Apocalypse: Should we start to panic? | DW Documentary

Apocalypse: Should we start to panic? | DW Documentary

Have you ever thought the world was coming to an end? If so, you’re not alone. For centuries, people have been trying to predict the apocalypse. February 1st, 1524, May 19th, 1910, and December 21st, 2012, were all dates penciled in for doomsday. Either we keep getting extremely lucky or Nostradamus, the Jehovah’s Witnesses

And thousands of doomsday-cult disciples keep getting it wrong. But what if they simply missed the target? If they were all on the right track but just miscalculated? Watson – Im beginning to see the plan! I’d say we’re currently on our way to a kind of downfall.

Humanity clearly is perpetuating an act of ecocide at the moment. Are we closer to the end of the world than we realize? Did we just get lucky till now and the apocalypse has been merely delayed? The end of the world is history’s longest cliff-hanger.

It’s been predicted at least 200 times over the last 2,000 years. That’s an average of one doomsday prediction every 10 years. It’s true. Numerous apocalypses have been announced and failed to show. It’s interesting that the day after, no one can be bothered. The belief in the end of the world

At least in the Christian parts of it is tenacious. But why? It’s connected to the history of Christianity. The word ‘apocalypse’ means revelation or unveiling The theological origins are found in the last book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation by John.

Early Christian communities expected the world to end at any moment. And the prophecies piled up and up and into modern times. In the Middle Ages, making a prediction was good for enhancing prestige. Everyone got involved in the hunt for the exact date including scientists.

They continued this attitude because they were devout believers, still. So, Isaac Newton, he used scriptural prophecy to predict when the end of the world would be. How long did he predict? 350 years! His theory of gravity has stood up. So, let’s hope that his prediction on the end of the world won’t.

Knowing the exact date was important so believers could prepare for “the Last Judgment”. Although the apocalypse is unpleasant, it’s fundamentally positive, because in the end, as a devout Christian, you enter paradise. Several ‘ends-of-the world’ later, we can take a more sober look, right?

Because in the meantime, even this guy, is under close observation. Space agencies are monitoring 2000, 200 and 70 P-H-Os or potentially hazardous objects. Sometimes we know to the month when comets and asteroids will approach the earth. But the probability of an asteroid causing a large-scale catastrophe is about 0.1% per year.

Still the danger is more real than previous end-of-the-world prophecies. So, for instance, on January 1st, 2000, there was no sign of men from Mars coming to take us away. On the other hand, and I think it’s equally important, the history of humankind is full of apocalypses that actually did happen.

True! For numerous civilizations and cultures, but also for many creatures who shared the planet with us humans, the world has ended. But: All previous collapses were local. Now we have a globally interconnected, high-tech civilization for which there isn’t a precedent. Impending reality of nuclear warfare or a worst-case climate catastrophe.

Yeah, apocalyptic would be the right word. Indeed, the apocalypse looms overhead as never before: Fear of nuclear war or climate catastrophe is on the rise and people react in very different ways. The doomsday preppers are famous. They anticipate all kinds of scenarios no drinking-water or a complete black-out in the city.

Another approach is to say we have to move away from capitalism. We don’t need growth but rather de-growth. Then, there are those on the right who say climate-change ideology is all just hype. It’s all a big lie. It’s nothing new. In some variants, there’s a joyful anticipation of the collapse.

It means the collapse of democracies as we know them and the dawn of a new era. Doomsday predictions are still made by scientists today: Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been publishing updates on when civilization’s final hour will come. This year, the researchers set their Doomsday Clock

To 100 seconds before midnight. This is the closest since the Soviet Union’s hydrogen bomb tests in the 1950s Unlike back then, the threat today isn’t only from nuclear overkill, but also climate change, species extinction and the risks posed by artificial intelligence for example, from its use in autonomous weapons systems and cybercrime.

True, the Doomsday Clock is only a metaphor, not a real prediction. But is it possible to predict the demise of a society using modern, scientific methods? These days we can predict so many things: planetary movements, tectonic shifts, the climate. So why not the decline of our civilization? Modelling societies is difficult,

Mainly because they are made up of people, and people’s decisions are mostly made freely, at least to a certain degree. Some situations are relatively predictable: for example, when panic breaks out somewhere. There are very good models for how people will behave, where they’ll run to. It’s flocking behavior. Sociologists, economists and mathematicians

Have in fact been looking at the question of when our civilization will end for about 200 years now. Finally, in 2014, a model appeared that caused an especially big stir: the HANDY model — short for: Human and Nature Dynamics. It doesn’t sound dramatic. But newspapers like Britain’s The Guardian

Commented that this model predicted the end of the world. The paper printed a collection of formulas: the irreversible Type-N full collapse meant the total collapse of a civilization. Is that what it is? The end-of-the-world formula? The Handy model uses four variables. One is nature. Then there’s the population with ‘commoners’

As well as a possible ‘elite’ variable. And finally, there’s wealth. In the worst-case scenario, everything starts off pretty well. But now the population is growing slowly slowly, but it’s very productive. It produces quite a lot of wealth. And that’s to the detriment of nature. A few years later prosperity peaks.

But nature is almost entirely destroyed. And now the first elites appear on the scene. They consume, but don’t produce anything, so prosperity levels drop. But since the general population — which has since grown no longer has as much to eat, the wealth decreases more rapidly. And nature, too, has been severely depleted.

So, there aren’t that many resources left. The ordinary people have nothing to eat. Prosperity continues to decline. Hardly anyone is still producing anything. Of course, if nothing is produced any more, the elites can’t survive either, and eventually, they’re the last to die out. Okay.

Simulations are one thing, but is this doomsday scenario realistic? Can we use the model to predict the end of the world? If so, then when is it coming the apocalypse? Well, what would be a good month for the world to end in. It would be nice to experience one final summer.

So, let’s go for the end of the year. I mean, the whole point is: we can’t predict. No one knows when the world is going to end. It’s more about understanding how something like that could happen. What are the important factors? What factors would favor a doomsday outcome,

And what factors could make it less likely? That’s why we speak of scenarios and not forecasts. But it doesn’t mean we don’t know where the journey is heading. We absolutely do know. It’s just that we can’t say: On December 31st, 2029, such and such will happen.

This or that tipping point will be reached. To understand a complex system, researchers pick out individual aspects. This lets them examine what keeps a system going and when it’s in danger of breaking down. For tipping points, you can imagine a coffee cup on a table.

You keep pushing it a little farther towards the edge. At some point, it’s so close to the edge that the slightest nudge is enough, and it falls. Once it’s broken, and the coffee is on the floor, you can’t ever get the same coffee cup back.

You can’t get all the coffee back into it again; you can’t put it back together exactly the same way. Simplified models and simulations like these help researchers understand what our societies might expect. In addition to the loss of natural resources or an upsurge in social tensions, there’s another factor to consider:

Often, societies tend to increase in complexity. That then develops a momentum of its own. You get an ever-larger administrative apparatus that was initially useful for organizing work and creating added value. But eventually, it mainly deals only with itself and no longer contributes additional value. Unfortunately,

The models can’t predict exactly when something will occur. For a precise date, we’d need far more complex models, and we’d have to feed them vast amounts of data. But the models don’t help you understand anything so much happens that all you can do is simulate the process

Like a black box in the computer and marvel at the result. It’s practically impossible to understand what specific details led to this or that outcome. Ok. But shouldn’t it be easier with the past? After all, the past is over with, and it provides lots of factual data.

Perhaps history could give us some insight into the timing of collapses. Do cultures have anything like a fixed expiration date? History is riddled with the rise and fall of civilizations: This cycle began about 6,000 years ago, when the first great empires emerged around the globe.

They developed writing and calendars and ruled over vast territories. and built stupendous monuments. They were Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. But then, they perished — some without a trace, like the Anasazi in North America’s desert southwest and the Nabateans in Jordan. The problem is that none of these collapses was like the next.

But is there a pattern nonetheless? One of the most recent and popular explanations of civilization-collapse is that of the polymath Jared Diamond. As a biologist, he thinks of the world very much in ecological terms, and that’s why he ultimately attributes everything to ecological mishandling. By which Diamond means:

The overexploitation of nature has led to the downfall of various cultures, including the Maya, Anasazi, Rapa Nui and the early Scandinavians on Greenland. Let’s take a closer look at the latter: For five centuries, the Scandinavians settled on Europe’s northwesternmost outpost. But around 1500, they suddenly and completely disappeared

Leaving behind cowsheds — lots of cowsheds. According to Diamond, the Scandinavians turned Greenland’s ecosystem on its head when they cut down all the forests to make way for cattle. Without the forests, the exposed soil eroded. And the Scandinavians’ cows and sheep ate up the last remaining grass.

When, in the early 15th century, a mini-ice age set in across Europe, the Greenland Scandinavians didn’t even have the wood to keep themselves warm. They’d committed ecological suicide. Ecocide. The problem was the inability to adapt. Take the Inuit. They live several hundred kilometers farther north,

Yet they’ve adapted their way of life and economy perfectly. But if I, as a Greenland Scandinavian, am not willing to eat caribou and insist instead on having my cow, it all just collapses. Many researchers regard the ecocide theory is a blue-print for civilization collapse. And it works astonishingly well:

Hardly any place is farther from Greenland geographically, climatically and culturally than Rapa Nui — also known as Easter Island. Still, the collapse of this Polynesian culture is thought to parallel the developments in Greenland nearly 11,000 kilometres away in the northern hemisphere. It’s hard to imagine, but the island, long since all but treeless,

Was a dense jungle at the time of the Polynesian settlement between 400 and 1200 C-E. One of the major narratives of how that collapse happened was that kind of rapacious deforestation, the citizens of the island being kind of obsessed with erecting these vast stone heads in the same way that we’re obsessed with,

You know, erecting skyscrapers. To move the giant stone statues — or Moai the Rapa Nui used bast ropes and ramps made of tree trunks lots of tree trunks. There are over 900 Moai skirting the island some up to 10 meters high and weighing 86 tons. At the height of Rapa Nui culture,

There was practically a competition to have the biggest stone in the field. The outcome: Devastation! The forest disappeared, the soil eroded, the remaining wood was not even enough to make canoes for fishing. The island could no longer feed its inhabitants. The Rapa Nui culture collapsed.

Within a few centuries, the population declined by almost 90%, from over 15000 to barely 2000 when the Europeans arrived. It was ecocide with eyes wide open But if we’re honest, aren’t we on a parallel course? Aren’t we headed straight into a global climate crisis? Researchers at Australia’s breakthrough National Centre

For Climate Restoration have long warned: The risk that global civilization as we know it will collapse by 2050 is quite real. IF we continue as we are, with our C-O-2 emissions, deforestation, and so on. Every year, about 13 million hectares of forest are lost worldwide the equivalent of the size of Greece.

Is the fate of the Rapa Nui a preview of our own demise? Not necessarily. It kind of turns out that there’s a good case to be made, that it was kind of a completely different story. The ecocide theory is compelling, but it has a catch: it’s not historically watertight.

In the case of Rapa Nui, archaeologists have discovered a societal collapse did in fact occur. And the forests disappeared, though it probably wasn’t the Polynesians who were to blame, but this here: The rattus exulans is a tenacious fan of civilization and a real pest in the Pacific area.

Arriving on a new island, it often encountered ecosystems that were entirely defenseless against it. With no predators, the gifted climber set to feasting on palm tree nuts and prevented forests from growing back. The destruction of the forest was truly an ecological disaster,

But it probably was not what dealt the Rapa Nui their fatal blow. Apparently, they practiced an agriculture that was perfectly adapted to the climate. It seems like the Easter Islanders were doing fine for a very long time, and it was actually European colonizers and eventually slavers that caused that collapse.

We don’t know the exact reasons for the collapse of the Rapa Nui culture. What’s certain is that both the slave trade and diseases introduced by Europeans decimated the population. By 1877, only 111 Rapa Nui were still living on the island. The ecocide theory is not the only model

For explaining the collapse of communities. So, why is it so compelling? History’s not telling what has happened. Each era tells its history on its own and goes by what that era happens to be preoccupied with. We project our own social discussions and fears onto past cultures.

It’s always about why people interpret events as the end of the world how they put one and one together and say, ‘Something’s brewing here!’ In that sense, there’s always a socially embedded act of interpretation — a narrative. Put simply, every epoch has produced its own doomsday theory.

It was often a criticism of contemporary events which used history as a means to an end: The decadence theory, for instance, has been taking shape since the 18th century. It posits that ancient cultures like the Roman Empire perished due to corruption and moral decay. Elites are decadent.

As a result, the original greatness of our people has been dragged into the mud and come to fall. And now we have to fight against decadence, so we can rise again to new greatness. That’s the typical fascist narrative. In the 20th century, biologistic narratives of decline emerged.

Oswald Spengler saw cultures as organisms that blossom like flowers and then pass away again. This was based on ideas of evolution at the time. It’s so attractive, this idea that there’s something inbuilt within a society or a civilization that creates it, you know, kind of dooms it. The theories are not entirely wrong.

But they are often one-sided. They tend to focus on a very specific aspect such as war, poverty, disease or environment and climate. But is there such a thing as a holistic approach? What can we learn from history? The road to crisis leads through a long series of small errors.

It’s the banality of ignorance. Often, it’s a question of success. After all, we are successful. And the rest of the world should do as we do. So why should we change anything? It leads to a certain hubris. At some point, the difference between the world

You’re trying to hold onto and the world around you become so great that the whole thing explodes. And then society is finished. To counteract this hubris, we could start by taking doomsday theories less as universal explanatory models and more as warnings. We are indifferent to the apocalypse. We’re jaded and numb.

I think, initially, we needed this apocalyptic narrative, but now, it’s not enough! In stark contrast to previous doomsday scenarios, the evidence this time round is staggering, especially for human-made climate collapse. The scientific community shares a broad consensus that our societies will come under such intense pressure that they will change radically.

For now, some Western societies are splitting into two groups: those who believe in the climate crisis and those who steadfastly deny it. How is that possible? Psychology researchers at the University of Toronto identified one possible explanation back in 2011, calling it the just-world bias.

It says that we see the world as a fair place where good people are rewarded, and bad people are punished and we, of course, are always on the good side. That’s why we see ourselves on the survivor-side in an apocalypse. If this certainty falters, we initially react defensively.

In a study by the University of California published in 2011, test subjects were confronted with facts on climate change. These were packaged as an appeal for them to change their way of life. The subjects stonewalled. The more frightening the appeals were, the stronger the blockade.

But, if the bad news was combined with suggested solutions, the test subjects were far more open to the facts. Another reason we find it difficult to understand man-made climate change is connected to how we learn from mistakes. Our fundamental learning principle of cause and effect is of little use here.

Normally we learn, if we put our hand on a hot stove, so to speak, we get burnt right away. But the climate crisis works differently. There’s a considerable time-lag between cause and effect. I put my hand in the fire ten years ago, and my neighbor’s hand gets burnt today.

This means that while some still see the world as just fine, others see it as already ending. Who will be affected and when, we can’t exactly say. And now? The uncertainty over the timing mustn’t be used as an excuse for doing nothing.

If anything, it should alarm us even more, because it could be very soon. No one knows when the world will end. The only thing that’s clear is that our own greatest threat is we ourselves. But it also means that we humankind have the ball in our court. We have a choice.

From Armageddon to Extinction Rebellion: The end of the world is one of humanity’s greatest fears. The apocalypse has been predicted almost 200 times in the past 2,000 years. We’re still here. But has the danger passed?

What if the prophets just got it wrong? What if their intuition was right, even if their calculations were off the mark? The famous Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been set at 90 seconds to 12 since 24 February 2023 – the closest humanity has ever been to its extinction. But the Doomsday Clock is only an allegory. It isn’t predicting a precise moment when the end will come.

Perhaps the apocalypse is something we can predict exactly? In the Late Middle Ages, mathematician Michael Stifel used complex numerical symbols to convert Bible verses into tangible data. And even Isaac Newton wrote more about apocalyptic ideas than he did about physics, says historian Johannes Fried. If Newton’s calculations are correct, the end is nigh.

But surely these days, we have more precise scientific methods at our disposal? For example, we’ve got a pretty good idea of when we might potentially be hit by comets or asteroids. Nowadays though, the most acute threat is the result of our own actions – environmental destruction, wars, the climate catastrophe. And as we know from history: societies aren’t exactly stable and can collapse. But whereas destruction used to take place on a more local scale, now we’re living in a globally networked high-tech civilization, which means that the next demise could very well be a global one.

This episode of “42 – The Answer to Almost Everything” examines the question of whether we’re able to calculate civilizational implosions as precisely as comet impacts. Are there recognizable patterns in the extinction of past cultures? And can we spot and use them to protect ourselves from eventual doom?

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