The Shape of Armageddon

The years 2004 and 2005 brought global disasters enough to gladden the heart of any prophet of doom. With the tsunami, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, famine, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, suicide bombers, and bird flu, all the biblical signs are there to suggest that the end of the world is at hand. But that should be qualified by saying that the end of the world as we know it may be at hand - civilization, we call it.

Human life will not be wiped off the face of the earth by natural disasters, plagues, or wars; there are just too many of us. Consider our history. The million Biafrans killed in that terrible 1967-1970 war of attempted secession in Nigeria were replaced by natural procreation in just one year. The Black Death of 1347-1351 wiped out at least one-third of the people of Europe when its population was a fraction of today's, but the continent recovered. There will always be some humans who avoid the killer diseases; in addition to isolated developing world tribes that have never been exposed to such killers, some people in developed countries are now showing resistance to AIDS.

So what will the world look like after the populations of the major cities have been destroyed by nuclear holocaust or disease, and with them the whole infrastructure that moves money, food, and fuel over the face of the earth? People on the fringes of the global village will survive, but civilization will not - remember William Golding's Lord of the Flies?

Members of mountain militias in the United States believe they have the answer, stockpiling food, fuel, and ammunition, but they will last only as long as those stocks last. They will soon use up their fuel by using their transport to sally forth and loot the area around their headquarters. Then they will turn to attacking each other for plunder until the ammunition runs out.

The true survivors will be the woodsmen and plainsmen who know how to hunt with bows and arrows and traps, or grow field crops and live off the land. There will be no shortage of bush meat; in North America, there are more deer today, due to their protected status, than there were when the Mayflower landed. The Eskimos will move south to colonize abandoned land. The Australian aborigines will make a comeback. A few technologically savvy people may survive by absorption into primitive tribes, to whom they could impart advanced technology in much the same way as Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, so that in a few years the wheel, steam power, the printing press, electricity, and radio will have been reestablished and civilization will be on the way back to the mess it is in today.

But whether humanity can reestablish itself, it is doomed in the end by the cooling sun. Bacteria are already way ahead of us in adapting to extreme environments, from polar below-zero temperatures and zero humidity to the edges of boiling hot geysers and much hotter undersea fumaroles. And now, thanks to groundbreaking work by Bonnie Bassler at Princeton and others (see her profile in the June 2006 issue), we know that they can communicate with each other. So if they can avoid internecine warfare and cooperate, then when all the existing coastal areas are under water and all that remains is desert, with no other animal or plant life, they could cover the land with biofilms, regulate the weather by changing surface reflectivity, control the atmosphere by determining how much land area is devoted to photosynthesis, recycle their pollutants, build nanobots to do their bidding, and as the sun cools, survive at freezing surface temperatures well below those that would end all homeothermic life. In the absence of any human competition, they may just take over, create a completely bacterial civilization, and rule the globe.

Of course, once they become politicized, or worse, develop rival gods, this micro-utopia will be all ruin.

Jack Woodall is director of the Nucleus for the Investigation of Emerging Infectious Diseases in the Institute of Medical Biochemistry at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.