Apocalypse, a world without people and where can you be saved?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

What if the world gets unbearably hot? Or will a new ice age come? Where do we go? How do we handle it? Astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell answers these questions.

Whatever the sissies in the West may think, we are deeply lucky that we live right now.

In the entire history of mankind, life has reached the maximum level of comfort, medicine is developing as never before, the level of poverty is at a record low, and developed countries maintain unprecedentedly peaceful relations with each other.

This is to be enjoyed until it's over, which will inevitably happen. The point is not only that history tells us that about every thousand years a natural phenomenon occurs on Earth that erases about a third of its population from the face of the planet, moreover, we all also expect the next ice age, which will cause us a much more difficult blow than any cataclysm.

Indeed, there is no certainty as to how humanity will end its days. Some see something terrifying in this perspective; She consoles nihilists, but the fact remains: 99% of all species that have ever existed on Earth have become extinct.

For a short period since the beginning of our existence, people have managed to find themselves in the balance of complete destruction. Three times from what we know, our population has been reduced to thousands and even hundreds; the last time - 70 thousand years ago, when, as a result of the global climate shift, people were "on the very brink of extinction," as paleontologist Meave Leakey put it.

Earlier this month, we interviewed astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell about the causes of a new apocalypse (most likely a global pandemic). He not only studies our origins and probable causes of its end, but also wrote a book about what the aftermath of near extinction would look like - The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World After an Apocalypse).

It offers an interesting observation that, unlike our hunting and gathering ancestors, who managed to (only) outsmart the planet when it was in its most hostile mood, most of us today would be depressingly ill-equipped for such a turn of events. And the few survivors with incredible difficulty would try to return everything to square one.

Are you ready to immerse yourself in the game, what would be the worst-case scenario?

How will it happen

Five years before the current coronavirus outbreak, Dartnell suggested almost prophetically: “The incredibly infectious strain of avian influenza has finally overcome the species barrier and successfully crossed over to humans, or may have been deliberately released as an act of biological terrorism.

The infection spread at a crushing rate in the modern age of densely populated cities and intercontinental air travel, wiping out a significant portion of the world's population until effective immunization measures and even quarantine orders were implemented. The world known to us has come to an end: what now?"

How do we handle

Bad. “People living in developed countries have been cut off from the civilizational processes that support their livelihoods,” says Dartnell. “Individually, we are strikingly ignorant about even the basics of food, housing, clothing, medicines, materials and vital substances.”

He tells us: “If people in modern life could not just come to terms with the fact that there is no food in the markets or water from the taps, we would very soon begin to leave our homes and go to violence, competing for resources. In theory, in fact, only three days separate us from the riots”.

Obviously, in the event of a mass extinction of people, when only a small proportion of the population will remain on the planet, the very fate of humanity will depend on the professions of these people. “If you have a huge number of accountants and management consultants, you might just as well say goodbye to the chances of rebuilding society forever,” he says. "If you still have nurses, doctors, engineers, mechanics, they would certainly be of much greater benefit than people of theoretical professions." Dartnell places himself, a scientist, and me, a journalist, in the last useless category.

Agriculture

It took homo sapiens, the first modern humans, almost 200 thousand years to invent agriculture, and since then they have come a difficult path.

Take the Mayan civilization, an incredibly complex ancient society that existed in Central America. By the eighth century, the Maya, without facing difficulties, had made too much progress in agriculture on their own head - it was enough to incur the collapse of civilization.

Rampant deforestation in a short time meant more crops to feed people, and hence rapid population growth (which entails its own problems). Around the tenth century, the Maya suddenly left their cities. No one knows for sure why, but the popular theory among many scientists today is that the Mayan collapse was accelerated by local climatic changes caused by the destruction of rainforests, combined with overpopulation, hunger and, probably, war.

Today we are seeing some kind of repetition, especially when it comes to overpopulation, Dartnell stresses. “Many of the problems of resource overuse and environmental damage - ocean acidification, pollution, plastic - essentially boil down to too many people living in violation of environmental standards,” he says.

"In the event of a massive population decline, following this twisted logic, many problems will be resolved."

So, you survived among the few, and it's time to think about restarting agriculture. Where do you start? Get to Norway and its snowy expanses.

In the northern archipelago of Spitsbergen, the World Seed Vault is hidden away from view. Its purpose is to preserve enough seeds to ensure the genetic diversity of crops around the world in the event of the apocalypse. More than 860,000 specimens of approximately 4,000 plant species are safely stored in hermetically sealed bags in this remote Arctic warehouse.

There are even James Bond-style security measures in place: in the event of a power outage, the rarely-opened vault will remain hermetically sealed. The cold in the warehouse will be maintained by the permafrost. And the special conditions of the current security measures state that the stored seeds can only be received by the state that placed them there, ensuring that no one can profit from the agricultural crisis of another country.

Before the apocalypse, of course, you will not be able to go and look around the vault out of idle curiosity, but Svalbard has many attractions for travelers, in particular the settlement of Longyearbyen - a strange town that exists a hundred days a year without sunlight, where anyone in the world can live without a visa, but no one is allowed to die.

How will we survive the next ice age?

If it is even a little like the last one, which ended about 12 thousand years ago, then all of North America, Europe and Asia will freeze. A significant drop in sea level will cut off shipping lanes in regions such as the Mediterranean or the Torres Strait in Australia, and civilization as we know it will collapse.

Some of the few survivors of the last ice age took refuge in one of the only places on Earth that remained suitable for life - on a piece of land on the southern coast of Africa near Cape Town, for which, by a convenient coincidence, Telegraph readers voted seven times in a row as your favorite city.

What kind of life will it be if an extreme cold snap occurs? We do not know, but you can use the wisdom of the inhabitants of Oymyakon, currently considered the coldest inhabited locality on Earth. When photographer Amos Chapple visited this Russian town, where temperatures can drop as low as -67 degrees and frosty eyelashes are an everyday reality, the locals told him that to maintain their strength, they resort to "Russian tea" - as they called vodka.

What if, on the contrary, it gets too hot?

The most rapid rise in temperature on Earth happened about 55 million years ago and is known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period when natural greenhouse gases - the exact cause is unknown - raised the planet's temperature by five to eight degrees Celsius, probably over several thousand years to a level that was about seven degrees higher than today.

Then many species of marine animals became extinct, but this benefited biodiversity on earth; mammals flourished, and it was during this period that primate evolution took place. Much closer to the present time, the phases during which the temperature of our planet was somewhat hotter than now, usually coincided with the heyday, and not with the difficult period of humanity; a good example of this is the Roman climate optimum. Most recently, in 2001, when journalists from the Los Angeles Times interviewed residents of the California Death Valley, now considered the hottest place on Earth, they spoke out with incredible enthusiasm.

All of this does not mean, of course, that warming is beneficial for everyone. For us, rising temperatures will translate into melting ice sheets and rising sea levels, and if that happens, it would be wise to find some place that is virtually inaccessible for flooding. For this, the Himalayas are suitable, although at the very top it can be quite fresh there. Perhaps it would be better to bet on the Altiplano high plateau of Bolivia, which occupies a vast territory in South America. This entire region is located at an altitude of 3750 meters and, moreover, it is a wonderful place in the world.

Could our planet get even hotter than it was, for example, during PETM? This is theoretically possible. According to Scientific American, if we were faced with an "uncontrolled greenhouse effect," a climatic process that has never happened on Earth (but may have happened on Venus). For this to be possible, we will have to burn ten times more fossil fuels than we have at our disposal.

In short, no matter how we humans consider ourselves to be a powerful and destructive force, there is a limit to how much we can actually influence the climate.

The super-rich are already preparing

People have been building their own doomsday bunkers for a long time - usually eccentrics and conspiracy theorists - but in recent years this madness has spread to the elite.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire behind PayPal, is one of the many Silicon Valley giants who have seized a safe haven from the apocalypse: he bought 500 acres of land for $ 13.5 million on the coast Lake Wanaka, New Zealand, after (somewhat controversially) acquired local citizenship.

Thiel made a wise choice, not least because it is your favorite country. Two scientists recently ranked the safest places to escape in the event of an extreme pandemic, and unsurprisingly, the islands have been the main focus. New Zealand ranked second behind Australia on the list of eligible options. Isolated naturally from the spread of the disease, they have been labeled excellent sites to avoid a pandemic or "other significant existential threats."

A conspiracy theorist might be surprised to learn that of all the biggest players in the corporate world, it’s the tech giants who are most eager to acquire these bunkers (maybe they know something that we don’t know?), But we are not here to ask similar questions.

What will the world be like without people?

Pretty sweet if you don't happen to be one of them. When Greg Dickinson of Telegraph Travel visited Fukushima - eight years after the site was cleared of population by a nuclear disaster - he saw a desolate but hopeful landscape.

"This place, probably more than any other place on the planet, gives us the opportunity to look at what happens when people leave something, and nature is left to itself," he wrote. “Green shoots were growing in the cracks in the asphalt, areas where houses had been destroyed by the earthquake were now buried up to the waist in foliage, one house was completely hidden behind a colossus-plant crawling along the outer walls.”

Likewise, in Chernobyl, 30 years after the worst nuclear disaster in history led to a mass evacuation, wild animals and various species of birds roam virtually the largest - albeit spontaneous - nature reserve in Europe. The European lynx, which had previously been absent here, returned to these territories, as did a significant number of elk, deer and wolves.

Today, under the supervision of a guide, you can visit individual sections of Chernobyl, as Oliver Smith from Telegraph Travel did - the decision is yours. Just don't linger - it's still pretty radioactive there.