Is this the end of the world? Not really

Telegraph

16-02-2025

'Fake! Bum Show! World Is Intact!' crowed the San Francisco Chronicle on December 18 1919. A Jesuit professor had predicted that a planetary alignment would ravage the earth on the 17th – but the day had passed without incident. As Tom Phillips writes in his entertaining new book, A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World, people have been confidently predicting the End at least since the dawn of Christianity with 'an absolutely 100 per cent failure rate'. But such predictions make for reliably good copy.
And they continue to do so. During a single month in 2019, the Daily Express carried no fewer than 87 stories about world-destroying asteroids. The thought of annihilation inspires fear, desire and ridicule in equal measure: as Phillips observes, 'we take our own apocalyptic speculations very seriously… at the same time, we also love stories about how everyone else's apocalyptic beliefs are batshit crazy.'
As far as we know, the Persian prophet Zoroaster was the first to suggest that the world could end. He proposed that history was an arrow rather than a wheel, and therefore that it had a final destination. Just as influentially, he dramatised this conclusion as the ultimate battle between the forces of good and evil – ideas which made their way into Judaism, and more starkly into the Western Christian imagination, via the lurid drama of the Book of Revelation.
Even ostensibly secular uses of apocalyptic storytelling, from political projects to disaster movies, tend to cleave to this narrative of destruction and renewal; of a world divided between the righteous and the damned. 'As long as there are people… who can't conceive of how [the world] could improve without everything burning down, then there will be people ready to tell a story that satisfies that impulse.'
Needless to say, this is a dangerous idea. Cannily neutered for centuries by St Augustine, who insisted that Revelation was a metaphor rather than a prophecy, it came roaring back in the Middle Ages thanks to the Italian monk Joachim of Fiore, and has fuelled countless extremists, prophets and cults ever since. The arc of apocalyptic thought tends to be inherited, and to bend towards bloodshed: the same impatient zeal that led Anabaptists to turn Münster into a proto-totalitarian slaughterhouse in the 1530s later animated the Islamic State. In 19th-century China, Hong Xiuquan's messianic Taiping Rebellion led to the deaths of up to 30 million people.
The idea endures partly because it's politically useful. As Phillips points out, apocalyptic narratives 'have been used to demonise or deify pretenders to the throne, to rationalise crusades and colonialism. They have stoked repression, reform and revolt in equal measure.' James I – who called the Pope the Antichrist so often that the pontiff snapped during one meeting and told him to stop – was more motivated by the necessity to appease Protestants than sincere millenarian conviction. Hitler warned in Mein Kampf that if his anti-Semitic crusade failed, then the planet would 'move through the ether devoid of men'. Today, there's a clear connection between Elon Musk's long-standing obsession with turning Mars into a cosmic Noah's Ark and his new-found conviction that his critics are active threats to human civilisation.
But this is not just a story about extremists and cranks. Figures as momentous as Christopher Columbus, Isaac Newton, the mathematician John Napier, the Suffragette Christabel Pankhurst and the slave revolutionary Nat Turner were all firm believers in the apocalypse, drawing up timetables and cataloguing the omens. Phillips traverses this sprawling terrain with energy and charm, though his compulsive quips and blokey title sell short the breadth of his research. His lucid explanation of potential asteroid impacts, for example, is not improved by calling the lethal object 'Smashy McDeathrock'.
In its last third, Phillips moves from religion to the history and science of existential risk, and to surprisingly reassuring effect: 'Humans are a survival machine.' Consider that only once in recorded history, after the Black Death, has the global population definitively declined. The latest scholarship suggests that the scale of the Bronze Age collapse and the climatic impact of the Toba supervolcano 74,000 years ago have both been exaggerated. As for the killer asteroids that haunt the Daily Express, the chance of one destroying city, let alone a planet, are vanishingly small. Phillips advises worrying more about the genuine 'local apocalypses' produced by war and climate change rather than the hypothetical Big One.
Unfortunately, a sense of crisis can make one more, rather than less, likely. During the Cold War, we almost stumbled into global devastation at least twice: from human misunderstandings during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and from a computer error in 1983. On each occasion, a Soviet officer blocked the release of weapons because he kept his head. Had these two men panicked – well, use your imagination. Among the many existential threats we fear, with varying degrees of justification, is fear itself.