Will our world end with a bang or a whimper?

Rising tensions: but nuclear war is only one of the threats facing humanity. Picture: AFP

How will our time at the peak of the evolutionary Everest end? How will we fall from grace? Will our world end with a bang or a whimper? Today’s epistle: risk assessment of the fates that await. And let’s face it, we have enough of those Damoclean swords dangling over our head for a full dinner service.

Top of my list – as it’s been for 40 years since my Commission for the Future first blew the whistle on the “greenhouse effect” – is what became known, via global warming and other aliases, as climate change. Thanks to denialists in government and the lobbying power of the fossils running the fossil fuel industry, we’re experiencing ever-greater droughts, floods, bushfires, tornadoes and extinctions. Climate deserves its own Doomsday Clock – and we’re seconds from the midnight of our own mortality. Millions of us may die of its consequences – if not from starvation, then Covid-accelerated disease.

The original Doomsday Clock concerned itself with nuclear armageddon and, during the Cold War, we could hear the noise clockwork makes just before striking. Now, decades later, the nuclear stockpile is stacked with more than 13,000 nukes yearning to burst from the bellies of bombers, submarines or underground missile sites, and the clock once more is making its ominous sound. Among the proud owners of nuclear WMDs: Russia, the US, China, India, Pakistan, Britain, France and Israel. With more, including North Korea, beating their nuclear pectorals.

There are pandemics aplenty, too: HIV-AIDS still wreaks havoc. Ditto outbreaks of ebola and our current crop of Covids. Time for a Covid Clock? Will we reach herd immunity before we’re herded into the abattoir?

Oh, and UFOs are making a comeback, as evidenced by the collection of military-grade photographs released by the Pentagon to a US Congressional Inquiry. Suddenly Spielberg’s Close Encounters looks like a documentary. A War of the Worlds to add to the inventory? I’m old enough to remember the good old days of the “flying saucers” that fellow sceptics were easily able to rationalise, explaining them away as misidentification of natural phenomena or simply wafting weather balloons. Or the testimony of ratbags. Suddenly we’re heading back to Roswell. Here comes The X-Files.

And there are other threats from outer space. The universe is forever playing cosmic billiards – everything from comets to black holes. You may have heard of the problem the dinosaurs had when an errant asteroid struck our planet just 66 million years ago – causing climate change to wipe out the dominant dinosaurs and give the humans to come an evolutionary advantage. To borrow the title of the Netflix flick, Don’t Look Up.

Have I missed anything? Yes. Political apocalypses (apocalyae?) abound. One by one nations deemed to be democracies have fallen to dictators, demagogues or tyrants, among them Putin in Russia, Duterte in the Philippines and Bolsonaro in Brazil. Not to mention the treasonable Trump, a US president who choreographed an insurrection. Seems the Republicans are poised to make gains in the midterm elections this November while The Donald preps for another presidential run. From the land of the free to another failed state.

Thank god it couldn’t happen in Australia. There’s no QAnon in high places here. No corruption gnawing away at the body politic. No climate-change denialism in our upper echelons. Just a Labor Party full of Chinese spies and Manchurian candidates. What’s that old saying? “What could possibly go wrong?”