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

by Dan Carlin

To imagine the twenty-first-century world being hit with a great plague like the great disease pandemics of the past is fantasy, yet it’s also extremely possible and has happened many times before.

A history professor once told me that there are two ways we learn: you can put your hand on the hot stove, or you can hear tales of people who already did that and how it turned out for them.

Premodern dentistry alone is enough to convince me things are pretty good now, no matter what.

Hubris is, after all, a pretty classic human trait. As my dad used to say, “Don’t get cocky.”

“History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up,”

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.

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.

if things become too complicated to work well, or too centralized to be in touch with ground-level problems, is reverting to a greater level of simplicity and local control moving in a negative or a positive direction?

And two hundred years later, when Xenophon stumbled upon the ruins, no one could even tell him they were Assyrian. The ghost city, however, remained in mute testament to the greatness and majesty of its builders, whomever they might have been. We assume such a fate won’t be ours. But once upon a time, so did they.

our minds are hardwired to think in terms of continuous improvement and modernization, an unspoken assumption that capabilities will always be advancing and the pace at which technological discoveries and innovations occur will only speed up.

The transformative figure among the Carolingians was Charles I (known as “the Great”)—a.k.a. Charlemagne.* His rule as king of the Franks would last a monumental forty-six years—he isn’t called “the Father of Europe” for nothing.

The collision of this outbreak with this first period of true globalization was devastating.* At its height, whole cities in the United States were virtually shut down, as areas where human beings congregated were closed to prevent people from transmitting the illness.* People stayed home from school and work rather than risk exposure, and the gears of society in some places seemed imperiled by the justifiable fear of getting sick.

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.’

Albert Einstein is supposed to have said that he didn’t know what sort of weapons the Third World War would be fought with, but the one after it would be fought with sticks and stones.

It would be unfair, though, if they thought us evil. The road to hell, it is said, is paved with good intentions, and if a nuclear holocaust had happened, or ever eventually occurs, evil was never why people poured their lives and reputations into such endeavors.

If humankind ever spawns another dark age because we engage in a global thermonuclear war, perhaps we will all feel as Charlton Heston did when he screamed, “You maniacs! You blew it up!” But if that is the outcome we get, it won’t be because that’s what anybody wanted at the time.

If our children do not have our level of capabilities because the power doesn’t exist, does that mean they live in a worse time? Or is it a better time because they are possibly making headway against extremely significant, potentially extinction-related problems we are currently far from solving? If their situation allows them to progress through the Great Filter successfully, but ours doesn’t, who is really ahead?

That scenario sounds about as plausible to my ears as the likelihood of my alternative book title coming true. It was going be called And They All Lived Happily Ever After. 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.