THE FATE OF THE WORLD

How our Future is Written in the Past (extract)

If you are wondering why I haven’t posted much on here lately, its because I have been tied up with my next book: The Fate of the World: How Our Future is Written in the Past. While the publisher is yet to be confirmed, I am confident that the book will be out in 2026. Meanwhile, I intend - on an off - to publish short extracts here on Substack, to provide a flavour of what’s to come. This is the first:

Rogue species

“A little more than four billion years ago, on a tiny, insignificant, planet orbiting a very ordinary yellow star within the Orion Spur of the Milky Way galaxy, something extraordinary – and as far as we know unique – happened. Molecules randomly cobbled together in a primordial chemical soup, cracked what it takes to organise and replicate and, perhaps for the first and only time in the history of our universe, life was born!

For the next three and a half billion years or so, not much else happened. It seemed that this new variety of existence was pretty content as it was. There was insufficient rhyme or reason for these most basic of life forms to adapt or change, and there was little increase in their complexity. Then, for one reason or another, everything changed, and ocean life suddenly blossomed into a cornucopia of strange and wonderful multicellular organisms.

Across the aeons that followed, an extraordinary assortment of beautiful and, on occasion, astounding organisms appeared, flourished and vanished or sometimes transitioned into something entirely different. Thus began a roller-coaster ride of evolutionary exploration and experimentation.

Sometimes led down evolutionary dead-ends, occasionally knocked back by cataclysm or environmental change, life nonetheless prevailed and prospered, heading always in the direction of more complex forms, towards bigger brains, in search of consciousness and self-awareness.

Then, very recently as we count geological time, the evolutionary process brought forth something altogether different and rather dangerous; a new species of intelligent ape, a life-form with the potential to fundamentally change its environment, to supersede nature as the dominant force on the planet, and to devastate ecosystems half a billion years in the making.

The small planet in question is, of course, Earth, and the ape species, us – Homo sapiens. In less than 300,000 years, so-called 'thinking man' – in reality despoiler, pillager, exterminator – has wrought mayhem, plundering resources without thought or care, driving the sixth of our planet’s Great Extinctions, and bringing the climate and the natural world to the brink of catastrophic collapse.

In one form or another, humans have been around for just one five hundredth of the time that dinosaurs roamed the planet. The giant reptiles' only legacies are assemblages of fossil bones, a glut of implausible disaster movies, and a boost to mammalian evolution that led, ultimately, to us. When we are gone, the marks of our existence, and the wounds we have left on our home will be manifold, and will endure for millions of years. The growth and development of civilisation, the degradation and destruction of nature, and the rapid modification of the climate, form interwoven strands that stretch back 10,000 years or more into the past. Where they will lead in the future is still up for grabs, but to say that prospects look bleak would be a monumental understatement.

Unknowingly at first, and later indifferently, or with disdain, humankind has worked tirelessly to systematically dismantle the indigenous framework that binds together the fundamental elements of our world – life, the oceans, the atmosphere and the solid Earth. We are a rogue species and we not done yet.

You can register for updates about the book at: https://thefateoftheworld.com/