Opinion | A blip on our way to a better 21st century or the end of the road for humanity?

Is humanity entering a down cycle of calamity? Some prominent futurists think so. Certainly the news headlines are not encouraging.

The Middle East is going up in flames. The European continent is caught in the most consequential military conflict since the end of World War II.

The Doomsday Clock, set up during the height of the Cold War to gauge the danger of nuclear war, has never been so close to midnight. The COP29 climate summit, billed by some as our last chance to save the planet, has been a big disappointment.

Most of the G7 economically advanced democracies are mired in economic troubles and political instability. South Korea, a close ally, is reeling from the worst political crisis since the end of the country’s dictatorship in the 1980s.

The United States, meanwhile, is torn by extreme political divisions and domestic terrorism. All the while in the background is the power struggle between the two superpowers. Their Cold War 2.0 could well turn into a hot war, most likely over Taiwan.

In times like this, alarmist futurism has come in fashion. The more credible are not Nostradamus-wannabes, or historians and philosophers who claim to discern cyclical patterns in the long spans of human history. Rather, a new breed of futurists, applying the physical sciences and working with computer modelling, try to crunch massive amounts of data to try to predict where not only this or that country but the whole human society may be heading in the coming years and decades. Their prognoses are not good.