New research is warning that the most likely outcome is that human civilization is poised for collapse.
As The Guardian reports, a sweeping new historical survey that analyzes 5,000 years and the collapse of more than 400 societies makes the case that we're in for a rude awakening.
"We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today — and self-termination is most likely," Luke Kemp, research fellow at the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, told the British newspaper.
"I’m pessimistic about the future," he added. "But I’m optimistic about people."
Kemp warned of narcissistic and psychopathic leaders — a powerful but small "oligarchy" working against the interests of the rest of us — who turn a blind eye to existential threats like global warming, nuclear weapons, and AI.
Scientists have long warned that escalating global temperatures caused by human activities could eventually tip us over the edge, leading to food shortages, unbearable heat, and droughts — not to mention the strain and instability that all those problems place on everything else.
To Kent, we can learn from thousands of years of human civilization to get a sense of how things will eventually play out. In his book, he used the term "Goliaths" to refer to kingdoms and empires that dominated others using weaponry and other threatening tactics.
"History is best told as a story of organised crime," he told the Guardian. "It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population."
But these groups don't tend to last and eventually collapse under their own weight due to inequality, the researcher argued, and greed by those in power.
"Then as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiserization of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation, and poor decision making by a small oligarchy," he said. "The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change."
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