Final Destination: Extinction

With a brain no longer fit for a world of scarcity, humans meet the definition of an evolutionary dead-end: a species unable to adapt.  Extinction events occur when environmental conditions change too rapidly for organisms to develop evolutionary adaptations, and this is precisely what is happening to humans.  Runaway climate change is altering Earth too fast for us to develop both the physical and mental skills needed for this crisis.

Selecting and eliminating mutations, the process of evolution, takes countless generations and hundreds of thousands of years.  Humans are only as good as their previous “working” version, which belongs in a cooler, more abundant, more stable Earth.  Along with a changing climate we are faced with multiple game-ending overshoot endpoints: overpopulation, water scarcity, pollution, annihilation of the food web, artificial intelligence.  Ironically, it is intelligence itself which accelerated us towards overshoot, making our civilisations exponentially efficient in exhausting resources.  It would have happened to any other species on Earth, had they become “intelligent”.  If only it was the right type of intelligence, but it isn’t.

The human mind resides in an overshoot cognitive bubble so much so that it is unable to recognise and accept both the concept of overshoot as well as its repercussions.  We haven’t known any way of existing other than through overshoot since the beginning of our existence, which makes it extremely unlikely we ever will.  Most preventative action should have already been implemented hundreds of years ago, and many solutions could have taken place in just the past few decades. 

But even in a hypothetical scenario where these crises manage to cross into our 10-minute attention span, it would be too late to address them now.  Multiple tipping points have been crossed, entering us into an acceleration path.  There is no escape velocity when you’ve come so close to the black hole of Extinction.  Once we destroy the rest of this ecosystem, we will be left in the precarious company of our own psychoses and no fallback plan(et).  Even with superbly advanced technology, the human species will remain far too mentally unstable to avoid doing something extremely self-destructive.

A self-destructive brain can only create self-destructive civilisations.  All our innovations were selected specifically for their immense short-term benefits yet punishing long-term consequences.  Fossil fuel was a great idea back in the day, not today.  We are facing an abrupt end to a long history of catastrophic decisions as we rapidly transition from a time of benefits to a time of consequences.  Payback time is now, and the only currency accepted is extinction.  

This is a war between two brains: The brain that only cares about right now, and the brain that can project into the future.  It is very clear who is winning.  Seeing patterns in data, putting together models or wining Nobel Prizes does not make a species intelligent when it is unable to avert self-destruction.  We may be creating next generation iPhones but we are still using Humans v1.0.  The human brain in the age of overshoot is as outdated as Kodak photographic film in the digital age: out of time, out of place, and functionally extinct. 

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.

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