I admit to being a "doomnik" since I was raised, like many others, to expect doomsday as a Baby Boomer who heard Civil Defense air raid sirens tested regularly as a child and "duck and cover" was naively practiced as if one could survive such an attack. My grandfather even began building a bomb shelter (never finished) in the canyon behind his home during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I have viewed numerous theatrical and literary doomsday scenarios with an almost fanatical interest all my life. My favorite dramatic version of it is The Road. I also regularly view The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists articles and their Doomsday Clock keeps a steady climb closer to midnight. There are also many other scientific and scholarly writings on the subject which get my attention. And my favorite title of such a work is, Thinking About The Unthinkable by Herman Kahn. I have even written my own doomsday yarn in an e-book called, Terminal Boredom: A New Dadapocalyptic Panic Story. Well this unthinkable future is very much a growing part of all our lives even if we choose to consciously avoid such thoughts as too disturbing. But subconsciously it is still a major reason for this Age of Anxiety we live in. And now the confluence of geo-political conflict, ecological decline, runaway AI technology or man-made pathogens draws us closer to the abyss. So there's not just one doomsday scenario to be alarmed about. While it does seem as though we are on course for some extinction level event(s), there might be a way to avoid it if we humans can find a way to literally change our minds away from our primitive DNA wiring. We ought to seek to redesign our bellicose genetic heritage based on brute survival of the fittest to rapidly self-evolve to a unified race based on altruism and cooperation. I'm aware that this seems too fanciful or optimistic but humans appear to be at the crossroad between utopia or oblivion. And unless we change fast, it will be the latter.
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