This house hails the end of the world - moderator's introduction

“It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)”

So how will it all end? Will it “start with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane” as the REM song describes, or will we reel, dinosaur-like, from the deep impact of some space-sent nemesis? Perhaps the threat is far smaller and closer to home, an all-conquering virus, for once not hyped up by big pharma, maybe even created by our own research. Yes, The End may turn out to be of our own making, a morally-appropriate negative Last Judgement we visit upon ourselves. But which? Where once our nightmares were full of nuclear armageddon, now we guiltily apprehend the consequences of globalisation's unbridled industrialisation.

The world certainly will end, and that end is nigh, 7.6 billion years nigh. Earth's hubristically expansionist sun-god will over-reach itself, engulfing its votary planet in gigantic red excess before collapsing ignominiously into degenerate dwarfism. Later, much later, somewhere between 10³² and 10⁴¹ years from now, the Universe itself will succumb, in a Big Freeze, Rip, Crunch or Bounce, take your pick.

The world has already ended, times without number, and will do so again. Alok Jha explains, “Since the beginning of life on Earth, around 3.5 billion years ago, the fragile existence has lived in the shadow of annihilation. On this planet, extinction is the norm – of the 4 billion species ever thought to have evolved, 99% have become extinct. In particular, five times in this past 500 million years the steady background rate of extinction has shot up for a period of time. Something – no one knows for sure what – turned the Earth into exactly the wrong planet for life at these points and during each mass extinction, more than 75% of the existing species died off in a period of time that was, geologically speaking, a blink of the eye.”

Of previous endings religions tell the tale. Man was irredeemable, God saw, and decided to wash away the old and start afresh. When the waters receded, He promised that never again would all life disappear in such a deluge. Don't get too relieved: we now have dry cleaning. We are also told (though here accounts differ) that to seal this covenant, God sent His son as the source of man’s redemption. The sole source, that is. For some who heard His Word, thus ended the "fallen" world, from whence they averted their eyes, and turned their contemplation towards the superior kingdom, of which terrestrial empires are mere simulacra. Others retreated into the wilderness, built monasteries, sought out signs of Horsemen, cried fire and brimstone. Stop the world I wanna get off.

History too tells tales. In 1492, when Columbus cast off from Castile, or in 1607, when Captain Smith touched land in what was to become Jamestown, who knew that the world of the Old World was thereby ending, to be superseded by the world of the New? Four centuries later, the Old World remains old, but the onetime New World is afflicted with the "New Normal". What, when and where will be the "New New"? How do you say "new world order" in Chinese?

So many old worlds have already ended: antediluvian, antebellum, ante-revolutionary. All that's solid melts into the air. Here today gone tomorrow. The blink of an eye. The Mayans' world did indeed end, destroyed by the seeds Columbus had sown, but they themselves may never have foreseen such a definitive full stop, having a cyclical vision of time and history. Age's twilight is youth's new morn. Surveying the destruction of the Ancien Régime, Wordsworth wrote “Bliss was it that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven”.

In an age of millennials, a generation apparently screwed by its elders, why not be millenarian? What a prospect: at the end of the old world, a thousand years of prosperity! Weighed down by the parent-bequeathed past, born indebted, in bond to bondholders and ratings agencies, rather than this endless repayment for the sins of others, default! Du passé, faisons table rasa... Or practise Creative Destruction as Schumpeter proclaimed, liquidating all... But who can be sure of the pay off? The probable result cannot be calculated as accurately as a presidential election. Every revolutionary is a gambler, rationally or irrationally seduced to take on Pascal's Wager, though the stakes may be too high.

So the stage is set: a debate about “the world”, whatever that is. A place we reside, living full and rich lives, or where we virtually waste our time? The place we live in or that lives in us? The world, our world, our (common) home, where the heart is... How to defend it? Whether to defend it?

A debate also about attitudes. Those signs in the sky, those figures on the page, the looks on people’s faces: are they the symptoms of irredeemable corruption, or a treatable condition? These cards we’re holding: were we dealt a bum hand right from the start, or are we just one deal away from a full house? (Who d'you think you're bluffing?) This path we’ve been walking down: did we make the wrong choice at the crossroads somewhere back there, or must we keep following it precisely because there are no crossroads, it’s our only path, whether leading to the sunlit uplands or the dark wood? “Our world”: the best of best of all possible worlds, perhaps not, perhaps even the worst world ever imagined... except, that is, for all the others.

MP