‘The timescale of a century is an instant in cosmic time, but for politicians it’s an eternity.’

Lord Martin Rees

Astonishing archaeological discoveries still appear, often. A couple of recent finds are:

  • The skull of the Pliosaur, a huge marine reptile that plied the oceans about 150 million years ago, and which was extracted from the cliffs of Dorset's Jurassic Coast in 2023; and
  • The ancestor of Tutankhamun, Thutmose II, whose mummy was discovered in a tomb of the Pharaohs from 3,500 years ago.

It's extraordinary to think that the dinosaurs roamed the earth from 227 million BC to 65 million BC: that’s a range of 162 million years compared to the two hundred thousand for which humanity has been around. That means the length of the dinosaur era was more than eight hundred times as long as the human era thus far, roughly the same proportion as the time now remaining on the Doomsday clock (89 seconds before midnight); and, as we all know, dinosaurs were only rendered extinct by an asteroid hitting what has now been renamed the ‘Gulf of America’.

However, our super-intelligent human species is setting about wrecking its chances of survival beyond even this century, with what looks like totally careless abandon.

The environment continues to suffer massive degradation. Countless numbers of species of living creatures are being reduced to extinction. And, although we say that we care about our children and grandchildren's future, we give young people a rotten start in life, and our gross-overspending is laying down a totally unsustainable level of debt for them to carry.

And none of this even touches on the stupid, land-grabbing wars started by old men who have little more than a couple of decades to live themselves.

The environment continues to be a massive concern, the seriousness of  which seems hard to communicate to the electorates of western democracies, and Donald Trump’s denial of climate change will set the world back much more than the four years during which he is in power. Already the fossil fuel giants (including BP) are starting to flex their muscles again.

Sea ice and glacier destruction is gathering pace as this chart shows, and I suspect it will not be long before predictions of the rise in sea levels over the next fifty years are increased sharply, with levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now higher than at any time over the past fifteen million years. The huge proportion of human civilisation who are living in coastal cities will be seriously at risk, and the scale of cost and deprivation will be beyond anything we can now imagine.

How can we be so stupid as not to recognise this, and take action now?

As for wildlife extinction, most of the damage has already been done, as we have pushed remorselessly against nature. One of the most shocking statistics I have seen is that wild animals and birds now comprise just 4% of mammalian biomass, with humans being 34% and farmed livestock being 62%, as the huge growth and geographical spread of humanity has denied most wildlife a foothold.

It took millions of years to build up this diversity: how can we be so stupid as to destroy it within hardly more than one human generation?

Our commentaries have often reflected on the lousy inheritance that we are leaving for future generations, particularly those starting life from very disadvantaged and deprived circumstances. In the United Kingdom, the Government is collecting £8 billion in inheritance taxes each year, but nothing is done to ring-fence that money in order to break the cycle of deprivation. Instead, we pile on the public debt in huge quantities for those future generations to service: in the UK alone, the annual interest payable already exceeds spending on defence. Meanwhile, in the United States annual interest on its $35 trillion national debt already exceeds $1 trillion per annum.

How can we be so stupid as to deny our descendants the opportunity to have a decent standard of living and quality of life, instead exposing them to the increasing likelihood of 1930s-style trauma as a result of national debt default?

But it is the conflicts being waged almost entirely by old men who covet neighbouring territory, plus the desire to build walls and processes of rejection against integration and co-existence, which should horrify us all (notwithstanding the fact that so many of these old men's careers have been built on exploiting global communication, trade and movement). Within nation states we have learnt, often the hard way, how processes of public order and safety are built on the foundation of law and respect for property rights. It should not be so hard to lift those processes above the nation states and to install them under a system of global oversight such as the United Nations.

But, as we said a fortnight ago, improved global governance is under serious pressure in the Trumpian era as autocrats jockey for control. Donald Trump may say he wants peace in Ukraine, but his actions are seriously increasing the risk of war in the Far East, as China increases its threats against Taiwan, and is even threatening Australia with military exercises off its eastern coast.

Why can't these despots understand the lessons of history? Their time span is but a few decades long, and it is far more important to enable continued human existence over centuries and hopefully millennia ahead, by encouraging co-operation and integration across humanity.

The majority of the world's population believes that our existence was made possible by a conscious Creator, and I am among them in this respect. It's hard to imagine what despair we must cause for such a benevolent force of unconditional love, to see our intelligent species acting with such stupidity. We have been gifted this unique (so far as we're still aware) and beautiful place to live and enjoy, and yet so much of what we do is undertaking its systemic destruction.

For goodness' sake, can we please try to turn over a new leaf?

Gavin Oldham OBE

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