The End of the World

I remember a flight I took when I was younger. In 2014, West Africa was in the midst of the largest Ebola outbreak on record. Though I was not traveling to Africa, and cases in the United States were extremely limited, I was very afraid. I remember looking out the window and coming to a horrible realization. For my anxious child brain, this was the apocalypse, and there was no escape. 

The end of days is the cornerstone of Adventist theology, so important that it is the very name of the denomination. While proclamations of the end times can seem far-fetched at times, currently, they feel very close. It’s not just Adventists believing the message; the Doomsday Clock, which represents the world’s proximity to collapse, is the closest it's ever been to midnight, just 85 seconds away. According to a study cited by the Independent, a third of Americans expect the world to end in their lifetimes. 

Unless one has their head stuck in the ground, everything everywhere seems very dire. The signs of the end times are wars and rumors of wars, famines, earthquakes, hatred, false prophets, lawlessness—there is not enough space here to detail all the signs I see.

The U.S. is engaged in a war of aggression, a U.S.-funded genocide is happening in Gaza, countless under-reported conflicts (as in Congo and Sudan) rack up thousands of deaths year over year, and there are constant whispers about an outbreak of nuclear war. 

And don’t get me started on AI. Even though I don’t believe that AI is an existential threat in a physical sense, I do think that it will do a lot of damage to the environment and society at large. The kids already can’t read, and someday maybe they won’t be able to think. 

A lot of people don’t want this future, but “AI is inevitable” accelerationism continues. I worry that the way AI has eroded our ability to trust or discern fact from fiction will erode a good future. Not to mention the bubble it has created, which threatens to blow up the country’s economy (and by proxy, that of the entire world). Part of what makes all of everything feel so horrifying is that it really feels like nothing can be done. 

The thing is that things have been really bad before. In the 14th century, humanity faced the worst pandemic that had occurred in recorded history to that point. Tens of millions of people died from a horrible disease that necrotizes tissue and causes painful, bursting lumps. Whole towns were destroyed, and at least a third of the population died; it seemed that if one person got it, everyone was doomed. That wasn't the only crisis: this century was also plagued (haha) with famine, banking collapse, inflation and war.

A few centuries later, religious tensions exploded into one of the deadliest conflicts in European history. Millions of people died in the 17th-century Thirty Years’ War to disease and famine, in addition to battle and the sacking of their villages. In more recent memory, even just the last century experienced two devastating world wars, a global economic depression and the invention of weapons that could annihilate the whole planet. In the 1930s, Dust Bowl storms literally blacked out the sky. Injustices abounded, whether through colonialism, apartheid or segregation.

What I'm getting at is that while history doesn't repeat, it often rhymes. Revelation says the world will end, and it will end soon. That the world is on the imminent brink of disaster has been true for at least 2000 years. Despite that, humanity has found a way to persevere and even make progress. 

On that plane ride, there was some truth to what I felt—everywhere on the earth is susceptible to infectious disease. It's the same with every other malady on the globe: war, pestilence, famine, and political and economic stability. There's no place to escape to. We're here, and we have to deal with these things. And while this could be the end of the world, it doesn’t have to be. There's hope: this has happened before, and we survived.