The End of the World, Again

Old and new apocalypses and our obsession with control

This week, predictions of the end of the world returned. Researchers associated with Anthropic spoke openly about human extinction from artificial intelligence; some of the industry’s leading figures called for slowing the development of increasingly capable systems, and King Charles III warned of “existential dangers”. The language is new. The fear is not.

For centuries, we have anticipated endings. In 1524, an astrological prediction foretold a European flood, and some people built arks. In 1844, the Millerites awaited the Second Advent and later experienced their “Great Disappointment”. In 1910, cyanogen detected in the tail of Halley’s Comet fueled fears that Earth would pass through a poisonous cloud. The year 2000 brought Y2K; 2012 turned a mistaken interpretation of the Mayan calendar into a planetary countdown. The instruments of disaster change; our fascination with the last page remains.

In AI and the Wisdom of Popular Religiosity: Human Limits and the Dream of Omnipotence (2026), I explore precisely that impulse: humanity’s aspiration to tame uncertainty, reduce mystery and turn limits into technical problems. We want control. And when we sense that we may be losing it, panic sets in.

That is why I also return to Eve. In The Venusian Perspective: Great Women in History and Artificial Intelligence (2025), I imagined Eden as a controlled environment, and Eve as the variable that stops behaving as the laboratory expected. Human life enters history when the experiment goes off script, and Eve would then be the one who “activated” history and free will. The speculative historical fiction I have been developing serves precisely that

purpose: to place ancient voices before new technologies and discover continuities that the enthusiasm of the present often fails to perceive.

There is, moreover, a semantic arrogance in saying “the end of the world”. We are almost never talking about the world: we are talking about ourselves. Earth is about 4.5 billion years old; Homo sapiens, about 300,000, according to NASA. For the believer, Genesis places the human being on the sixth day, not the first. In both accounts, humanity arrives late.

A truly magnificent humanity begins when it accepts that it owns neither the planet nor Creation, depending on where we stand. If our species disappeared, it would be an immense human tragedy. But Earth would keep turning.

Perhaps the most dangerous apocalypse is not the one announced by machines, comets or calendars. It is the fantasy of a newly arrived species that confuses its own disappearance with the disappearance of everything. The world can survive us. The question is whether we will finally learn to inhabit it sensibly, before trying to possess it.