Apocalypse 2058 (Michael Brooks)
(May 17th, 2000) The millennium bug didn’t finish us off, but a bigger bang is yet to come, says Michael Brooks
In 2058, we will blast-off to colonise Mars. Or we may enter symbiosis with machines — or find a trick that enables us to tame previously uninhabitable regions of the earth. But something extraordinary is going to happen 58 years from now. How do we know? It’s written in the Dow Jones Index.
Didier Sornette, a geophysicist who splits his time between the universities of California, Los Angeles and Nice, specialises in analysing the complex signals that warn of earthquakes or impending crashes in financial markets.
But he recently took a casual look at the variations of the Dow Jones Index, a measure of the prosperity of the world’s most profitable companies. From an extrapolation of its past patterns, Sornette came up with a graph showing that the index’s value would climb — with some small fluctuations — into the future. His specific predictions of its value, he noted happily, agree with those of US Federal Reserve economists and senior market analysts.
But according to his model, the index’s value will abruptly explode in 2058: for no apparent reason the graph suddenly shoots off the scale.
Surprised, Sornette had a look at another fluctuating signal: world population statistics. This too, he found, had a shape signalling an abrupt population explosion at a specific point in the future: 2058, to be precise. Sornette’s analysis was based on more than 100 years of the Dow Jones Index, and 2,000 years of available world population data, yet both sets of figures forecasted a singularity for the same year. “That,” he says, “was scary.”
In 2058, Sornette says, these two factors will hit a massive acceleration in their rate of growth that will take them to a “spontaneous singularity”. This is a point where the graphs can’t get any steeper. Singularities foreshadow a critical point of fundamental and abrupt disruption to the status quo. Black holes in space are one example. Others include stock market crashes, earthquakes, and catastrophic ruptures in engineering structures.
According to cosmologists, a singularity kicked our universe into existence.
With the world’s population and economy hitting a critical point at the same time, the survival of humanity will depend on developing a new way of living on (or maybe off) the earth, Sornette says.
After all, he points out, the two signals are inextricably linked. World population growth must somehow be related to the ability to provide food and habitable conditions for that population. And that requires innovation.
Each of mankind’s innovations — fire, tools, agriculture, fossil fuels, vaccines, pesticides and antibiotics — has increased the number of people that can exist on the planet. The technology-led internet is the latest revolution, Sornette says, following the industrial and biotechnological revolutions. But he points out that biotech had hardly begun to fulfil its potential before the internet was born: innovation is accelerating out of control. And that will lead to the singularity.
Hence the search for a “different way” — planetary colonisation, or maybe the development of human-machines? Biologists have even proposed to Sornette that it could be a fundamental mutation in the human genes. “These things have all been suggested by scientists, philosophers and writers; what’s fascinating is that we can see it coming in the data,” Sornette says.
There are a couple of caveats about the date. The Dow Jones Index is not an ideal measure of innovation, although Sornette believes it is still the best available indication.
Also, he adds, it’s only numbers. “Maths is just a language to formalise what we see around us.” In reality, things don’t always turn out as sharply as the figures suggest. So blast-off for Mars may not come in precisely 2058; it could come sooner or much later. But whatever the timing, Sornette says, mankind is definitely heading towards some kind of new era.
Pessimists will think of it as a catastrophic meltdown, where innovation rates can’t sustain the population explosion. Optimists believe some as yet unknown revolution will ease our way. But the optimists have a problem: any further innovation simply accelerates doomsday’s arrival.
It’s probably best not to get too worked up, though. With one thing and another, the end has been nigh for a very long time now.
