasters of climate change, epidemics, famine, war, and geological convulsions, while probably not species-threatening, may well be civilisation threatening.  They may well occur on a scale that would push civilisation and technology back several generations. 

We have already spoken of the Black Death.  There has not been an epidemic on its scale and mortality rate since 1347.  But there is no doubt that before long we will be confronted with a similar calamity.  Again, it is only a matter of time.  That is so despite, or even perhaps because of the significant advances we have made in public health, medicine, and genetic engineering. 

The global COVID pandemic was a reminder which is already being forgotten or denied.  The mortality rate of COVID was not high enough to change mindsets or to position us better globally for the next pandemic.  Before COVID, SARS and Asian bird flu were close calls.

It is a moot point whether the AIDS virus passed to humankind by the bite of a green monkey, or by an experiment in genetic engineering gone wrong.  Neither does it matter how and where COVID started.  Nature itself will regularly throw up new microscopic challenges.  The numbers of micro-organisms are so vast, and they mutate and replicate at such phenomenal rates that sooner rather than later Nature will deliver us a new package as unpleasant as the Black Death. 

The temptation to deliberately misuse technology will increase significantly with the pressures not of overpopulation per se, but of over-consumption, resource depletion, and environmental abuse and degradation.

Even 1960s weapons technology was able to destroy civilization several times over and cause an enduring nuclear winter.

Our technological development has also increased our vulnerability to the effects of major disaster, whether natural or man-made.  We live in a world where mussels contaminated with listeria may be packed in New Zealand one day and be in the bellies of diners in London and Tokyo the very next day.  You can now travel to the very ends of the Earth only to find a Coca-Cola dispensing machine.  For a highly virulent virus, the globe today is as accessible as the medieval village was in 1347. 

Today, the impact of a contemporary Black Death on our civilisation would be much more severe than it was in 1347.  Historians now argue that far from wiping out civilisation as it then was, and being followed by a prolonged dark age, the Black Death accelerated the development of western civilisation.  The Black Death and the periodic plague epidemics that followed it, broke the stranglehold of old ways and beliefs; the crisis opened the way to humanist and scientific thinking.  Depopulation pushed up wages, altered the social power balance in favour of the lower classes, and forced the increased use of technology. 

But medieval society was very different from the global village we now live in.  In the Europe of 1347, nine out of ten lived in small settlements of a few hundred people, twenty to thirty kilometres apart.  Surrounding the villages were the fields, pastures, and woodlands from which most people squeezed their subsistence.  Each of the small communities was largely self-sufficient. 

Today what most characterises our lives is the extent of our specialisation and interdependence.  We have made technology an integral part of our lives without necessarily having any idea of how it works, or how we might repair or recreate it should that be necessary.  Much of the technology on which we depend is not even manufactured within our own nations^[2], let alone communities.  When an integrated circuit or computer chip fails, the "repairer" isolates it and replaces it with a new one manufactured at one of only a handful of sites in the world.  For many mass-produced consumer goods repair will not even be a viable option - it is cheaper to discard and replace the entire product. The capability to repair locally may not even exist.

Our technological and knowledge supply lines are very thinly stretched.  Much of the developed world lives in the vanguard of technology.  The time to market of lifestyle changing products is now measured in months^[3].  Knowledge is advancing rapidly on all fronts but the fronts are becoming more and more specialised and disjointed.  The links between the fronts are becoming weaker - it is simply not possible for single humans to straddle more than a few.  Our civilisation rests on a bed of sharply tapered nails and it will not take much of a push to fatally impale it. 

If a disaster on the scale of the Black Death were to occur today it would be catastrophic and force our civilisation and technology back at least a generation.  Such a regression increases our exposure to the inevitable life-extinguishing cosmic disaster^[4].  While even now our ability to effectively counter a large asteroid strike is limited, during a pandemic-induced Dark Age we would have no ability at all.

The same would hold true for any war between major powers where weapons of mass destruction were extensively used.  The MAD (mutually assured destruction) strategy adopted by the USA and the Soviet Union during the Cold War stopped either side setting off a nuclear apocalypse.  But humanity was also lucky.  How many times did we come too close?  And with the proliferation of nuclear technology, will we be as lucky again?

If there are trans-national contingency plans to mitigate the effects of global disasters they are well kept secrets.  Where, for example, are the strategic measures that would assist the survivors of a holocaust to systematically recreate the fruits of our present-day knowledge from first principles?  Perhaps we are all too busy reaching for the next golden apple to bother securing the ladder that is holding us up?

Imagine the appearance tomorrow of an epidemic like the Black Death that kills four in ten humans within three days of symptoms first appearing, but that like AIDS has been a "sleeper", has already made its way around the globe, and has quietly lit a fuse in each of us.  If you are among the lucky few to survive, don't count on the light switch and your smartphone working for a very long time.  Count on going very thirsty and hungry if you don't have your own supply.  If you do have some self-sufficiency, count on your neighbours and others trying to take it from you by force, unless you have built and nurtured a community^[5] around you. 

The unpalatable truth is that our continued and uninterrupted civilised survival can by no means be taken for granted.  Closing our eyes to the numerous and significant threats that surround us is only justified if there is nothing effective we can do.  In that event a fatalistic attitude in which life is lived to the full and for the moment is to be commended.  But there is a great deal we can do, a great deal more than we are doing. 

We need to plot a sensible course somewhere between the extremes of the reversionist pessimism of the greenies and the self-serving optimism of the greedies.  While there is a need to be more circumspect about how and when we use technology it is not the source of as many of our evils as some would have us believe - to the contrary, beyond tomorrow only technology can save us^[6]. 

If technology does save us it will probably not be thanks to the operation of the marketplace^[7].  The development and deployment of technology intended to protect or salvage us from species threatening cataclysm is very unlikely to be driven by market forces because there will not be any profit in it. 

While the long term perspective of the insurance market and the behaviour modification power of high insurance premiums should not be underestimated, when the going gets really tough the market fails, and it is only a society-wide entity not motivated by profit such as a State that will take up the cataclysm avoidance cause, or pick up the tab when the unthinkable does happen. 

The troubles of Lloyd's of London in the mid 1990s were a case in point.  Re-insurance on a global scale for large-scale disasters is tricky at the best of times.  But when unforeseen and extraneous factors such as climatic change come into play, it ceases to be a commercially attractive proposition because of the increase in the incidence of very large claims.  Similarly, the haste with which life insurance companies world-wide introduced small print exclusions to their policies for AIDS-related claims, was a salutary reminder of the limits of the marketplace.

As global citizens^[8] we need to lobby and act to ensure that the governments and emerging trans-national entities that could do so, take effective calamity avoidance measures and have viable recovery plans in place.

While we cannot live our daily lives in the constant fear of calamity or extinction, we cannot close our eyes to it either.