This is a quote from Yuval Noah Harari’s “From Animals Into Gods: A Brief History of Humankind.” Mine is a “draft edition,” without a cited publisher, but I’m pretty sure it was finally published under the title “Sapiens,” with the same subtitle:
In the year AD 1500, five hundred million people inhabited the world. Today, there are seven billion. In 1500, global annual production was equivalent to 250 billion dollars. Today it’s close to 60 trillion dollars. In 1500, humankind consumed each day about 13 trillion calories of energy. Today, we consume 1500 trillion calories a day. (Yuval Noah Harari, “From Animals Into Gods: A Brief History of Humankind,” Draft Edition 2012)
How long can this last? Or more to the point, will it end with a whimper or a bang? Personally, I think we’re whimpering now. But I’m waiting for the bang (a big one, either real or metaphorical). After that, it’s anyone’s guess.
Interestingly, this also makes me think of another quote:
“Watch, therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour…” (Matthew 25:13)
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The first quote is about Real extinction; the second quote is about Imaginary deliverance.
Regarding the second quote, I was thinking more metaphorically. It can refer to either individual death or the end of our species. Regardless, and regardless of either the cause or the timing, few are those who consider it consciously Andy live by its implications.
And all of those wholesome, calorie-rich foodstuffs are eliminated as shit and pee—where does it go? It has to GO somewhere—it doesn’t just vaporize when we flush. And the livestock we consume are themselves producing waste in enormous quantities. People think of Nature as being OUT THERE, but it is the Nature inside ourselves that dooms humankind to extinction; reproduction and alimentation will be our undoing. How can the Earth possibly absorb all of the filth generated by mindlessly expanding human populations? All other topics will someday appear trivial in comparison with this overriding issue. People will experience profound guilt at the dinner table because they cannot help thinking of the inevitable fecal aftermath. People will be scaling Everest—not as now for the adventure—but to get above the stench, which will be everywhere. The beautiful blue marble will become a foul brown and yellow-green cesspool, the dominant life-form spawned from raw sewage spewed out by tens of billions of human anuses. I hope we are rendered extinct before this horrific vision is made real. No one speaks of this.