Portents Of The Unthinkable | Countercurrentshttps://countercurrents.org/2022/06/portents-of-the-unthinkable/If the history of the 21st century is ever written it would be reported that, while large parts of the planet were becoming uninhabitable, the extreme rate and scale of global warming, migration of climate zones (>100 km per decade), extent of polar ice melt, sea level rise, ocean warming, acidification and methane release from permafrost threatened to develop into one of the extreme mass extinction events in the geological history of Earth.
As concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases exceeded 500 ppm CO2-equivalents (Figure 1a), rising at a rate an order of magnitude faster than in earlier geological hyper-thermal events, was rising higher than 4oC above pre-industrial temperatures (Figure 1b), threatening to exceed the rise rates of the great mass extinctions.
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But in the core of human conscience is its mythological nature, a mindset springing from the mastery of fire where, for longer than one million years, members of Homo erectus, perched at campfire, watching the flickering flames, developed insights, imagination, a fear of death leading to dreams of omniscience and omnipotence, aspiring for eternal life.
In the Neolithic the fear of death has driven humans to construct pyramids in order to enshrine immortality, undertake human sacrifice and ultimately fight nature to appease the gods, becoming the most barbarous species ever existed. As expressed by Albert Einstein: “The splitting of the atom has changed everything bar man’s way of thinking and thus we drift into unparalleled catastrophes”