The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

by Dan Carlin

Toughness is this vague concept that we all believe exists, and we all use “tough” as an adjective, but it is a relative term, and one person’s or culture’s idea of what’s tough may be different from another’s.

A husband and wife who have lost several of their young children to disease and have stoically pushed forward with their lives would probably seem tough and resilient to us. People around the world still do this, and we consider it one of the great tragedies of life to lose even a single offspring. But it has been only relatively recently in human history that this experience has become less than commonplace.

In some ways, illness makes us tougher, because immunities often develop in those who have been sick. That’s hard science.

The main service of the standing army consists of making civilized people through discipline capable of holding their own against the less civilized.”

History is akin to traveling to a distant planet, but one inhabited by human beings. Biologically the same, but culturally alien—and a major reason is that they were raised differently.

“Wrong” is a culturally determined concept, of course.

Besides, who knows what child-rearing experts of the future will think about our current practices? Maybe our best practices now will be deemed abusive or damaging to children by future standards. In our defense, we could probably say that we did the best we could knowing what we know now—but that’s also probably what our ancestors would have said.

symbols of wealth and prestige mean nothing if enough people reject their meaning.

Smallpox is one of the most infamous diseases in history. To give an idea of its virulence, it killed an estimated 300 to 500 million people in the twentieth century alone,* but the disease was eradicated from the planet in 1980*—meaning half a billion people were killed by smallpox in just eight decades.

Whether you live in an era when a scary-size asteroid hits the earth or a supervolcano explodes in Yosemite seems merely the luck of the celestial roulette wheel.

One of the modern theories on societal collapse argues that because of the entire planet’s connected nature in the twenty-first century, individual or localized “dark ages” of the sort that formerly occurred are nowadays absorbed by the rest of the global body and civilization as a whole.

And who gets to decide this—we moderns looking backward at the past, or the people actually living in the earlier era? Our ideas of what was good for the inhabitants of an earlier time might be different from their own.

Of course we would want the things of the past that seemed like improvements, but would we want the rest of the package that came along with it? If, for example, a Native American from five centuries ago had a bad tooth, she might really want our modern dentistry to deal with it. But if in order to get the modern medicine she had to become modern in all the other aspects of her existence, she might not consider the deal worth it.

The anthropologist Joseph Tainter said that in some regions the Roman Empire taxed its citizens so highly, and provided so few services in return, that some of those people welcomed the “conquering barbarians” as liberators.

We assume such a fate won’t be ours. But once upon a time, so did they.

the historian Roger Collins writes: “What is genuinely striking . . . is the haphazard, almost accidental nature of the process. From 410 onwards, successive Western imperial regimes just gave way or lost practical authority over more and more of the territory of the former Empire. The Western Empire delegated itself out of existence.”

To paraphrase Barbara Tuchman, modern man may have been born because of the Black Death. Suddenly, the well-ordered class system—one often defended by those who benefited from it as “divinely ordained”—didn’t matter so much, and ideas of equality and merit-based advancement seeped in where nobility and lineage had previously held sway.

Is that a cause to celebrate? If our ability to massively lower the traditional death rate from disease is part of explaining our highest-of-all-time global population level, perhaps we have somehow thrown a monkey wrench into a self-correcting system that was keeping things in balance?*

Since the weapons aren’t ever going to get any weaker, the only way this experiment will likely ever conclude is if we find out that we can’t.

remembered the line from the end of scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multiarmed form and says, ‘Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I

to some, this new bomb just seemed like a more efficient and economical way to do with one airplane what was currently being done in raids with hundreds and hundreds of them.

The physicist Arthur Holly Compton* wrote, “If with such destructive weapons men are to survive, they must grow rapidly in human greatness.

“destruction of the civilization that has been growing for a thousand years.”

It seems like a nice way of saying that we as a species must become more enlightened or die.

In light of new knowledge . . . an eventual world state is not just desirable in the name of brotherhood; it is necessary for survival. . . .

Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars.*

“We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead,” Baruch said in his speech. “That is our business. If we fail, then we’ve damned every man to be the slave of fear.”

The West, however, had fantastic air forces and complete naval supremacy.

“There is one thing and only one thing which could save the world, and that is a thing which I should not dream of advocating. It is that America should make war on Russia during the next two years and establish a world empire by means of the atomic bomb.”

“More and better bombs, where will this lead is difficult to see. We keep saying we have no other course. What we should say is we’re not bright enough to see any other course.”

How much would it affect your feelings about a murderous event from history if you found out that you were alive today only because of it?

Anyone who has ever read accounts of this event (dubbed a “firebombing”) understands why an atomic bomb seemed little different from conventional bombing. It doesn’t seem possible that conditions could ever be any worse than on the ground after the Tokyo strike, so an atomic bomb was simply a more economical way to accomplish the same outcome.

Tail gunners were sickened by the sight of hundreds of people burning to death in flaming napalm on the surface of the Sumida River. A doctor, who observed the carnage there, later said you couldn’t even tell if the objects floating by were arms and legs or pieces of burnt wood. B-29 crews fought super-heated updrafts that destroyed at least ten aircraft and wore oxygen masks to avoid vomiting from the stench of burning flesh.

One may have been the bravery of the citizenry.

And remember: this was all done, and justified, in the name of shortening the war by making it worse.

It would be incredibly ironic if a civilization-killing asteroid that has been on target to hit Earth for perhaps millions of years was only thrown off course at the last minute by the timely use of a nuclear weapon.

How do I define “happily”? Humanity living in an age when, for once in our existence, it is not the case that the end is always near.