Don't waste time bemoaning the demise of the old order; get on with building the new one
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A FEW days ago, a woman called New Scientist's subscription desk with an unusual question. Was it true that the world would end in a week's time? She was worried about her young relatives: "They don't deserve to die," she told our sympathetic, if nonplussed, representative.
Our usual response to such enquiries is to say there's about as much reason to expect the world to end this week as any other, which is to say: not much ("Countering the new horsemen of the apocalypse", New Scientist, 1 December, p 5). But surprising numbers of people think otherwise. In a recent poll by the US Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), about 2 per cent of people said they expected the world to end before 2012 does; 15 per cent - many of them evangelical Christians - said the end would come in their lifetimes.
Most of us are jokier about prophecies of doom, but still subject to deep-seated anxiety about what the future will bring. The order of things has crumbled in recent years. But we should relish, rather than fear, the challenge of rebuilding it. After all, apocalyptic thinking is also about renewal: those waiting for the world to end usually expect a better one to take its place ("The end is always nigh in the human mind", New Scientist, 4 June 2011, p 30).
There is certainly cause for concern. Struggling western economies eye the fate of Greece uneasily. Democracy's birthplace has plunged abruptly from apparent affluence to penury. Nor are its problems confined to its borders: its economic crisis is turning into a continent-wide public health problem, with long-vanquished "tropical" diseases staging a troubling comeback ("Greek crisis: How to prevent a humanitarian disaster", New Scientist, 26 May, p 6).
There's better news on the global scale - although it still has its befuddling features. The Global Burden of Disease report released last week shows life expectancies to have risen significantly around the world over the past 40 years - but we now die of different causes, from AIDS to traffic accidents. Strikingly, excess weight is now a bigger global health problem than undernutrition (see "Overeating now bigger global problem than lack of food").
And the general increase in living standards is being thrown into doubt by climate change, which is becoming more serious, more quickly, than most feared ("Climate change: It's even worse than we thought", New Scientist, 17 November, p 34). Thankfully, public acceptance of the problem seems also to be on the rise. Some 6 out of 10 people in the PRRI poll think the severity of recent natural disasters is evidence of global climate change. That's a bolder link than most scientists would make. But then again, more than a third of those polled took such disasters as evidence of the end of the world.
This is a deeply unhelpful reaction. Our species has certainly made a mess of the atmosphere, and it will take immense efforts to sort it out. But we are capable of them. It's our species that built a huge machine to test our theories of the universe's finest workings. It's also our species that this year winched a giant robot down to the surface of another planet to see what's there. And beyond sating our curiosity, it's our species that's cut the death rate in our under-5s by 60 per cent in 20 years.
So yes, the world is complicated, and the challenges we face are enormous. But we mustn't just throw up our hands in despair: all the ingenuity and determination we can muster will be needed. We have to believe that we can make the world a better place, and act to make it one. We shouldn't view the end of the old world as a threat - but as an opportunity.
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The end of the world is an opportunity, not a threat
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The end of the world is an opportunity, not a threat
