The End of the World, Again

Old and new apocalypses and our obsession with control

This week brought another round of end-of-the-world warnings. Researchers linked to Anthropic spoke openly about human extinction caused by artificial intelligence. Several prominent figures in the industry urged a slowdown in the development of increasingly capable systems, while King Charles III warned of “existential dangers.” The wording may have changed. The fear has not.

People have been predicting the end for centuries. In 1524, an astrological forecast warned that Europe would flood, prompting some believers to build arks. The Millerites expected the Second Advent in 1844, only to face what became known as their “Great Disappointment.” Halley’s Comet caused another scare in 1910, when cyanogen in its tail raised fears that Earth would pass through a poisonous cloud. Then came Y2K in 2000, followed by the 2012 panic built on a misreading of the Mayan calendar. The supposed threat keeps changing; our fixation on the last page does not.

In AI and the Wisdom of Popular Religiosity: Human Limits and the Dream of Omnipotence (2026), I examine that urge to make uncertainty manageable—to strip mystery away and treat human limits as engineering problems. We want control. The fear arrives when control starts slipping.

That is why I keep returning to Eve. In The Venusian Perspective: Great Women in History and Artificial Intelligence (2025), I pictured Eden as a controlled experiment and Eve as the factor that refused to follow its design. History begins at the moment the experiment escapes the script; in that sense, Eve “activated” both history and free will. My speculative historical fiction grows from this idea: setting ancient voices against emerging technologies to reveal continuities that present-day excitement can easily obscure.

Calling something “the end of the world” carries a kind of semantic arrogance. Usually, we mean the end of our world—the human one—not Earth itself. NASA dates Earth to about 4.5 billion years old and Homo sapiens to roughly 300,000 years. Genesis makes a similar distinction: humans appear on the sixth day, not the first. Either way, we arrived late.

A better humanity starts with humility: the planet—and, depending on one’s beliefs, Creation itself—does not belong to us. If our species vanished, the loss would be devastating for humans. Earth, however, would go on turning.

The most dangerous apocalypse may not come from machines, comets, or some date marked on a calendar. It may be the human belief that our extinction would mean the end of everything. Earth can go on without us; the real question is whether we can learn to live on it wisely before we try to claim it as our own.

Author bio

Alejandro Félix de Souza is a Panamanian-Uruguayan social and political analyst, writer, entrepreneur, VIP Senior Advisor, and former diplomat. His books include “Timeless Insights on A.I.: Artificial Intelligence Through the Eyes of History’s Greatest” (2024), “The Venusian Perspective: Great Women in History and Artificial Intelligence” (2025), and “AI and the Wisdom of Popular Religiosity: Human Limits and the Dream of Omnipotence” (2026). He examines artificial intelligence through the lenses of history, ethics, humanism, and civilization’s accumulated wisdom.