An introduction to the doom spectrum

What’s the worst that could happen? Probably the total extinction of the human race and the potential annihilation of all life on Earth.

From leading computer scientists warning us that artificial superintelligence will definitely kill us all, to Stephen Hawking arguing that runaway climate change could unleash a Venus-style ‘hot house earth,’ inhospitable to life, we have been presented with no shortage of terrifying futures to keep us up at night.

Given that human extinction might not be the most pleasant of outcomes, a number of institutions have emerged with the aim of diagnosing and mitigating our existential threats.

Organisations like The Stanford Existential Risk Initiative, the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, and the Future of Life Institute, were all founded with missions of interrogating the threats, risks and remedies on our horizon.

According to The Existential Risk Observatory, the greatest threats humanity faces are: Unaligned AI, man-made pandemics, climate change, and nuclear war, followed by natural extinction risks like supervolcanoes and asteroids, and other man-made extinction risks, including technologies that are yet to be invented.

In his 2020 book, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, philosopher Toby Ord investigated the likelihood of both natural and anthropogenic existential risks. He concluded that the odds of humanity facing an extinction-level event in the next 100 years were around one in six. The same odds as Russian roulette.

In January 2023, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists gave us slightly worse odds, moving the Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds to midnight—placing us the closest we have ever been to annihilation.

Slightly less dramatic than fearing human extinction, deep doomers worry that a global civilizational collapse is inevitable, imminent, or already underway, and that it could result in the total breakdown of law and order, the end of functioning economies, or the rise of new totalitarian dystopias.

In recent years, a wave of scholars and researchers have explored how civilizations have collapsed, drawing lessons from history to make sense of today’s global uncertainties.

In The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter argues that breakdown occurs when the resources required to support a society’s growing complexity becomes unsustainable relative to the advantages gained.

Peter Turchin, in War and Peace and War and End Times, highlights the destabilising effects of rising inequality and elite overproduction (when too many ambitious individuals compete for too few positions of power). Jared Diamond’s Collapse points to ecological overshoot and environmental mismanagement as the main culprits in the downfall of past civilizations.

Many of these writers have warned of parallels between the circumstances of historical collapses and the present day.

One of the most well known prophets of doom is Jem Bendell. In 2018 he wrote a paper titled Deep Adaptation where he argued that climate-induced societal collapse was unavoidable and would probably happen within decades.

Believing that humanity no longer has a problem to solve, but rather a predicament to manage, Bendell proposed a four-part framework advocating for Resilience, Relinquishment, Restoration and Reconciliation.

In this framework, he urges people to rethink what to protect, what to let go of, and how to make peace with the world and each other.

He also warns against relying on technologies that will increase catastrophic risks when society crumbles, for example nuclear power plants that might melt down when they can no longer be maintained, or cities that could be thrown into chaos if they rely too heavily on the internet, or automation. In 2023 he published, Breaking Together: A freedom-loving response to collapse.

The belief in the inevitable descent or collapse of civilization has given rise to a new group of what Michael Dowd calls “Post Doomers” and a global community of changemakers who want to help channel grief into meaningful action.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity applies an end-of-life care metaphor to our civilization and advocates for a justice-focused approach to managing descent.

Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects helps people cope with ecological grief and find meaning in the new world.

Margaret Wheatly, author of Who Do We Choose To Be? advocates for building “islands of sanity” and argues that “facing reality can be an empowering act,” that can, ‘liberate our minds and hearts to discern how best to use our power and influence in service for this time.

Sarah Wilson’s Collapse Book explores similar ideas.

Many of them have been baffled by recent heat records, which have been worse than their models predicted. Professor James Hansen has recently said that the 2 degrees goal of the Paris Agreement is “dead”.

Scientists like Dr. Peter Kalmus, and members of Scientist Rebellion and Scientists4Future have resorted to getting arrested to draw attention to the urgency of the climate crisis.

Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann, author of Our Fragile Moment and The New Climate War, advocates for urgent action, but he also says that it is not too late to avert the worst impacts, and that the latest scientific models suggest that runaway climate change leading to a Venus-like hot house earth are “not impossible but not likely”.

Mann warns that doom and despair have replaced denial as the fossil fuel industry’s new delay tactics, and warns that the fatalism they are pushing is both wrong and dangerous.

The Revolutionaries

The revolutionaries feel the urgency of the challenges we face, and usually acknowledge that infinite growth on a finite planet might be a fairytale, but rather than surrendering to despair, they believe that large-scale systemic changes can help us avert disaster and eventually flourish.

Tim Jackson has hopes for a Post-Growth economy. The Degrowth Movement advocates for a reduction in production and consumption in the global North, the liberation from the Western paradigm of development, and the creation of open, participatory, and localised economies. Kate Raworth champions a Doughnut Economy that meets the needs of the people while staying within planetary boundaries.

Moving beyond the economy, Glenn Albrecht wants us to ditch the Anthropocene and evolve into the Symbiocene—a future grounded in Indigenous wisdom, where humans live in deep reciprocity with the Earth. Dark Matter Labs thinks the new world can be born via “a radical refarming of our relationship to everything,” and shifts towards what they describe as ‘Life Ennobling Economies’.

Daniel Schmachtenberger, one of the world’s leading thinkers on the Metacrisis,  says that in order to escape our predicament we need to design an entirely new economy and system of global governance.

Schmachtenberger doesn’t know what that looks like, or how to get there, but he believes that the more ‘intellectual capital’ we can throw at the task, the more likely we are to succeed.

He founded The Civilization Research Institute and The Concilience Project with the aim of “supporting the emergence of a mature global civilization capable of wisely stewarding the unprecedented power of exponential technologies in concert with an enduringly healthy biosphere while avoiding the twin failure modes of catastrophes and dystopias.”

We might not know what the new world will look like, but there is a growing ecosystem of movements exploring what it could look like. Solarpunk, afrofuturism, bioregionalism, even resourced-based economies or ‘ecological civilizations’ all offer glimpses of possible new worlds.

Techno-optimists believe in the power of innovation and human ingenuity. Whether it’s having faith that the natural progress of technology will solve all of our challenges, hoping that ambitious policies and massive investments will save the day, or waiting for artificial intelligence to come up with all the answers, techno-optimists aren’t fretting about the future.

If all else fails, there will always be radical interventions like carbon capture and storage and geoengineering to reverse damage and avert disaster.

Thinkers like Stephen Pinker and Johan Norberg argue that the doomist world views are the result of negative media bias, that most metrics of progress are actually improving, and that liberal capitalism and human ingenuity are unassailable engines of growth that will be the pathway to prosperity.

The ecomodernists don’t have the same Pollyanna outlook, but they believe that by doubling down on innovations like precision agriculture, genetic engineering, and other technologies that allow us to use less land and interfere less with the natural world, we can decouple resource consumption from growth and continue to grow indefinitely.

Hanna Ritchie’s Not The End of The World, Ross Garnaut’s Superpower, and Saul Griffith’s Electrify, along with thinkers and think tanks like Gunter Pauli, RethinkX, and Beyond Zero Emissions, all offer hope that with the right mix of policy, investment, and innovation, we can rapidly decarbonize the global economy, and achieve sustainability while still improving our living standards.

Professor Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute, sees us on the brink of a new era, where ‘positive tipping points‘ in technologies like heat pumps, green ammonia, and plant-based proteins could kick-start sweeping transformative changes, accelerating the shift toward a more sustainable, resilient future.

Paul Hawken, founder of Project Drawdown and author of Regeneration tells us that we have all the tools we need to end the climate crisis in one generation.

Bill Gates, who penned How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, thinks that we need an unprecedented technological transformation in almost every sector of modern life, but with a mix of existing and yet-to-be-invented technologies we can avoid worst-case outcomes and begin to heal the world. The founder of Microsoft and the more recently launched Breakthrough Energy has funded or invested in everything from cow farts to “Plan B” options like dimming the sun.