VIBING TO EXTINCTION JOEL KARANIKAS DELVES INTO THE WORLDS OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY AND EXTINCTION THEORY TO UNCOVER A POSSIBLE FUTURE FOR THE HUMAN RACE.
Those who predict the end of the world today are bound to feel a lot like Cassandra, a mythological Greek woman who could foresee true prophecies but was doomed to always be disproved. There have been too many predictions fallen foul, too many crazy New Age cults, for a serious forecast of imminent annihilation to escape a chorus of hooting by the rest of sane society. And who can complain? Isn’t that how civilisation works: pushing the loonies to the fringes, normalising sanity in the centre? Well yes, but the problem is not all doomsayers are alike in their febrile embrace of conspiracies. Rather than scrutinizing Mayan calendars, some prefer scientific data. The foremost of these data-driven doomsayers is Guy McPherson, the emeritus professor of ecology at the University of Arizona whose Near-Term Extinction theory would have you believe that all of us will be dead in 2026, after climate change
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goes really bat-shit crazy and makes our current bushfire crisis probably look like a nostalgically idyllic period. And no, he’s not trolling. Unsurprisingly, the professor has a touch of Cassandra about him. His vocal critics in the scientific community deride his alleged misunderstandings of feedback loops and atmospheric physics. Scientist Michael Tobis claims McPherson is one of those bizarre professors we’ve all probably had, whose PhD only encouraged his inner charlatanry. With the 2020’s now rolling out, it’s especially true that our deepest intuitions will insist against the scenario our dear McPherson has cogitated for decades. You may have no pretensions to fathoming the intricacies of climate, atmospheric physics and ecology, but Doomsday is still Doomsday—far away and unlikely.
