And I saw a pale horse…

Any form of life which acquires the ability to destroy itself,
is destined ultimately to do so.

Are humans the only intelligent life in the universe? Throughout billions of galaxies containing billions of stars it’s rather hard to imagine we are. Are humans the most intelligent life in the universe? Probably. If we aren’t, I suspect we’re pretty close.

Life, as we know it, is self-limiting. Evolution by natural selection is based on the competition of variations. When you have competition, you have winners and losers. Where you have losers you will have hatred and simmering resentment. When you have variation, you have positive and negative qualities. Where you have negative qualities you will have the murderous, the psychopathic, the nihilistic, the genocidal.

There have always been people in the world with the motivation to bring about humanity’s destruction, but not the means. I’m not really thinking of history’s showboating alpha males here; those mad enough to think they could be victorious in an unwinnable, cataclysmic war, and charismatic enough to raise an army to try.  I’m more thinking of the solitary misfits, the killing-spree rampage types, usually (but not necessarily) too fucked up and too downtrodden to bring about more than local carnage.

There are an ever-increasing number of people in the world with the means to bring about humanity’s destruction, but mercifully not the motivation. Those with access to the makings of biological, biochemical and radiological weapons and the ever more accessible technology to create them.  As science and technology continue to advance, this pool of people will become ever larger, those means will become ever more commonplace.

The end of days will not come at the hand of a rampaging nutter – an Anders Brevik or a Seung-Hui Cho. Nor will it be at the hand of a megalomaniacal and delusional leader of men – a Kim Jong Il or Osama Bin Laden. It will rather come from a perfect storm of their worst qualities. Perhaps an individual, perhaps a small group, but a person or persons with both the capacity to bring about an apocalyptic disaster and a deep enough conviction that it is what they must do. Maybe not in my generation, or the next, or the one after that, but there are two certainties as time rolls on – the means of our destruction will become ever more accessible, and ever more tickets will be drawn in the genetic lottery of human life.

What form will it take? A massively co-ordinated release of dirty bombs? A communicable and absolutely destructive biological weapon? A contaminant of the food chain that doesn’t directly kill people but makes our survival impossible? Some cosmological experiment deep under the Swiss mountains bringing about a second big bang? Has the means of our ultimate destruction even been discovered yet? Will it be malicious or deliberate, or just an accident or a miscalculation?

It may be absolutely destructive or it may be effectively so – a few pockets of life may be left but we will be so hopelessly compromised and preoccupied with merely surviving for many generations that so much of our progress to date will be completely lost to us.

Intelligent life’s progress will always be limited by its inherent failings. I can’t see that we are many more generations away from that limit. Surely we’ll hit it before we have the means to preserve ourselves by settling other planets in our locality, or traversing the stars to other solar systems, other galaxies.

And unless life on other worlds came about by a fundamentally different means to evolution by natural selection, surely the same goes for every other pocket of life too. If we do indeed have contemporaries on other worlds, we will never meet them, because they too will have wiped themselves out long before developing the technology to come and see us.