Let's face it, things aren't great right now. We are approaching year four of a pandemic and the end of the hottest year on record. Climate scientists issue chilling reports seemingly daily. (Did you know emissions are at an all-time high?) Tens of thousands have died in two large-scale wars, and imagery of their final moments circulates on screens across the globe. In the US, women's rights are moving in reverse. We keep learning scary new things about long Covid. AI is coming for our livelihoods. Twitter is now X. Babies are addicted to screens. Fast fashion. Doorbell cameras. That Squid Game reality show. Amid all of this, it feels like we can do nothing but sit and watch communities be destroyed—wrecked by viruses, wildfires, rising sea levels, gun violence, missiles. One could be forgiven for feeling like we are approaching the End Times.
Of course, our society has a grand tradition of doomsday predictions and general apocalyptic unease. For example, a surprising number of people—one in seven apparently—went to bed 10 years and 361 nights ago believing they would wake up to calamity. They didn't exactly know what cataclysm morning would bring, but they knew the Maya Long Count calendar foretold the end of the world on December 21, 2012. Whether it was an environmental catastrophe, a planetary collision course, or the Second Coming, we were toast. A few months before the big day, WIRED attempted to quell anxieties with a fairly scornful cover story entitled "Apocalypse Not: Here's Why You Shouldn't Worry About End Times." It was written Matt Ridley, a British science journalist perhaps best known for his climate change skepticism. Ridley wasn't feeling particularly generous toward the doomsayers. On the cover, his story was teased with the words: "Climate collapse. Mass starvation. Deadly pandemics. Get a grip."
Ridley set out to convince the 2012ers that the sun would indeed rise on December 22, 2012, and every day thereafter, and that any following end-times predictions would be similarly overblown. He claimed our track record was evidence enough, and detailed decades of misguided eschatology related to climate, disease, overpopulation, and resources—the four horsemen. He narrows in on fears—some unfounded, some alleviated thanks to innovation—over acid rain, ozone holes, flu and mad cow disease, overpopulation, and declining oil reserves. Mostly, Ridley was bothered by what he viewed as dramatic doomsaying on the part of scientists, and he diagnosed society with, in the words of writer Gary Alexander, apocaholism. "The promised Armageddons—the thresholds that cannot be uncrossed, the tipping points that cannot be untipped, the existential threats to Life as We Know It," Ridley said, "have consistently failed to materialize." That, he said, was proof that they never would.
It's worth noting that Ridley is now the author of a 2021 book about something he once scoffed at. In WIRED, he wrote that a new global pandemic was growing less likely, not more; that colds proliferated, but only because they were so mild; and that truly lethal viruses could be thwarted quickly since we were making so much progress in genome sequencing and vaccine development. His new book is called Viral and it's about the origins of a particularly virulent cold called SARS-COV-2.
Let's not forget—the one prognostication that turns out to be right will be buried amongst all the others. So on this third-to-last Saturday of 2023, I want to know what you believe we need to be thinking about going into 2024, or even into the next 50 years. What are we too concerned with, and what are we not concerned enough about? Comment below the story or send me an email.
Thank you so much for sharing your considered thoughts, random musings, and personal stories with us this year. WIRED Classics will be back in your inbox in 2024.
Happy holidays,
Sam
.jpg "An illustration depicting the devastation of the San Francisco earthquake with lots of smoke and fire.")
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