I loved the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, I read all five books in the trilogy – and if you know the books, you know what I said makes sense. This blog entry isn’t about Douglas Adams or the books, rather it’s about the scene when those words are uttered.
Humans had finally translated dolphins’ speech and that is what was heard. The dolphins were leaving the planet because they knew what was coming. They’d activated their ‘get out of town’ plans and were taking off. I don’t remember if it was explained how they knew this, I always had the impression it was because they were extraterrestrial beings and had picked up on messages the party was about to be over.
What if humans know the party is over, we just aren’t consciously aware of it yet? I don’t mean for the whole planet, just us, just humans. What if our time has come, we reached the zenith of our existence and have begun the slow descent into non-existence? I’m not about to get morose or depressive here and I’m far from a nihilist, I just like to explore through exercises and see where they lead me. Why not join me?
If you live long enough you become aware that everything happens in cycles from the hours to days to weeks to months to years. The seasons cycling round at roughly the same point each year. The pendulum swinging from summer solstice to winter solstice and back to summer solstice again. We are even aware of much longer cycles like Halley’s comet coming around approximately every 76 years or the cycle of ice ages of Earth and weaving all through that, the cycle of extinctions and appearances of new species.
Within each new species that evolves, the seeds of it’s own demise are present. In all other animal species we call this instinct. Instinct tells the animal what territories are home, which are safe, what to eat and when to breed. It’s all linked to nature, to ensure the new offspring are born at just the right time to give them the best chance of survival to adulthood. If something happens to disrupt their natural habits – a food source disappears, breeding environment is destroyed, the seasons go chaotic so the animal breeds in the wrong season – that can be the match that lights the fuse of extinction. Have offspring at the wrong time and they might not survive to birth the next generation. If your instinctual breeding grounds are destroyed, you won’t breed. If there is not enough food available you either won’t breed or your offspring might starve. Species extinction rarely happens quickly, it slowly builds up over time until one day there is simply not enough adults to ensure dna diversity. Because of their very instincts which ensured survival for thousands of years, they now dwindle and disappear because they can’t change their behaviour.
What if humans have an inbuilt extinction trigger as well and we just don’t know it? During extended periods of stress, like long famines, pregnancy numbers decline, either through not occurring to begin with or pregnancies being spontaneously aborted as there is simply not enough nutrition available for developing foetus and parent. Once the stress event has gone, numbers naturally climb back up – but what if no pregnancies happen because of deliberate choice to not get pregnant?
Birth rates around the world are dropping below sustainability. And it’s happening year after year, not just a once-off blip. It’s happening for a number of reasons, increasing infertility is a minor one, deliberate choice to not get pregnant is the main current cause. For centuries there has been a kind of unsettled war between men and women over property rights – men saw women as property and women didn’t. If you come forward to today, in many parts of the world men are actively trying to roll back women’s rights and freedoms and women are fighting it. The end result has been women refusing to be in relationship with, intimate with and have children with, men. This doesn’t take into account non-hetero sexualities or genders other than (cis) men and (cis) women.
As a specie that developed the ability to think about the future we are not as stuck in our instinctual ways as other animals might be, so the extinction trigger would have to be something other than physical needs being met. What if with humans, it was as simple as respect and fair treatment? The way you treat me now is most probably the way you are always going to treat me, at the present time I don’t have to accept that from you, I can choose to walk away. With the return of authoritarianism in the western world and men turning into brutish, misogynistic versions of themselves, women have chosen to leave the table. Birth rates everywhere are dropping below replacement levels, with only areas in Africa and surrounds showing positive numbers. That may not be enough to ensure long term survival.
While all this is happening, we have climate change, wars, massive disruptions to global supply chains that in 2026 have still not fully recovered from the 2020 pandemic and we are seeing further disruptions because of the US going to war with Iran. We are starting to see massive job losses, prices of everything going through the roof and millions becoming homeless every week. Hardly conditions to encourage births!
Could we be living through the beginning of the end times for humans on planet Earth? Not a biblical end times but a genuine one seeing the end of our species altogether? To quote an Australian ad “it won’t happen over night but it will happen” if nothing changes. This week France has seen over 1,000 deaths due to heat wave no doubt caused by El Niño, being mostly the elderly and not likely to procreate. The issue as far as evolution is concerned is not the elderly, it is enough newer generations coming along to ensure viability and diversity of genes. And we are experiencing that not happening. The choice might have started with women refusing to have children with disrespectful men but what if that choice is now being taken from us by climate change? What if we have reached a climate tipping point where now we have no choice but to not have babies because we simply don’t have the resources to take care of them?
And what if that tipping point is actually the crest of a very steep mountain with no way to halt the coming decline?
It won’t be all over red rover next week, next month, next year or even next decade. The extinction event for humans isn’t going to happen in our lifetime, or in the lifetime of our children’s children’s grandchildren. It will most likely take several hundred years and the effects of climate change aren’t going to slow down any time soon and will only serve to amplify our specie’s decline. We have no way of knowing from this point in time if this is, in fact the beginning of our species end, it just seems like it is very likely it could be.
If you have read this far, thank you for sticking with me. I hope I haven’t left you feeling too saddened, it’s all just ‘what ifs’ and like trying to build Pyraminds with tweezers. I find exploring things like this to be an interesting challenge that keeps my brain young. If you have thoughts on this or can see something I might have missed, please share it in the comments below.