Knowledge arks – SEVERAL THREATS LOOM OVER OUR KNOWLEDGE (3/9)

SUMMARY:

• There are at least three major categories of threats to established knowledge: natural threats, political threats, and industrial threats.
• All forms of knowledge are vulnerable to the passage of time; therefore, duplication is the best way to preserve our knowledge for as long as possible.
• Political powers are often capable of resorting to censorship or destruction to eliminate certain knowledge, while the rise of authoritarian abuses and conflicts around the world makes this possibility increasingly likely.
• The preservation of knowledge sometimes involves information that may be perceived as dangerous to those in power, particularly if it conflicts with official narratives or serves as a reminder of tragic events in human history.
• Many civilizations have already vanished abruptly, leaving few traces; our own industrial civilization could disappear in the same way without warning.
• Our industrial civilization faces unprecedented threats, such as runaway climate change, the overexploitation of resources, and certain alarming technological developments.
• A new industrial civilization with advanced science will have great difficulty emerging, depending on how we respond to the threats facing our own civilization and our knowledge.

Our knowledge is vulnerable to natural hazards

Knowledge is, as we have seen, not only a heritage, but also a resource for our contemporary civilizations. All kinds of obstacles have existed and still exist that can hinder the advancement of knowledge, such as dogmatism, misinformation, cognitive biases, or even the concept of common sense. These thought processes have mainly hindered the development of science, but once knowledge is “established,” or even simply formulated, its long-term preservation is not entirely guaranteed. Risks related to human behavior are still present, and by extension, risks related to politics or risks related to the very functioning of society. These risks can take various forms, such as conflicts, industrial disasters, censorship, looting, neglect of heritage, etc. Above all these dangers looms also the risk of the unintentional destruction of our body of knowledge, whether sudden (natural or technological disasters, etc.) or gradual (wear and tear, corrosion, obsolescence etc.). In summary, there are all kinds of risks that may be reasons to start preparing a proper epistemic memory now. Those risks can be classified into three main categories: natural risks, political risks, and industrial risks, which we will discuss in that order.

Firstly, it should be remembered that knowledge can be preserved by being “crystallized” in physical media, whether tangible evidence or the publications we mentioned earlier. Except, of course, that these media are vulnerable to the ravages of time and the effects of entropy. Mechanical wear, corrosion, demagnetization, and many natural phenomena can render all our electronic media irreversibly inoperable over time. Paper can be degraded by moisture, exposure to light, fungi, and other biological species. Ink can sometimes fade even before the paper degrades. Even stone can suffer the effects of entropy through erosion, although the oldest written records ever found by archaeologists are most often made of granite, marble, or clay. Gold, which is reputed to be stainless, does indeed suffer the effects of corrosion, but only at a much slower rate than other metals. Ultimately, therefore, copying is the only guarantee of long-term preservation of knowledge. Negligence cannot be an option if we want to preserve our knowledge for as long as possible, particularly if it is non-reproducible. Many archives have already disappeared simply due to a lack of resources or interest in preservation, whether it be lost films, obsolete software, or abandoned libraries.

But worse still, our knowledge is not only threatened by entropy, it is also threatened by other phenomena that are much more sudden, albeit rarer. Fires, earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes—all these disasters can destroy entire cities and historic buildings in a matter of moments, and of course, they can wipe out our most precious places of memory: libraries, museums, laboratories, archives, and other heritage institution. In the worst-case scenario, and although this is more unlikely, certain totally unpredictable disasters could even have less localized effects and lead to the total loss of our civilization (super volcano eruption, particularly virulent pandemic, asteroid strike, etc.). If our knowledge of Greek literature is so fragmented today, it is because much of what the Greeks wrote did not survive the multiple fires that occurred in libraries, notably those of Pergamon and Alexandria, renowned for having attempted to centralize as much knowledge as possible at that time. Of course, other human causes have sometimes contributed to such disasters (war, arson, looting, etc.), but fire is a capricious element that quickly escapes human control, and many library fires, even if they did not have a completely natural origin, often spread without any control of those who started them. The key point to remember is that phenomena of this kind, whether fully natural or not, are very often accidental and therefore unpredictable. For example, no one could have imagined a few years ago that Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris would catch fire. Further back in time, no one could have predicted the catastrophic flooding of the Arno River in Florence (1966), which resulted in the loss of several thousand, if not millions, of ancient and unique books. This latter event even led to improvement in risk prevention in libraries, museums, and other archives. The fact that a disaster can strike at almost any time should alert us to the vulnerability of our knowledge.

If less than 1% of the writings of the ancient Greeks have survived to this day, it is not unreasonable to think that in a few millennia, our descendants may only have access to 1% of written materials produced by our modern industrial civilization. We might as well ensure that this 1% is as representative as possible of our knowledge, and ensure that the remaining 99% consists only of duplicates or reproducible knowledge whose loss is not irreversible. Our archives would benefit from existing in multiple copies, storing the same information on a variety of media, and being distributed evenly across the planet (or beyond?), if possible, in locations that are less likely to be affected by natural disasters (far from dry and hot climates, away from seismic faults, coasts, flood zones, and traditional storm paths). As for architectural heritage, which is immovable and difficult to duplicate, it can be “preserved” in a way by storing a very precise description of the sites, accompanied by representations of the monuments that are as accurate as possible (3D models, photographs, maps, etc.). Many monuments now exist only in this way, through the testimonies of their contemporaries, fortunately allowing for a form of preservation, even if incomplete: the Colossus of Rhodes was destroyed by an earthquake, but knowledge of this monument has nevertheless come down to us thanks to the writings of the Ancients, who considered it a world wonder, and numerous attempts at reconstruction have been made as a result.

Knowledge can be silenced by those in power

It is not only nature that could conspire against our knowledge; we must also not underestimate the fact that man is a wolf to man, that he can put obstacles in his own way when he has the opportunity. Dogmatism, the biggest adversary of rational knowledge, is an important factor in the evolution of science, since it can not only lead to censorship and therefore oblivion, but also nip new knowledge in the bud. The scientific community has sometimes slipped through the net, but this has not always been possible. If this dogmatism is supported by political power, research can be considerably hampered (budget restrictions, personnel layoffs, misinformation, etc.), while certain well-established knowledge (or at least promising hypotheses) can be rendered inaccessible overnight. For a government in power, there are several more or less radical methods for eradicating knowledge:

The first method is exclusive appropriation by an elite. For example, a political power may prevent the dissemination of knowledge to a fairly wide audience, make access to scientific publications very expensive, or simply refuse to invest in education. In this type of situation, some people may have access to all kinds of knowledge, including sometimes taboo knowledge, but only a handful of people. Some areas of knowledge thus become more difficult to advance or challenge, due to a lack of people to study them, which can lead to stagnation. There are a few rare legitimate situations where knowledge cannot be easily accessed, such as anything related to sensitive technologies (nuclear, defense, space, etc.) or people’s private lives (medical confidentiality, personal digital data, etc.). And even then, these are situations in which there is relatively little risk of the knowledge in question disappearing in the blink of an eye due to the resources invested. Because this is the heart of the problem when it comes to appropriation: the risk of knowledge disappearing is all the greater when access to it is limited. All over history, the reasons for concealing knowledge can often be considered questionable: preventing the poorest from learning crucial social facts to prevent rebellious activity, silencing political opposition, or promotion of an official religion or official pseudo-science. For example, consider the situation of black people in the southern United States (before the 1960s) or in South Africa (before the 1990s), who were denied access to certain libraries museums reserved for a Caucasian elite. The level of education was also much lower among part of the American and South African populations, while the scientific community in these countries deprived itself of an important human resource.

The second method is censorship. This is a step more dangerous than the first, because in the case of selective appropriation by an elite, knowledge is still there and can theoretically still be made accessible again after a major social change. But with censorship, on the contrary, the specter of irreversible loss of knowledge looms large. Censorship is not only about preventing the slightest contradiction, debate, or argument; it is also a form of destruction of existing knowledge. In the best-case scenario, when a work is censored, the original work is stored away in an archive that is closed to the public (which brings us back to the first method). In the worst-case scenario, a censored work can only exist in its altered form, and it will no longer be possible to reconstruct the original work. For instance, there is archaeological evidence that Egyptian pharaohs sometimes ordered the destruction of certain engravings in bas-reliefs recounting the exploits of their -rival- predecessors, in order to replace them with their own propaganda. Whether the censored work is artistic, scientific, or other, censorship can cause an irreversible loss of information for future generations, and even when the original work still exists, it may only exist in a small number of copies, which significantly reduces its potential longevity.

The third method, even more violent than the second, is outright suppression. It is no longer a question of making information inaccessible or partial, but of destroying it entirely, along with everything that could be valuable and unique about it. These include autodafés, large-scale deliberate burning of texts by those in power, with the aim of “protecting” a population from ideas perceived as dangerous. One can think of the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century, who ordered the destruction of all Mesoamerican writings (Mayan, Aztec, etc.) so that the Bible would become all the more indispensable to Native Americans, who had become subjects of the Spanish crown and converted to Catholicism. As a result, only four Aztec codices have survived to this day, giving us only a very limited glimpse of the extent of this civilization’s ideas; society and technique. One can naturally also think of the fascist regimes of the 20th century, which ordered to burn books whenever they were written by Jews, pacifists, or socialists (whether proven or not). Of course, equivalent phenomenon can also exist in other media, including digital media.

The motivations behind these attacks on knowledge are very varied. Of course, the most common reason is often a conflict between new scientific discoveries on the one hand and the dominant ideology on the other: the Church’s condemnation of Galileo’s works (heliocentrism versus geocentrism), the Soviet Union’s ban on natural selection during the Stalinist period (“bourgeois” sciences versus “proletarian” sciences), rejection of the idea of global warming (climatology versus climate skepticism), restrictions on sociology in authoritarian regimes, etc. Added to this are other motivations such as budgetary restrictions, dependence on industrial espionage, or even indifference or contempt on the part of public authorities towards certain sciences. Not to mention cases where the destruction of our heritage is not even intentional, but simply the result of collateral destruction caused by war between several belligerents (bombing, looting, fires, etc.).

Authoritarian drifts are more likely than ever

Until recently, Western civilization experienced a period of relative calm since the end of World War II: all Western countries were democracies, there has been few wars in 80 years, armed revolutions were extremely rare, and ruling political parties would change constantly over the years. However, we should not believe that individual freedoms, including everyone’s right to access knowledge and culture, are guaranteed simply because our Western democratic regimes are stable and relatively respectful of human rights. Indeed, phenomena that could lead to a rise in authoritarianism in otherwise stable democracies are always possible in the relatively short term: a proliferation of crises, polarization of political life, isolationism, nationalism, demagoguery, an increasingly blurred separation of powers (i.e., executive, legislative, judicial, and even media), the spread of fake news, monopolies of the mainstream media, vertical hierarchy of political parties, warmongering, dissemination of conspiracy theories and pseudo-scientific theories (alternative medicine, flat Earth, creationism, climate skepticism, etc.). This combination of factors is entirely capable of transforming democratic regimes into authoritarian ones, and doing so quickly enough for those in power to endanger the scientific community and established knowledge, but slowly enough for the general public not to immediately perceive the danger and even to become accustomed to the situation. There are numerous historical examples of transitions from democracy to authoritarian rule (or transitions from intermediate regimes with democratic potential to authoritarian rule) (contemporary Hungary, post-Soviet Russia, the Weimar Republic, the Second French Republic, etc.), and such phenomena could become more common in the future if sufficient precautions are not taken now (independence of the supreme court or equivalent institutions, protection of whistleblowers, diversification of information sources, education in critical thinking, duty to remember, guarantees of free elections, more regular referendums, and participation of the people in major political decisions, etc.) Protecting our knowledge from censorship and large-scale destruction is one of the most important reasons in protecting democracy, as for other reasons (oppression, murder, corruption, obstruction to culture, conformism, etc.) And epistemic memory is the best guarantee of the survival of our knowledge in the event of failure.

Of course, we have discussed the case of Western democracies, since this book was written in one of them, but many countries on Earth are already authoritarian regimes, sometimes even totalitarian (North Korea, China) or theocratic (Iran, Saudi Arabia), where censorship is omnipresent and where science only progresses in areas where the benefits for the nation are obvious (nuclear physics, computer science, surgery, AI, chemistry, etc.). For example, the Chinese government practices heavy censorship, to the extent that no alternative thinking that contradicts the official state ideology (market socialism) is possible, nor, more broadly, any alternative view of the country and its government. Thus, during the 2020 coronavirus epidemic, the Chinese government initially decided to silence scientists who were beginning to warn of the risk of an epidemic. The practice of sociology and political philosophy is obviously complicated, as their conclusions can sometimes clash with the ideas of the Chinese regime. Chinese internet users are unable to search for all possible and imaginable information on the events of Tiananmen in 1989 or on the situation of the Uyghurs and Tibetans in the 21st century. Similarly, in theocracies such as Iran, even though it is not an official ideology but a religion that dominates political life, censorship works in the same way, and scientists and philosophers face the same difficulties in thinking about the world in peace, without offending Koranic precepts that are perceived as immutable (for example, positions such as natural selection or the natural and non-pathological nature of homosexuality are difficult to defend in the face of religious dogmas that are sacred and therefore, by definition, impossible to question). As we can see, authoritarianism can hinder the development of knowledge, but it does so even more when it is accompanied by a single way of thinking: political agenda (extremism and fundamentalism), sacred texts (the Bible, the Vedas, the Koran, etc.), official ideology (communism, nationalism, capitalism, fascism, etc.), or even pseudo-scientific theories endorsed by the state. In the latter case, one might think of Nazi Germany, where history, genetics, and linguistics were stripped of their scientific elements and used to fuel and justify the Nazis’ nationalist and revisionist theories: human race theory, the superiority of Germanic peoples, the need for living space, etc.

To all this must be added another major political risk, which is correlated with that of authoritarianism: conflict. Authoritarianism has the disadvantage of leading to instability, both internal and external. Internal because in authoritarian regimes, there is always a significant risk of coups and violent revolutions, especially if the ruling power is incompetent and fails to win the favor of an elite (economic, military, or religious) that is essential to the stability of the country. Externally, because authoritarian regimes are more bellicose than democratic regimes and tend to favor national priorities, even if it means jeopardizing international treaties and appropriating their neighbors’ resources. The risk of war, whether internal or external, can obviously further contribute to the irreversible loss of knowledge through the more or less unintentional destruction of heritage during military campaigns or looting, in addition to causing the flight or death of intellectuals who could have contributed to scientific research. There is no shortage of examples of wars throughout history that have resulted in the destruction of heritage that could have advanced fields such as archaeology or ethnology (the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Syrian Civil War, the Chinese Civil War, etc.).In extreme cases, countries can shoot themselves in the foot by committing genocide, annihilating a large proportion of their intellectuals (the Cambodian genocide for instance was specifically directed at the most educated at the time).

Given the many threats posed by authoritarian regimes to science, it is clear that we do not need to wait for the end of the world for our knowledge to be seriously threatened. Even if our civilization survives for several centuries, despite a lot of existential threats, there is no guarantee that our descendants will continue to have access to everything we know today if unscrupulous political powers come to power in the meantime. During the 2010s and 2020s, many whistleblowers have noted that threats of authoritarian abuses are multiplying in democratic or hybrid regimes around the world. As a result, we are already seeing the scientific community coming under increasing attack in the media and on social networks (while fake news spreads), massive disinvestment in certain promising fields of science (medicine, climatology, gender studies, etc.), and that political leaders increasingly have the means to “cancel” scientific research, sometimes in favor of new dogmas (conspiracy theories, ultra-nationalism, pseudo-therapies, etc.). Added to this is the prospect of a Third World War, which has never been more relevant than in the 21st century, with the proliferation of conflicts (Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, etc.) and tensions between rival powers (China, the United States, Russia, the European Union, India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran, etc.). The need to create backups for our knowledge (and by extension, the creations and ideas of our contemporary civilization) thus becomes more and more pressing as the global political climate deteriorates. It is no longer simply a matter of protecting our heritage from occasional disasters.

Preserving knowledge also means preserving the mistakes of the past

As we have seen, our knowledge can be a source of considerable power, particularly when it is exclusively reserved for the most powerful people in the world, just as it can be perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a spanner in the works of the well-oiled machinery of power. Certain types of knowledge can challenge the established order when they relate to the functioning of an economy, a society, or even nature. It often happens that a policy has undesirable or unforeseen effects for those who implemented it, sometimes even when warnings were issued by well-trained specialists. Knowledge also often contradicts certain narratives staunchly defended by those in power, whether they be national narratives, founding stories, myths, or legends. If these beliefs are sacred or official, they are difficult to knock off their pedestal, and the scientific community has often paid the price in the past.

But the great mistakes of human history are not just epistemic errors or conflicts between rationality and ideology. History is also full of moments when humanity has committed the worst possible tragedies, regardless of the ideologies in place. These tragedies take various forms: wars, genocides, species extinctions, climate change, torture, exploitation, and slavery, among others. These events tend to occur regularly all over the globe, and while they are often motivated by ignorance or ideology, the core problem is not so much that these events were committed in the name of some form of irrationality, but rather that the consequences of these events have been traumatic for humans. These events are so traumatic that knowledge of these events is considered crucial to prevent the world from repeating the same tragedies over and over again. This importance given to specific knowledge of the great mistakes of human history is what we call the duty to remember. If properly observed, this duty makes it possible to anticipate a potential new atrocity and thus prevent it from happening. However, such events often do not suit those who are responsible for them, and constitute considerable challenges in official narratives: national histories punctuated by mass murders in the country concerned, economic growth driven by the exploitation of workers and the environment, massacres perpetrated in the name of one or more deities. For this reason, this duty to remember is as much a necessity as it is a danger: there are many institutions that want to prevent certain important knowledge from being disseminated. The Soviet Union went to great lengths to hide the existence of the great famines of the 1930s (Holodomor) from the world, multinational corporations rely on lobbies to muffle their abuses, while accusations of blasphemy and the concept of holy war are used to counter those who denounce atrocities committed in the name of religion.

Certain powers therefore have every interest in suppressing the memory of certain major historical events. Moreover, the duty to remember does not only involve disseminating knowledge about tragic events, but also disseminating explanatory theories that enable us to identify their root causes, whether it be climate models for predicting climate change or the theory of the banality of evil for modeling the rise of totalitarianism. The world of research in general can therefore also be put at risk. Certain types of knowledge are therefore valuable for the development of humanity, and not only because they are useful or because they constitute a heritage in themselves. The entire body of scientific knowledge, complemented by philosophy, is probably an indirect remedy for some of the great atrocities committed by civilizations, and forgetting it could have dire consequences. Epistemic memory is therefore also a means of helping humanity move forward.

A civilizational collapse would mean the end of our science

We first focused on the natural risks (disasters, the passage of time, etc.) that threaten the body of established knowledge, before emphasizing the political risks that could lead to the same outcome. However, there is a separate category of risks that also deserve our attention: industrial risks, i.e., risks that threaten the integrity of our contemporary industrial civilizations. These risks not only have the potential to lead to the end of industrial civilization, but also, indirectly, to the global destruction of the intellectual heritage accumulated to date. Of course, civilization does not need to disappear completely for our heritage to be in danger. We have clearly identified that natural and political risks alone are already sufficiently worrying to justify the need for an epistemic memory. Except that, on the one hand, these natural and political risks have been multiplying in recent decades due to multiple factors that influence the decline of our civilizations (global warming, resource scarcity, technological runaway, demographic crisis, the race for weapons of mass destruction, etc.). And above all, on the other hand, the collapse of modern society is not a risk to be taken lightly, given that many civilizations have already disappeared abruptly in the past.

Much of the knowledge of the ancient Greeks was already destroyed by the Roman conquests and then the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Few examples of Mesoamerican texts remain following the Spanish conquests. But we could also have mentioned the Indus civilization, the society of Easter Island, the Nazca’s, Great Zimbabwe, Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, etc. Not to mention the many nations that did not disappear, but saw radically different periods follow one another, sometimes interspersed with phenomena of massive de-urbanization (Burma, Cambodia, the Mayan Peninsula, etc.). During these phases of decline, the knowledge acquired by these civilizations fades with time, due to the lack of archival maintenance and the disappearance of skilled labor, which was responsible for keeping knowledge alive. All that remains are the few selected media that have been copied thousands of times over generations (think of the copyist monks who preserved part of ancient literature) or some “indestructible” media (bas-reliefs, steles, epitaphs, etc.), which are veritable time capsules of these dead civilizations.

The circumstances surrounding decline are often poorly understood and/or complex, which should remind us that the disappearance of our own modern society is completely unpredictable. There is no need to detail all the possible scenarios for collapse, but we can dwell a little on those that are specific to our contemporary society. The latter is indeed an industrial civilization, a feature unprecedented in history, which also entails risks unprecedented. While natural hazards (droughts, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc.) and geopolitical events (conquests, ethnic cleansing, colonization, looting, etc.) have been the main drivers of the rise and fall of civilizations until now, our civilization is now facing new challenges due to the proliferation of industries, massive urbanization, and increasingly powerful technologies (artificial intelligence, air transport, agricultural machinery, etc.), with all that this implies in terms of energy and material consumption, particle emissions, urban sprawl, and radioactivity. Since these risks are recent, it is difficult to quantify with a high degree of accuracy when our civilization will come to an end. And even if our civilization survives the challenges it faces, it is also impossible to predict what the negative consequences of this survival will be. This makes it all the more urgent to create a backup for our knowledge.

Of course, the collapse of our contemporary society would have disastrous consequences for human beings as a species. Not even mentioning possible extinction, the resulting death and suffering would be incalculable. But the epistemic and cultural consequences are also very worrying: most of our knowledge is stored in information media that cannot be read without specific tools (films, computer memory, discs, etc.) and that have a limited lifespan if the conditions for preservation are no longer met (temperature, humidity, isolation from the outside world, fire protection measures, etc.). In the event of industrial collapse, it is clear that the direct and indirect effects of this collapse will destroy a large part of our heritage if nothing is done to prevent that from happening. This also means that future generations will have to start all over again and relearn everything rediscover everything. Worse still, we established much earlier that the loss of certain knowledge would be irreversible, particularly that linked to archaeological evidence, to extinct life forms or non-reproducible works. The knowledge of future generations, particularly that relating to the history of Earth and humankind, could thus be much more limited. If we add to this the fact that our civilization will already have exploited a large part of the most accessible energy and mineral resources, the emergence of a potential second industrial civilization after ours would be all the more unlikely, and it would then be more difficult for our descendants to once again reach the level of technological development necessary for certain scientific discoveries (space probes, computer simulations, particle colliders, radars, etc.). With the loss of important archives on extinct species, past civilizations, previous celestial observations, climate and meteorological measurements, and languages and customs recorded on Earth, future generations will have much more difficulties to rediscover certain ideas with profound implications, to re-achieve great medical feats, and to definitively emerge from the age of superstition and obscurantism. It would be a shame if we were the only ones to benefit from the knowledge we might have created, given that we are just a tiny fraction of humanity, living in a very special and limited period of prosperity.

There are varied factors contributing to collapse

While it is difficult to predict the exact circumstances under which our civilization could disappear, we are still able to identify certain threats to it. These threats, most of which result from industrialization, are as follows:

First over-exploitation of resources: productivism is the main driving force behind industrial civilization to this day. The more industrialized a society is, the more resources it consumes, whatever their nature. These resources are also increasingly varied: they include not only resources that are vital to human beings (water and food), but also energy resources (oil, gas, coal, uranium, etc.) and raw materials (metals, salt, sand, chalk, building stone, etc.), whose importance has grown considerably over the last three centuries, even though they are not, in absolute terms, necessary for individual survival. The problem is that most of the resources we consume today are fossil fuels, which means they exist in limited quantities on Earth, while our consumption continues to grow due to economic development in emerging countries on one side, and economic growth policies in already rich countries on the other side. All this combined with the development of domestic markets, advertising and, more simply, the current economic model, which is based more on the continuous accumulation of wealth than on the production of what is strictly necessary. Therefore, the possibility that we will run out of exploitable resources is becoming increasingly serious, especially since alternatives are not always possible depending on the situation: while renewable energies could replace fossil fuels (albeit with a very significant investment upstream of energy production peaks), there are not always alternatives for metallurgical resources, for example (How can concrete be produced without sand? How can electrical conductors be made without metals? How can heat be made without coal or wood? etc.). Sometimes, even renewable resources are threatened if production is too high in relation to the rate at which these resources are renewed: this is the case for forests or fishery resources for instance, both are theoretically renewable but in practice are also threatened). In addition, the unequal distribution of resources across the planet could be a source of new conflicts (hydraulic dams at river sources, oil-producing countries arousing nation’s envy, deforestation threatening indigenous societies, etc.). Our civilization could very well be the first and last to have ever achieved such a high level of technology using cheap but scarce resources.

*The other major existential risk facing our industrial society is, of course, global warming. For several decades, the scientific community has observed that average temperatures are rising worldwide due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases (particularly CO2 and methane). There are many sources of these gases (heavy industry, electricity production, transportation, construction materials, deforestation, intensive livestock farming, etc.), and the extent of the current warming will depend considerably on the responses taken to counter (or not) greenhouse gas emissions: energy efficiency, frugal lifestyles, technological innovations, economic sovereignty, degrowth, etc. The extent of global warming will also depend on certain natural feedback loops (such as the melting of Arctic permafrost), which can add additional gases to the atmosphere. The fact remains that, for the moment, the global average temperature has risen by +1.5°C in just 150 years, a rate never before seen in the planet’s climate history, and warming of around +4°C is expected if nothing is done within just a century. Therefore, given the slow response from governments, the general public, and multinational corporations, the scientific community is naturally concerned about the many consequences of global warming that await us in the future. The increase in global average temperature will lead to an increase in the frequency of droughts and even desertification (therefore, indirectly, a sharp decline in agricultural production, leading to more and more famines), an increase in the number or intensity of natural disasters (and therefore increasingly high repair costs for all countries), a rise in sea levels (thereby reducing habitable areas, causing recurrent flooding, and much more expensive costal infrastructure), as well as an acceleration in the decline of biodiversity (with all the unpredictable effects that this could have on our agriculture or on pandemic spread). The combination of all these phenomena will result in massive human displacement (climate refugees), chronic instability (hunger riots are a precursor to this), forced economic decline (more and more costly infrastructure), a more expensive life (certain resources will be scarcer), demographic decline (more famines and more epidemics), and unprecedented conflicts over control of the remaining habitable land. In some regions, the onset of “humid heat” waves could even render them inhospitable to humans. Global warming is therefore an existential threat to our industrial civilization, in addition to having the potential to lead to the extinction of many species and cultures.

*The rise of high technology can be seen both a miracle and a curse, depending on how it is used. We do not wish to condemn innovation in general, and even less so Science as a whole (especially since applied sciences are not representative of science in general), but it is clear that certain technological developments are significant causes for concern. Examples include, but are not limited to, nuclear weapons (with the risk of nuclear war and the resulting nuclear winter), artificial intelligence (due to the unpredictability of such intelligence, even if unconscious, and the potential global computer failure it would cause), chemical synthesis (excessive and overly concentrated doses of certain chemicals—pesticides, fertilizers, cosmetics, etc.—can have an impact on human health, fertility, and even the ozone layer), bacteriology (with the associated risk of a particularly destructive pandemic if a virus created by humans—or by AI—escapes from a laboratory), and many other threats that cannot be cited here. As technological innovations have made society increasingly complex, the evolution of industrial society has become much more difficult to anticipate, and it is increasingly likely that technology will turn against us if we do not regulate it quickly.

Whatever phenomenon or phenomena might trigger the collapse of civilization, it is clear that this will be accompanied by numerous collateral effects (wars, rise of authoritarian regimes, natural disasters, etc.) which alone will have the capacity to destroy the masterpiece of our civilization: our knowledge.