Everyone loves a good disaster. As Niall Ferguson writes in this sparkling, provocative and entertaining book, “the end of the world… has been a remarkably recurrent feature of recorded history.” Religions teach us that we are all doomed. For Jews, Christians and Muslims, the end of times will be upon us all—and woe betide us if we are not ready to meet our maker. Other faiths, like Buddhism and Hinduism, offer a little more hope, promising that although we are all doomed, we’ll go back to the beginning and start again. And then there are secular belief systems like Marxism, says Ferguson, that offer their own prophecies and visions of apocalyptic fulfilment. As the wheels of the Russian Revolution began to turn, some automatically likened Lenin to the Antichrist: ideas about the end of the world are ubiquitous.
Expectations of disaster, however, are more based on fears than on realities. It depends how one conceptualises time. It is true that from a geological and cosmological perspective we are running out of time on Earth. The good news, though, is that the planet has around a billion years or so to run. Whether humans will be around to see the end is another matter for, as Ferguson reminds us, in the grand scheme of things our species has not been around for very long.