The Armageddon Club: Education for the Future of Humanity

• In Event: The Armageddon Club: Educating for the Future of Humanity — Educating Toward Equitable Futures 1

Abstract

In contemporary usage the word ‘Armageddon’ has come to represent any ‘end of the world’ narrative, in a discourse that has become increasingly secular and scientific. In religious terms Armageddon refers to the time when final judgement is made and the last great battle ensues to banish the unbelievers and set up the Kingdom of God. Today it has lost its exclusive religious meanings to come to represent any major global disaster like extreme climate change or nuclear war that might threaten the survival of the human species. In secular and scientific narratives, ‘end times’ has centered on a discourse about the fate of an ever-accelerating expanding universe cooling as it expands so that eventually it becomes too cold to sustain life. More recently ‘end times’ has centred increasingly the fate of planet Earth facing on ecological collapse, climate warming, species and anthropogenic extinction. Ceballos et al., (2017), for instance, argue ‘The loss of biological diversity is one of the most severe human-caused global environmental problems. Hundreds of species and myriad populations are being driven to extinction every year. From the perspective of geological time, Earth’s richest biota ever is already well into a sixth mass extinction episode’ with irreversible. The authors suggeste that ‘as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone’. Many contemporary scientists, including ecologists, microbiologists, cosmological physicists and climate change scientists warn that humans are unlikely to survive the existential climate-related security risk thirty years into the future. Ray Kurzweil, Google’s ex-chief engineer, suggests that life as we know it will cease by 2045. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2021) in their ‘Summary for Policymakers’ report: ‘It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land’; ‘The scale of recent changes across the climate system as a whole and the present state of many aspects of the climate system are unprecedented’; ‘Human-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe.’ The report assesses the climate response to five illustrative scenarios of anthropogenic drivers of climate change and comments on the likely probability of temperature extremes, heavy precipitation, floods, droughts, extreme storms, and compound events. There are various estimates for the end of humanity and technological civilization, the end of the solar system and the universe. Anthropogenic extinction is seen as a strong probability during this century based on the threat of ecological collapse, climate change, overpopulation, pandemic, biological warfare, nuclear annihilation, AI technology (‘superintelligence’) and geological or cosmological disaster. Increasingly, the future of humanity has attracted a variety of scholars who more pessimistically have emphasized the possibility of biological extinction. Climate change is only one of a possible ‘end times’ scenario and there are many others and a great complexity of interrelationships between them. There are a number of important educational questions: Should schools teach children about ‘the future of humanity’ and ‘end times’, and, if so, what kind of approach should they follow?

Author

• Michael A. Peters, Beijing Normal University