Paul Oates sent me two books as gifts over the Christmas period. One was his own book reflecting on his time as a kiap in Morobe including in my village. Another is a book titled Sapiens and tells of the evolution of humans.

According to Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the book Sapiens, the evolution of humans has been the biggest tragedy ever to hit the animal kingdom. We've messed up the ecology of mother earth and continue to do so.

The rate of destruction of earth was hastened when humans developed the cognitive ability and figured out a way to domesticate other animals and plants.

Harari directly links the extinction of certain animals throughout time to the activities of humans. And backs that claim up with archaeological evidence. Terrestrial animals have been the biggest losers but even their oceanic neighbours are now under threat by humans.

He has some sobering news for us. It wouldn't be long before the only animal that is left will be humans and humans. And then what?

For all our ingenuity, arrogance and pomp, we shall eat bricks and mortars and cars and ships and aeroplanes and machines to continue to live and carry on the destruction then.

The doomsday clock is non-existent scientifically according to me but its the belief system of conspiracy theorists and cultic dreamers. Prediction of world events and timing normally went wrong. Some religious fanatics who claim to have the gift of prophecy keep predicting evens that never happens. Of one such example is William Miller and Ellen White's prediction of Second coming of Christ in 1844. Christ never came and the dates were changed. Then Ellen White in her plagiarised books mentioned that instead Christ entered into holy of holies and started his judgement in 1844. This is called investigative judgement. The recent Australian Bushfire is attributed to the punishment from God because Australians never attend church services and their prime-minister is promoting gay marriages. (I heard from a Pentecostal pastor) We always find ways to blame even natural disaster are attributed to the action of God as a punishment or from the devil. President Donald Trump is now a anti Christ enforcing Sunday law in USA or even Pope Francis is the 666. Russian president is also an anti-Christ according to those religious fanatics and conspiracy theorists.
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Philip - As the article says, the Doomsday Clock is a symbol, not a real object. It is there to remind us that we humans can make the world a dangerous place and that we should do all we can to make it less so. It is not a theory or a prediction or a cult - it is simply a warning - KJ

I think that what is new under the sun this time Paul is the scale of all the problems.

That has a lot to do with population, of course, and advanced technologies.

Humans are overwhelming the planet through their demands for food and resources and for the first time we seem to have the power to manipulate nature on a grand scale.

As Simon hints, a lot now seems to hinge on whether Trump is re-elected.

What we do if that happens is anyone's guess. We seem to have run out of places to hide.

Before anyone can even begin to think about solutions, its necessary to work out and agree on what the problem is.

To paraphrase Prof. Jared Diamond who reckons in his books that it's a mixture of opportunity and basic human flaws that combine to provide a natural equilibrium in human populations.

I tend to think it's far more basic than that. In school biology we learnt about the so called 'Ess Bend'. That's the graphic portrayal of any life form that expands while ever there are resources to support and encourage its growth. The classic example is the growth of bacteria in a cow pat and how when one type runs out of food and the population collapses the next type takes over. This continues until the cow pat finally disappears into the surrounding environment. That is unless there is spontaneous combustion caused by the heat of the bacterial action and the cow pat breaks faster down due to fire.

What we are seeing on a global scale is just this same type of the simple process of life on Earth.

What we are also experiencing is the frustration of knowing what is happening but that no one person or leader has the perspicacity to understand, let alone try to effectively manage a way out of the inevitable. This is due to there being a basic inability of most humans to think in an objective manner that doesn't involve a selfish need to preserve what they currently have.

So what's the answer? Well until enough people start feeling unsettled in enough nations that have any control over what they do, there is only an inevitable collapse and the whole process might start again if our species hasn't annihilated itself in the process.

There have been mass extinctions in the past but this is however the first time that sentient beings have existed and that might be able to understand what is taking place. The Four Horseman have traditionally trimmed the over population of any human society. There is no evidence to suggest that this will not happen yet again.

War, (could break out any time given certain current empty headed leaders), Famine (a large percentage already grows hungrier due to diminishing resources e.g. Eastern Africa and the locust plague), Disease (e.g. read currently the new corona-virus) and natural disasters (read climate change).

There is nothing new under the sun except a continual procession of those who won't learn from the mistakes of the past. Hitherto, no one species was able to understand what the basic lessons of life were.

Are we now about to progress or regress?

I have been expressing concern about the general state of the world for some time, probably becoming something of a cracked record in the process.

That said, it is sort of encouraging that the world's scientists seem to have now caught on to the fact that something is seriously amiss with how we collectively are choosing to live our lives and govern ourselves.

We are, to put it bluntly, making a serious mess of ourselves and the planet. We seem to have no collective insight into the dangers to which we will expose ourselves and, much more distressingly, our children and grand children.

I am especially alarmed by the apparent political impotence of those who, like me, think that the current dominant neo-liberal economic model lies at the heart of the problem.

The so-called progressives have utterly failed to either develop or articulate a sensible, reasonably coherent critique of neo-liberalism let alone a plausible alternative.

The left (loosely defined) tend to rabbit on about a grab bag of largely unrelated issues ranging from LGBTI rights through to bat shit crazy anarchist ideas that bear no relation to reality at all.

They are then bewildered and enraged when the non-woke masses reject them at the ballot box in favour of the superficially plausible but erroneous blandishments of conservative or right wing politicians like Donald Trump or Recep Erdogan or Boris Johnson or even Scott Morrison.

Those who believe that neo-liberal capitalism represents ultimate perfection and must lead us all to some utopian future are seriously and dangerously deluded.

The evidence of its flaws and contradictions is mounting by the day yet, as they say, there are none so blind as will not see.

To some at least, authoritarian capitalism as practiced by China looks like a plausible alternative but it too will falter or fail in due course.

For the record, I am not a socialist, let alone a communist. My views have been formed by a fairly cold blooded assessment of the evidence before me, not as a consequence of viewing the world through a particular ideological lens.

History tells those who pay attention that the incredibly efficient but wasteful and destructive version of capitalism that is now ascendant will eventually extract a huge toll in social, economic and environmental terms.

It is a runaway train, no longer under the control of the authorities, who now freely admit that they do not understand what is going on and certainly seem unable or unwilling to do anything to ameliorate its worst effects.

Mega-corporations like Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon, BHP Billiton and so forth are now vastly wealthier and more influential than most of the world's nation states.

They are new versions of the British East India Company and its Dutch, German and French equivalents of the European Imperial era and arguably more powerful.

Even the president of the United States was reduced to a mere also-ran at the recent Davos summit, where the new great lords of the land held court to discuss the state of the world over which they exercise such a powerful influence.

This is not mere hyperbole on my part: it is very, very real and deeply alarming that we have a tiny billionaire class that effectively controls at least half of the entire world's wealth.

Not even during the medieval era was there such a gross disparity in wealth between the aristocracy and peasantry.

Karl Marx was largely right in his analysis of the deep flaws in the laissez faire capitalism of the 19th century, but almost entirely wrong in his prescriptions for change. Communism was a disaster of the first magnitude and must never be repeated.

That said, we collectively need to find a new version of capitalism that ameliorates if not eradicates its worst effects, especially the grotesque maldistribution of wealth and incredible amount of wasteful consumption it needs to flourish.

If we cannot do this, then the Doomsday clock will, as Phil rightly says, move relentlessly towards midnight and we will collectively be obliged to endure the terrible consequences of our folly in persisting with a fatally flawed neo-liberal economic system.