the earth is running out of time..

New York City, one of the United States' most recognizable cities. In September 2020, one of the many artistic landmarks of the city was repurposed. It was the metronome near Union Square. If you've ever walked by it or seen it online, you'll probably notice two things.

One, a giant piece of artwork by Kristen Jones and Andrew Ginsel that is supposed to convey instancy and infinity, transience and permanence all at once. While the pulsing nature of the artwork is supposed to embody the city's energy, elements such as the massive piece of bedrock symbolizing millennia of geological history and the rippling centerpiece all come together to help the viewer visualize one thing: time.

Another thing you might notice is the nearly 60 feet long display of digits. This digital facet of the artwork is what allows it to be reprogrammed to fit such an occasion. Previously, it was used to display the time of the day and the number of hours, minutes, and seconds that remain in it. It is all fittingly titled "The Passage."

But this September, this artwork embarked on a new mission. The numbers changed to not display only the regular time, but the time that Earth has left in our carbon budget before given the current rate of emissions. We crossed the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold outlined by the IPCC in 2018.

Now it all sounds like things people have heard before. Scientists come up with numbers, they urge how important it is, and then people move on with their days. This is different. A complete depletion would result in a total destruction of our planet, and it will have been at the fault of our own hands.

If the Earth's temperature is increased by just 1.5 degrees Celsius, we will feel its consequences: extreme heat waves, fire across the world, droughts in places there shouldn't be, and less and less of the one resource on Earth we all need: water. The concern for climate change is certainly nothing new. In fact, it's been with us not for just the past few decades, but for centuries.

British archaeologist Ian Morris spoke at the World Economic Forum to talk about how civilizations in the past had collapsed. He incorporated modern-day scientific methods, excavation practices, and billions of artifacts to dissect the collapse of previous civilizations. He concludes by saying that all major collapses tend to have five common factors, time and time again.

Firstly, they tend to have massive uncontrolled population movements that overwhelm societal infrastructures—pretty much overpopulation. Secondly, they have major pandemics and diseases, which, because of the population movements, spread and merge faster. Then there's state failure and increased warfare. This, in turn, leads to an economic collapse.

And then there's one final piece of the puzzle: climate change. Civilizations rarely collapse because of one thing, and so these five factors can often co-occur. It's their combined effect that leads to the collapse of civilization. It's easy to see how these factors connect with each other because all of these things are taking place right now around the world.

Climate change is displacing millions of people; a pandemic is ravaging the world as we speak, and bad governance about these issues is making it all worse. While the population growth is certainly not out of control, it is in fact declining steadily. All in all, we're well on our way to collapsing.

Ian Morris says there is some hope, however. In fact, in his study of past civilizations, he notes that quite a few actually survived the five horsemen of the apocalypse and rebuilt themselves afterwards. He credits their survival to economic growth.

Now I'm really not about to debate capitalism versus other economic models in the world because, well, I don't want to start a war. In his book about the future of human civilization, "Homo Deus," historian Yuval Noah Harari notes that although we experience occasional economic crises and international wars, in the long run capitalism has not only managed to prevail but also to overcome famine, plague, and war.

In fact, in modern times we've experienced so much economic growth that today, more people die of eating too much than eating not enough. It turns out we have a little too much stuff sometimes, and that too much stuff isn't produced out of nothing. Beyond the dollar value we pay for things, there's a far greater cost to abundance: an ecological cost.

The overuse of unsustainable natural resources, water pollution, soil pollution, and loss of biodiversity in recent times has meant that we are closer to ecological collapse than we have ever been. Even though in the past there wasn't a global governing body like the United Nations to oversee and recommend actions to reduce our environmental footprint, the footprint itself was always very localized.

People hardly traveled as far as we do today, and business was not nearly as robust. Sure, a few centuries ago there were no solar panels or recycled plastic, but there also weren't any fuel-hungry airliners either. We also weren't siphoning oil and fossil fuels out of the ground either. The scale of the industrial world, it seems, is truly unique to our time and civilization.

There are, of course, other aspects to our civilization that make it more unique and, by extension, more complicated. Total nuclear obliteration is still a non-zero possibility, and as low as that number might be, the simple possibility of something like that happening is terrifying. Both natural pandemics and bioweapons are also a threat.

In fact, both are quite common throughout the history of collapsed civilizations. Until very recently, more soldiers died from disease than from actual combat itself. It's just that modern advances, while allowing us to cure far more diseases than before, have also opened up a Pandora's box of future threats.

There's obviously the threat of runaway superintelligence as well. Such a technological singularity can encompass the threat of nanotechnology and their rising incorporation into everything from manufacturing to medicine. All of these factors understandably complicate the modern infrastructure.

Joseph Tainter, a historian, suggests that this rising complexity is what could ultimately be our society's downfall. He suggests that societies emerge as problem-solving collectives—that's what they're there for. But eventually, they reach a point where the complexity and intricate structures required to solve problems actually reach a point of diminishing returns, and civilizations collapse under their own weight.

Tied to this idea is that of energy return on investment, or ERoI for short. Simply put, it's how much energy is needed to produce or extract a set amount of energy. Fossil fuels have historically had good ERoIs, but as we are burning through tons and tons of non-renewable fossil fuels, this ERoI is steadily declining. The ERoI for petroleum, for example, has fallen by around 10 times in the past century because, well, we're stealing all of it.

Besides, despite being more in line with our goals of a greener future, as it stands, renewable energy sources are quite hard to develop, manufacture, and implement, which doesn't help their ERoI either. These are all factors that are truly unique to our time, and they sound pretty complex.

However, there is one factor that civilizations in the past have certainly never had before: social media. It's unique in the sense that there's never been a platform that allows us to connect with so many people so easily. It's a society within our society—one we certainly didn't evolve to live in. It was just a byproduct of other advances.

Of course, social media has led to some wonderful things. Like every other element I just talked about, it's allowed lost families to reconnect, allowed fundraisers to reach significantly larger audiences, and it's given a platform to the ordinary person. But the problem with social media—well, it's much more nuanced.

Much like the cost of biological advancements, there's the threat of virality in social media too, only it's much, much worse. If falsehoods spread six times faster than truth on Twitter, then there's only ever going to be one winner in the battle of ideas—the virality of ideas, or bad ideas, I should say, is a newfound threat to civilization.

It means the ripple effect of a bad idea is now much more likely to escape the geographic confines in which it took place and affect the rest of the world. The sharing of misinformation on social media has led to levels of polarization that have never been seen before. Lack of tolerance seems to be at an all-time high.

You see, one of the psychological side effects of prolonged social media is a broken concentration. You could argue that that's less of a side effect and more of an objective. Regardless, people are constantly glancing at their phones no matter what they're doing, and it's turning them into short-sighted individuals who are preoccupied with the next burst of dopamine.

That is exactly the problem we're facing with climate change and ecological collapse. We now have a world that is unwilling to look beyond the next presidency, or the next election, or the next generation or two. Social media, in this case, might just be a good analogy, but the fact of the matter is we are slowly but surely walking towards the collapse of civilization as we know it.

Now, while an asteroid strike or an alien invasion is a more spectacular possibility, they're not nearly as likely as, say, a slow ecological collapse. A popular saying goes, "Civilization may not end with a bang but with a whimper." The moral imperative to do something really presents itself when you think about the number of lives that will eventually be affected by climate change, ecological collapse, or another factor that might cause societal collapse.

The number of people presently alive pales in comparison to the number of people that can be alive in the future on this very planet—at least as long as the sun isn't too close. That number skyrockets once you factor in the possibility that, given enough time, civilization could become multi-planetary. But that's the thing: enough time.

We barely have enough time to think about the policies of today, let alone tomorrow. Think about this: a man named Danny Hillis invented the idea of a 10,000-year clock in 1984 with one singular purpose: to encourage long-term thinking. As the name suggests, this clock will continue ticking without human intervention for 10,000 years.

When construction is complete, much like the metronome near Union Square, this clock reminds us of time, albeit in a different way. This clock is not necessarily counting down from something, but by its sheer presence, its sheer scale, it serves to remind us that the world will go on long after we've passed.

As such, we can still have an impact. Who knows? Maybe under thousands of layers of sediment and fossilized remains, there could lie buried another civilization—another civilization exactly like ours at this exact stage of their journey. Their time had come, seven years, 36 days. The Passage takes away second by second to remind us the doors will too.

Earth has a deadline, and it literally is up to us—everyone—to save it. We need to solve our energy problems, change our daily habits, and work together to help undo the damage we've done. This is a big hurdle to conquer.

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