Global, Geophysical Events or GGE’s (Bill McGuire; ‘Armageddon and How to Survive It’; Lecture; Cheltenham Science Festival, (2006), pose a very real threat to the future survival of the human race. We are currently witnessing the sixth mass extinction in earth’s history and as a consequence commentators are expressing great concern over our future. We are killing off species due to a wide range of activities, including deforestation, pollution, over fishing, over hunting, over grazing of cattle and the range of animals dying are generally those who are of great use to us and those that of no use, but get in the way of some kind of economic activity. We kill plants, land mammals, birds and insects in huge numbers and have zero tolerance for any animals that interrupt our economic activity or are simply too large in number for comfort. The only animal we are not destroying in large number is human beings. In fact we will go to great lengths not to kill them or to save ourselves from death, expending enormous resources to achieve a much smaller scale of results. The life of one human being is often enough to justify the expense. I am not suggesting we should not value human life this much, merely that it is disproportionate to the way we treat other animals. Livestock for example. The wholesale ‘industrialised’ slaughter of billions of animals worldwide every year, for the sake of clothing and meat that we happily throw away at our leisure. So effectively, we are creating the sixth mass extinction of earths history ourselves, without any reference to the great Geophysical disasters that killed off our ancestors, thousands of years ago and before that our distant cousins and before that the dinosaurs and before that bacteria and simple plant life. But given a run of bad luck, are we not just as vulnerable as the animals we kill, to the myriad of ways the universe can kill us all off in the blink of an eye? This is what I discuss in this essay. A plan to overcome some of the challenges we will one day face, while preserving the earth and refraining from wholesale destruction of anything which opposes our will to create, build and consume earths natural resources.

Extinction events can come over very long periods of time and from several different sources. For example, the dinosaurs were killed via an asteroid, a mini ice age, volcanic activity and maybe even evolution, if all that stuff hadn’t happened. All stages were probably hundreds if not thousands of years apart, lasting for many decades each. There is evidence of a flood basalt in the North Western part of the Indian Subcontinent for example, which could have contributed a great deal to the deaths of the dinosaurs and a good 90% of the species on earth at the time. It is apparently very difficult to kill off an entire generation of species in one event, even if it is a large one. Life is resilient, whilst being fragile in many ways too. The survival instincts of most creatures is strong to the point of resilience and yet there is ample evidence to suggest that only 1% of species on earth right now have survived evolution and a myriad of different disasters over the history of earth. Our first mistake therefore is to assume we will survive where others haven’t; a kind of arrogance we despise in others and yet is endemic in our attitude towards each other and towards the other species we share the planet with. There is an ‘uncoolness’ to caring, which is disturbing. But the social adjustments needed to change this have not even started yet. There are too many among us who simply don’t care enough to do anything to change us for the better.

As we stride into our first 100,000 years, we have been possessed of technology for some unknown reason. Technology in which we are capable of measuring to a precise degree our own destruction whilst causing it as well. ‘We are monitoring our own extinction’, as Dr Caroline Lucas said in the introduction to ‘Our Fragile World’ (Wells and Henderson, 2005). Technology that has so far taken us to every corner of earth, searching for something new, or for answers to questions, or as is so often the case to search for some resource that will make a fortune for us, to allow us to live hedonistic, carefree lives; often unrealistically environmentally unbalanced and fatally flawed. A footballer can now own and operate a private jet to travel the world in the same way someone on an average wage might run a small car. The idea of everyone owning their own helicopter or jet one day, is becoming more unrealistic as the true extent of global climate change becomes clear. Ironically we find ourselves in such a mess, that when September 11^th 2001 happened I woke the next day, stepped outside the front door and noticed the sky was brighter than normal. Apparently as well as heating the earth, pollution hanging the atmosphere is cooling it as well. If we were to shut down all polluting activity at once, the atmosphere would heat by 1- 3 °C almost immediately. The irony is that not too long after the industrial revolution someone had noticed the potential for global warming (Koppen in 1873 and Wegener in the early 1920s; also, Broecker, W., Science, 189:460, 1975) and over a century later we are still debating how to handle it.

Economic activity therefore, is something which needs shaping and regulating in order to preserve the safety of the people the system serves. This will only be a fire-fighting exercise, patching up the law, agreeing some of the time, disagreeing most of the time. Tinkering with technology, allowing the free market to adjust to social panic as it resonates like an earthquake through the social mindset of consumers. And let’s not forget who we are talking about here. We are not talking about the very poor, who already live a carbon neutral existence. We are talking about the richer more successful people of earth, who consume more than they need and waste most of what they consume. Nobody really cared before about the impact of their lives on the environment, until someone made them feel uncomfortable and therefore guilty. Having attended two seminars recently, one by the environmentalist James Lovelock, the other the disaster management expert, Bill McGuire, the questions taken at the end of the lectures, had a panicky air about them. James Lovelock ended his lecture by telling everyone to ‘cheer up’, invoking a blitz mentality. But we are not all fighting on the same side. Some people deny their responsibility and increase their polluting activities, despite the dire warnings. So what in the end would we be left with, should we plummet into 100,000 years of atmospheric heating or worse? I don’t know the answer to this question, but it is a frightening prospect.

As the population continues to grow unchecked and we can envisage the prevention of the spread of the new strain of avian flu (H5N1), one of the contributors to disasters comes from population growth. People over populating the planet, threaten the supply of raw materials, distribution of water and oil, and the allocation of space. We could envisage the building of huge high rise apartments; not popular or successful in Britain, but successful in other countries, including the Netherlands and China. Are we all doomed to live in a high rise apartment block, whilst struggling for fresh water and fuel? Bill McGuire gave his view of the consequences. Millions of people heading north to avoid the drying out that will take place in Northern Africa and the Mediterranean. I could rerun this scenario, but I won’t. I want to look more at the social process involved in change in response to catastrophe rather than the effects themselves.

Previously natural catastrophes, widespread killer diseases and wars would take care of population growth for itself. A self regulating system, in which every few hundred years, tens of millions of people would be killed. This self-regulating system is now being attacked by the collective survival instincts of humanity. For example, Stalin killed off millions of citizens out of a paranoid fear that the same forces that caused the revolution that put him in power, would in turn remove him from power. But his psychosis served to cut a population that may have provided many problems for Russia in the later years of the 20^th Century and the 21^st Century. Now the opposite problem is occurring: there are not enough people in Russia. However, cutting the population to manageable levels was not why the killings were ordered by Stalin. It is not a cosmic reason or a design, simply a consequence. The same can be said of other periods of loss of human life, across history. The massacre of 50 million South Americans by the Spanish Conquests; the deaths of 55 million people in World War II; the death of 50 million people due to Spanish flu in 1918; the black death in Britain in 1350 and again 1665– all natures way of keeping population under control.

If we look closer at cholera which ravaged London in1854, the changes which followed were enormous and wide ranging. The Victorians built vast sewerage systems. Advances were made in medical science and engineering. The small bacteria of these water born illnesses were discovered and the idea of basic sanitation and health and safety were born. All these things would never have occurred without first the wholesale slaughter of millions of people. But again we have to dig deeper to understand why these lives were lost and why now we are beginning to save the lives of millions of people, as the scientific community embarks on a global project to halt the spread of avian flu and latterly COVID 19 and why in contrast we are unable to act aggressively to prevent global climate change.

Self Regulating Systems.

The population boom is as theorist Velikovsky put it, ‘an incubating stage of a dangerous illness’ (1982). In other words nature is known to stock up on its population of insects or mammals, just before an outbreak of a widespread killer disease. Population levels rise before the onset of a disease, in order to prevent the complete extinction of the species. But perhaps with increases in population, comes the disease, rather than the other way about? So where do we stand, in terms of moral philosophy and population control? Do we stop a disease like COVID if we can? Of course we do. There is no alternative. We will have no choice but to allow the population to grow to beyond what the planet can cope with and then watch as the system throws crises at us, and wait until the population is back under control, then begin to pick up the pieces again. However, demographers have cast doubt in the idea that populations increase on the build-up to a catastrophe, so we have to bear that in mind.

Extinction events then must accumulate, while we look round for solutions to keep every man alive. But to see what is in the round a learning experience, with marked periods of resetting human experience and beginning on a new path, like rings in a tree, we will have times when fate is stacked against us and times when we win every round. This process is what I believe will lead us into a preset, predestined way forward into a certain way of living, determined by all the previous events that have tried us. This process is essentially set out in periods of failure and adjustment in repeated cycles. But a western life brings with it, its own self-regulating system. As the strength and mobilisation of women from the home to the workplace increases, women and men are leading increasingly separate lives and as a consequence it isn’t certain that couples will choose to have kids. A kind of weariness has set in where children are trials; expensive and difficult to cope with. The enjoyment of the world and all its aspects, only really unlocked by promising careers, offers more of an incentive to people. The single life is as difficult as life with children, but at least the promise of greater wealth will offset the expense and inequities of parenthood. The population therefore is dropping. Take Russia, a place which has a third world economy, combined with a western lifestyle, is sending their population into a decline. So there are many ways in which population will be regulated, but this particular development, gives us our first glimpse of human life on the edges of extinction; another dimension to the wave of problems that might kill us off.

How can this kind of futurism answer all these concerns? Freedom is the most valued thing about western lifestyles. If life has restrictions built into it, I could argue that the best way to answer the concerns is to enter all the problems into one pile and come up with a general solution which makes sense. That is to allow these problems to encourage change and to help the process along, via a combination of dialogue, market forces and social, legal boundaries. That is to say that most, if not all these problems are solvable as people see the consequences of their actions, actually affecting them, not just some far flung country, you learn about on the evening news, along side EastEnders, as part of your evenings entertainment. The government as the interceding agent, can help the processes by encouraging companies to offer solutions as an alternative to the more vulnerable or destructive system. An example of this would be in and of the home; architecture being a key part of change, offering a range of services and features suited to both the problem at hand and the individual who will use that building. Many changes would have to be done away from any interaction with the user, allowing the user to know nothing of the technology and do nothing too strenuous to affect the change. This background technology must slip into the general usage of the building or system, without requiring expense or training.

Such systems are of course already available to us, if we choose to look for and research the technology. Whilst the development and marketing of this kind of technology is only a good thing, what it mustn’t be is difficult to obtain. It must slip off the shelf into the buyer’s hand without a fuss or a fanfare and sit happily beside their less productive or more destructive cousins. There have been plenty of new technologies over the years that I have adopted without ever been taught how to use them. I haven’t been in a learning environment since college and yet I mastered clever and complicated technology via a system of trial and error. This is how technology can provide solutions to problems in our everyday lives. Stuff we barely think about.

The PassivHaus, a European house design provides an airtight home, which insulates well, requiring only minimal heating and cooling if any. As fuel prices rise and the old draughty buildings of the past fade, designs like this one will become more wanted and therefore designs like this promulgate across the globe, reducing carbon emissions and providing affordable housing for all. The demand is there now and will increase as fuel demand peaks and supplies dwindle. Imagine a house where the energy requirements are so minimal, as everyone else pays through the nose to heat and cool their home, you’ll have more money to do other things, avoiding fuel poverty and living a higher quality of life. These are highly persuasive incentives to build green buildings (see www.passivhaus.org.uk).

With the recent series of disasters in Asia and the Middle East, in Pakistan, Iran, and the tsunami in 2004, it has never been more vital for some of the focus for building designs to be on earthquake and flood-mitigation for homes. Some of the recent changes in the BREEAM EcoHomes environmental assessment method in the UK, have been focused on flood defences; either managing floods by allowing rivers to empty into their natural flood plains, or else building flood barriers and stacking new housing developments on stilts. Further a-field in Greece, there is a focus on earthquake proof buildings and in Japan the anti-earthquake designs have focused on controlling the centre of gravity, by hanging weights inside the structure. These solutions are again driven by the market, but there any many things that no building on earth can yet do, with one exception.

The GCHQ building in Cheltenham (UK), has been designed to handle reductions in air quality, filtering and managing air flow around the building. In the worse case scenario it is conceivable that this technology would have to be put into effect in periods of unusually large volcanic activity. Changes in air quality can also lead to the collapse of agriculture and the ensuing starvation would be the biggest killer, next to the volcanic activity itself. Volcanoes have been known to cause mini-ice ages and periods of mass extinctions and therefore cannot be excluded in the process of change to safer living environments. If we’re really serious about survival, then architecture, including managing the social and political environments around those buildings, provide many of the solutions and challenges facing us as we face up to ‘normal’ life on earth. Surviving long term is no mean feat. There are many ways the universe can kill us off in sections over time. We have to manage our numbers both up and down. We have to provide quickly available solutions to Global Geophysical Event’s, along side sustainable and incorruptible political systems to deal with them. Too delicate a political arrangement can cause more problems in a civilization struggling to survive than it solves. Also, social mobility is a key factor. In a futurist model of civilization, social mobility is a key part; in other words to move large amounts of people to safety when problems arise, without causing mass homelessness and social unrest in the target country or region the immigrants arrive in.

In order to do this there needs to be less rigidity in geopolitics; less rigidity in economics, and more flexibility in dwellings, or towns and cities which can be created and demolished over less than a decade, rather than ancient immoveable and massive cities dominating a region, with huge build ups of buildings and infrastructure. Systems like this are so rigid that when cities are lost to environmental catastrophe, as evidenced by New Orleans, it takes decades to resettle and rebuild and the costs are enormous. It would be necessary in a really responsive and modern city, to move people quickly and easily to new housing, without inflexible and immoveable infrastructure being left behind to rot, while people move on. This can only really be achieved by reviewing the way we live, avoiding very large settlements and localizing economies and the supply and demand of goods and services (see E.F.Schumacher; ‘Small is Beautiful’; 1973). Again these changes must take place (by default more than any other force acting on it), via learning by failure and some market forces, making smaller towns and cities with flexible designs, more available to the average person and desirable by the individuals and families seeking such places. Of course given a disaster proof designed town, New Orleans wouldn’t have had to go anywhere. So perhaps insurers and therefore mortgage providers and landlords, might move the focus of their business to places which minimize these risks and provide alternatives where the risks are immovably high.

It takes large blocks of time, development, knowledge and money to make these come about. The argument is that much of these changes will take place out of the will of people, but instead will come about from necessity. It will also take the continued spread of globalization to bring about the natural market forces, inventiveness and finance to change our vulnerable system to a more stable and robust system. A system capable of reacting quickly to change, will have smaller consequences than the mass transit of millions people fleeing from the purges of a society in danger.

To cover every eventuality through learning to apply the lessons of the past and to continue to adjust to change, obviously has its own challenges. Some disasters are too big to plan for and most of the really big ones don’t happen all that often. It all depends on whether humanity sees itself as being around until the end of the suns life, or whether we are perhaps programmed only to think in terms of our own lifetimes. Some people, mainly academics can propose a long-term strategy, but most see only one day ahead, all too used to plans going wrong. However, the big factor is the time aspect. Big events can happen at any time. Despite the language of disaster management experts, who talk of 1 in 100,000 year events and so on, any of these disasters only average out as occasional events. The fact is we could face any of a range of disasters at any time and at any magnitude. We could lose a third of our population or all of it. Do we want to survive some these events? These are only questions we should ask ourselves in time of crisis, not here in theory. However many of the types and magnitudes of events can be planned for. The effects won’t last too long (for example the effects of a 1 – 1.5 km wide meteor strike would last about three to five years). Some of the events we could survive with large but not total losses. So why not give ourselves the best quality of life by planning the way we live around the definite possibility that something big will happen at some point? Why should we live on the edge for the rest of our time on earth, when the technology and resources are at hand to do so much more? We limit ourselves by making things impossible or improbable and we also limit ourselves to that which is affordable, or lucrative; always referring to the budget of something rather than the benefits. This might also change. But the comfort available to all people, within technological and resource limits of the planet we live on, in good times and bad, should not be underestimated. Everyone deserves a level of comfort and when we now know it is possible, within certain boundaries, it could be a great future. But when we fail to react to potential disasters adequately, like climate change the only benefit is to learn through tough luck and suffering what we already know. That does not make sense and may point to a wider psychological fault line opening up within us, over the last couple of decades, which may lead to our early demise. The collapse of civilization and the sixth mass extinction on earth.