A century ago, we found ourselves in a similar moment of existential dread over humanity's future.
These days, it can feel as though the existential challenges humanity faces are unprecedented. But a major extinction panic happened 100 years ago, and the similarities are unnerving. | | Cari Vander Yacht |
I was raised in the shadow of an apocalypse that wasn't. Born a stone's throw east of Three Mile Island in central Pennsylvania, I'm not exaggerating when I say that the nuclear plant's cooling towers — a trio of tombstones rising up from the Susquehanna River — were the background against which my childhood unfolded. From a young age, I became obsessed with my family's stories of the 1979 nuclear accident, the worst in American history. My grandparents, West Virginia transplants of hardy Appalachian stock, had refused to evacuate. The riddle of their refusal — not just to leave, but to be afraid in the face of apparent calamity — fascinated me. Still does. It is perhaps inevitable that I became fixated on not just catastrophes or worst-case scenarios, but the worst-case scenario: human extinction. I'm an academic who studies how our fears about the end of the world have changed over time in response to new scientific, technological and geopolitical developments. Experts call threats that could send our species or civilization to an early grave "existential risks," and today there is no shortage of them: climate change, nuclear war, artificial intelligence, pandemics, rising infertility rates. But even as these worries can feel new, they're anything but. As I wrote in my Times Opinion guest essay, we're in the middle of an extinction panic, and it's not the first time. Exactly a century ago, we found ourselves in a similar moment of existential dread. Many of our current fears — of a world-ending war, and even robot takeovers — are recycled from the 1920s. My essay makes the case that if we are to have any chance of surviving to see the 2120s, we need to take seriously the lesson of prior panics. That lesson is that fatalism can be self-fulfilling. But stubborn optimism can be as well. | | READ TYLER'S FULL ESSAY HERE | |
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