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12 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 26 AUGUST 2020 OPINION Thomas Moynihan PhD Candidate, University of Oxford IT is 1950 and a group of scientists are walking to lunch against the majestic back- drop of the Rocky Mountains. They are about to have a conversation that will be- come scientific legend. The scientists are at the Los Alamos Ranch School, the site for the Manhattan Project, where each of the group has lately played their part in usher- ing in the atomic age. They are laughing about a recent cartoon in the New Yorker offering an unlikely ex- planation for a slew of missing public trash cans across New York City. The cartoon had depicted "little green men" (complete with antenna and guileless smiles) having stolen the bins, assiduously unloading them from their flying saucer. By the time the party of nuclear scientists sits down to lunch, within the mess hall of a grand log cabin, one of their number turns the conversation to matters more serious. "Where, then, is everybody?", he asks. They all know that he is talking – sincerely – about extraterrestrials. The question, which was posed by Enrico Fermi and is now known as Fermi's Para- dox, has chilling implications. Bin-stealing UFOs notwithstanding, hu- manity still hasn't found any evidence of intelligent activity among the stars. Not a single feat of "astro-engineering", no visible superstructures, not one space-faring em- pire, not even a radio transmission. It has been argued that the eerie silence from the sky above may well tell us something om- inous about the future course of our own civilisation. Such fears are ramping up. Last year, the astrophysicist Adam Frank implored an au- dience at Google that we see climate change – and the newly baptised geological age of the Anthropocene – against this cosmolog- ical backdrop. The Anthropocene refers to the effects of humanity's energy-intensive activities upon Earth. Could it be that we do not see evidence of space-faring galactic civilisations because, due to resource ex- haustion and subsequent climate collapse, none of them ever get that far? If so, why should we be any different? A few months after Frank's talk, in Octo- ber 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's update on global warm- ing caused a stir. It predicted a sombre fu- ture if we do not decarbonise. And in May, amid Extinction Rebellion's protests, a new climate report upped the ante, warning: "Human life on earth may be on the way to extinction." Meanwhile, NASA has been publish- ing press releases about an asteroid set to hit New York within a month. This is, of course, a dress rehearsal: part of a "stress test" designed to simulate responses to such a catastrophe. NASA is obviously fair- ly worried by the prospect of such a disaster event – such simulations are costly. Space tech Elon Musk has also been re- laying his fears about artificial intelligence to YouTube audiences of tens of millions. He and others worry that the ability for AI systems to rewrite and self-improve them- selves may trigger a sudden runaway pro- cess, or "intelligence explosion", that will leave us far behind – an artificial superintel- ligence need not even be intentionally ma- licious in order to accidentally wipe us out. In 2015, Musk donated to Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, headed up by tran- shumanist Nick Bostrom. Nestled within the university's medieval spires, Bostrom's institute scrutinises the long-term fate of humanity and the perils we face at a truly cosmic scale, examining the risks of things such as climate, asteroids and AI. It also looks into less well-publicised issues. Uni- verse destroying physics experiments, gam- ma-ray bursts, planet-consuming nano- technology and exploding supernovae have all come under its gaze. So it would seem that humanity is be- coming more and more concerned with portents of human extinction. As a global community, we are increasingly conversant with increasingly severe futures. Something is in the air. But this tendency is not actually exclu- sive to the post-atomic age: our growing concern about extinction has a history. We have been becoming more and more wor- ried for our future for quite some time now. My PhD research tells the story of how this began. No one has yet told this story, yet I feel it is an important one for our present moment. I wanted to find out how current projects, such as the Future of Humanity Institute, emerge as offshoots and continuations of an ongoing project of "enlightenment" that we first set ourselves over two centuries ago. Recalling how we first came to care for our future helps reaffirm why we should continue to care today. Extinction, 200 years ago In 1816, something was also in the air. It was a 100-megaton sulfate aerosol lay- er. Girdling the planet, it was made up of material thrown into the stratosphere by the eruption of Mount Tambora, in Indo- nesia, the previous year. It was one of the biggest volcanic eruptions since civilisation emerged during the Holocene. Almost blotting out the sun, Tambora's fallout caused a global cascade of harvest collapse, mass famine, cholera outbreak and geopolitical instability. And it also pro- voked the first popular fictional depictions of human extinction. These came from a troupe of writers including Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley. The group had been holidaying together in Switzerland when titanic thunderstorms, caused by Tambora's climate perturbations, trapped them inside their villa. Here they discussed humanity's long-term prospects. Other writers and thinkers had already discussed such threats. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1811, daydreamed in his pri- vate notebooks about our planet being "scorched by a close comet and still rolling on – cities men-less, channels riverless, five mile deep". In 1798, Mary Shelley's father, the political thinker William Godwin, que- ried whether our species would "continue forever"? While just a few years earlier, Immanuel Kant had pessimistically proclaimed that global peace may be achieved "only in the vast graveyard of the human race". He would, soon after, worry about a descend- ent offshoot of humanity becoming more intelligent and pushing us aside. Earlier still, in 1754, philosopher David Hume had declared that "man, equally with every animal and vegetable, will partake" in extinction. Godwin noted that "some of the profoundest enquirers" had lately become concerned with "the extinction of our spe- cies". In 1816, against the backdrop of Tamb- ora's glowering skies, a newspaper article drew attention to this growing murmur. It listed numerous extinction threats. From global refrigeration to rising oceans to plan- etary conflagration, it spotlighted the new scientific concern for human extinction. The "probability of such a disaster is dai- ly increasing", the article glibly noted. Not without chagrin, it closed by stating: "Here, then, is a very rational end of the world!" Before this, we thought the universe was busy Extinction was not much discussed be- fore 1700 due to a background assumption, widespread prior to the Enlightenment, that it is the nature of the cosmos to be as full as moral value and worth as is possible. This, in turn, led people to assume that all other planets are populated with "living and thinking beings" exactly like us. Although it only became a truly widely ac- cepted fact after Copernicus and Kepler in the 16th and 17th centuries, the idea of plu- ral worlds certainly dates back to antiquity, with intellectuals from Epicurus to Nicho- las of Cusa proposing them to be inhabited with lifeforms similar to our own. And, in a cosmos that is infinitely populated with humanoid beings, such beings – and their values – can never fully go extinct. In the 1660s, Galileo confidently declared that an entirely uninhabited or unpopulated world is "naturally impossible" on account of it being "morally unjustifiable". Gottfried Leibniz later pronounced that there simply cannot be anything entirely "fallow, sterile, or dead in the universe". Along the same lines, the trailblazing sci- entist Edmond Halley (after whom the fa- mous comet is named) reasoned in 1753 that the interior of our planet must likewise be "inhabited". It would be "unjust" for any part of nature to be left "unoccupied" by moral beings, he argued. Around the same time Halley provid- ed the first theory on a "mass extinction event". He speculated that comets had pre- viously wiped out entire "worlds" of species. Nonetheless, he also maintained that, after each previous cataclysm "human civilisa- tion had reliably re-emerged". And it would do so again. Only this, he said could make such an event morally justifiable. Later, in the 1760s, the philosopher Denis Diderot was attending a dinner party when he was asked whether humans would go extinct. He answered "yes", but immediate- ly qualified this by saying that after sever- al millions of years the "biped animal who carries the name man" would inevitably re- evolve. This is what the contemporary planetary scientist Charles Lineweaver identifies as the "Planet of the Apes Hypothesis". This refers to the misguided presumption that "human-like intelligence" is a recurrent feature of cosmic evolution: that alien bio- spheres will reliably produce beings like us. This is what is behind the wrong-headed assumption that, should we be wiped out today, something like us will inevitably re- turn tomorrow. Back in Diderot's time, this assumption was pretty much the only game in town. It was why one British astronomer wrote, in 1750, that the destruction of our plan- The end of the world: a history of how a silent