Today I learned that scholars think there’s a 5 to 20 percent chance that humanity will have gone extinct by the end of the century.
Now, I’m not huge on end-of-the-world scenarios, but there’s nothing that reminds one of their mortality quite like walking out the door to a grey world and the scent of smoke–not the pleasant smoke of a campfire, but an oddly sweet mixture, difficult to place, somewhere between tree sap and dilapidated shed and with a hint of roasted marshmallow. The towering mountains were completely obscured by the fog, giving an ethereal quality to the scene: we might just as easily have been on an eerily quiet island as in mountain suburbia. The smoke, odor, and wind combined to inhibit the senses and make the neighborhood feel almost like the aftermath of some disaster.
In his last lecture to our class, my biology professor summarized the capabilities of humans with two slides: the 9-11 terror attacks and the bombing of Hiroshima. The photographs elicited a grim, awkward silence from the class. He could have chosen any number of images to represent what Homo sapiens have accomplished in the 300,000 or so years of our existence. Perhaps Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, or the Sistine Chapel ceiling, or even Adam Young on stage. Instead, it was a reminder of the tremendous destructive potential that humans have developed, greater than anything nature has come up with. That 5 to 20 percent chance of human extinction is overwhelmingly due to human causes, an apocalyptic conglomeration of AI rampage, nuclear warfare, life-destroying nanobots, or some combination of the above.
The cashier-in-training at Chick-Fil-A had started the job to buy a new car after his last one got totaled. A young woman with long black hair was doing her schoolwork intently at the bus stop. The bombing of Hiroshima occurred 76 years ago today, and today, as they do every year, Japan is holding a festival where they pray for peace. Humanity has seen worse, and I envision promise in our future.
In the meantime, it seems that the cause of the smoky incursion is a larger fire being blown in from the West Coast. Utahns who already blame everything on California have reason to rejoice. ∎