I'm thinking about history
Climate change is scary and the consequences are real but those effects are in the way of "our descendants will have to live in the world this creates."
The chances that climate change will cause human extinction are near negligible and it's disheartening to see people believing that humanity will not survive another hundred years on this planet.
I'm begging y'all to remember that similarly apocalyptic events have happened within written human history.
The Colombian exchange was the fucking apocalypse. NINETY PERCENT of the population of TWO CONTINENTS DIED. Have y'all read the stuff that early Spanish accounts of the Americas described? These guys were boggled out of their minds by the fantastically wealthy cities they visited all over the place. They and those that came after did their best to destroy it all for literally 500 years. And yet Native American people are still hanging onto their cultures and still trying to fight back because that's what you gotta do.
To go back a little farther: the city of Merv. Should need no introduction. Largest city on the planet. "Merv the Great." "Mother of the World." Buildings visible from a day's journey away. Ten gigantic libraries. Right? No??
Merv was, in the 12th and 13th centuries, the largest city in the world, with at least half a million, probably a million people. It was the epicenter of learning and culture for the whole Islamic world. So why is this potentially your first time hearing about it?
Because in 1221, the Mongols sacked it.
And they killed everyone.
I read some contemporary sources on this in class and these people didn't just think the world was ending, their world WAS ending. Think about how much 9/11 shook Americans to their cores. Now imagine if one morning you hear on the news that literal Aliens From Outer Space have invaded New York City and razed it to the ground, and practically everyone in the city is dead. Every building and iconic monument is rubble. Every person that lived there is dead.
Also imagine that no photographs exist of what New York City looked like. No photographs exist of the people that lived there. Furthermore, many of the world's most prominent scientists and poets lived there.
Are you imagining it? Good. Now imagine that some of the world's greatest libraries are also there, and the printing press doesn't exist, so books have to be copied by hand.
Yeah. And you might be learning for the first time that this even happened.
Let's go to the 17th century. Do you remember anything about the Thirty Years War? Probably not. It's a boring footnote in history.
It was also one of the deadliest conflicts in European history, with civilian deaths estimated to be as high as 6.5 million. Disease and famine wiped out some areas of (what would be) Germany so completely that more than 65% of the population died. Soldiers terrorized the civilian populations. People were straight up cannibalizing each other all over the place. If you were fifteen years old in 1618, you would be forty-five by the end of the war.
Same deal. People 100% thought the apocalypse was happening. The need to make sense of it all triggered, among other things, a series of witch trials with very high death tolls.
Back to impending climate crisis: If we do nothing, we're looking at the displacement of very large quantities of people, natural disasters, many extinct species, and ultimately a lot of death, but we are not literally all going to die. AND WE'RE NOT GOING TO DO NOTHING. We are going to have descendants that will live in the world after we are gone. If not biological descendants, then spiritual heirs to the world we create.
By what mechanism is every individual person on Earth going to be wiped out? Do y'all know how hard it would be to do that?
"This is the end of the world" is something humans go back to over and over again throughout history. Don't let the apocalyptic thinking paralyze you.
