Perceptions by Gerry Warner

Dystopian predictions of the end of the world have been with us from the very beginning and I don’t normally pay much attention to them. Whether it be cartoons in the New Yorker or doomsday passages in Revelations, I tend to yawn and go back to sleep.

I remember in university reading the theories of Thomas Malthus, an English cleric and scholar, who in the late 17th Century wrote ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ predicting the end of the world in a matter of a few hundred years if the earth’s rampant population growth was left unchecked. “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,” Malthus thundered in 1798. But more than 300 years later the world is still going strong despite a population of more than seven billion and the growth rate rapidly declining in most developed countries.

So much for Thomas Malthus.

And in the good ol’ ‘60s era there was the famous Club of Rome’s doomsday scenario predicting the collapse of civilization in a report entitled ‘Limits to Growth.’ Based on computer modeling, an emerging science at that time, the think tank predicted the industrialized world would soon come to an end because of the exhaustion of key natural resources like water and oil. Later in 1974, the scientists, economists and academics making up the Club issued a more optimistic report, “Mankind at the Turning Point,” saying the power to avoid catastrophe was within human control if mankind, regardless of race, politics and prejudice, was willing to work collectively on the world’s problems however unlikely that may seem.

Nevertheless, another 40 years have rolled by and the earth is still spinning around the sun more or less intact despite the antics of the Taliban, the Tea Party and Rob Ford. And just when I was starting to feel comfortable again, along comes a NASA report saying civilization is likely doomed. What a downer! But it’s true according to the prediction of a NASA-funded group of mathematicians, which based on four equations they devised, came to the grim conclusion that the utter collapse of human civilization will be “difficult to avoid,” according to a front-page story this week in the National Post. No kidding!

Their theory goes roughly like this. Civilized society is rapidly evolving into two classes – the rich and the poor – or “Elites” and “Commoners” as the mathematicians put it. The problem with the Elites is they consume too much which leaves the Commoners with not enough and as the world’s resources diminish under the pressure it “results in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society.” Or so the theory goes.

Hollywood, of course, has explored this theory in several movies and it’s easy to write it off as just the musings of another hyperbolic screenwriter. But mathematicians aren’t as prone to fits of lurid fancy as screenwriters and they deal with dreadfully logical tools like computers and algorithms. So could these NASA mathematicians and their terrifying equations be right? Oh, where is Albert Einstein when you need him?

Not being a scientist, or a mathematician for that matter, I hesitate to answer. But I am a citizen of this planet and I have as much right to pontificate as anyone else including the scientists and mathematicians who played a major role in getting us into this mess. And my thinking goes simply like this. Most of us, regardless of whether we could be considered “Elites” or “Commoners,” have much more than we really need and a standard of living that more than half the world would die for. The food we waste alone would feed the starving of the globe and the junk we struggle to get out from under would give the wretched of the earth a standard of living beyond their imaginations. It’s a question of balance.

In their report, the NASA mathematicians say the world’s inequity must be “greatly reduced” or population “strictly controlled.” The latter is already happening, but what about the former? The answer is surely obvious. We in the affluent part of the world have got to shift our focus from wealth creation to wealth redistribution.

And if we don’t? NASA’s mathematicians say the grim alternative is the end of civilization! Something worth thinking about.

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and a Cranbrook City Councillor, who would like to live to a ripe old age. His opinions are his own.

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