After the End

Maybe I have completely lost my mind, or maybe I have heard too much of millennialist thinking, or it might be from reading too much by “the-end-is-near” types, but I am fairly confident that the human race will undergo substantial change in the reasonably near future. I have already written a novel about the Really Great Plague in which about 80% of humans died from Pneumonic Plague; alas, it was not taken up by a publisher (with good reason), and I haven’t yet rewritten it. The conspiracy theory people are sure that the Illuminati will be behind it, and the Christians think that their god is the moving force. I don’t think that anything except biological processes will cause the catastrophe, unless it will be an asteroid. The exact method isn’t very important, but we can be confident that the population on Earth will be much lower in the future than it is now, but total human population may be higher, if interstellar travel becomes practical. We can’t count that out, unless we want to look like Professor Wilberforce who scientifically proved that heavier than air flight is impossible. But I don’t think that we should rely on that, because it may not become available for some considerable time. We should plan for the world after the end. What should the human world be like when there will again be fewer than two billion humans?

Leaving all possibilities open, what should we plan to have for institutions of control, both governmental and otherwise? What will cities and other places where people will live look like, and how will we get from one to the other? How will rules of behavior change? What will people look like?

The answers depend on when and how the population will be reduced. An asteroid strike will cause population reduction in some areas but not in others. The same is true of a virulent pandemic also, but that would tend to reduce in inverse proportion to population density. Some islands might be unaffected, while metropolitan areas might lose nearly all of their populations.

Remember, this won’t be the end as predicted in Revelations and in the popular press, so some people might be shocked at who will survive. So don’t think about who you would like to have survive. Think instead about what you want things to be like after the population will decrease, and it won’t be like a horror movie; there won’t be zombies, and there won’t be a complete collapse of civilization. And there won’t be shortages of many things; although there may be shortages of a few products.

We classical liberals want the government to be as small as possible. Government seldom does any good for many people, and it frequently gets in the way of people living their lives. There won’t be a lot of people available for government work anyway, because there will be too many serious things for people to do. We will need to continue supplying food and fuel and other goods to the remaining people. There will be surpluses of some things for years, but eventually it will be necessary to replace everything. The stock of Best Buy will only last so long, even with one tenth the demand.

What else will we need to think about?

    There are plenty of people who think that society should be perfectly social; that people should abandoned their individual desires and urges, but animals in which the individuals act for the generality lose the ability to be creative outside of a limited set of situations. Humans who could not be freely creative would not be humans. I admit that most people have few creative thoughts and do very little that is outside the norm, but the outliers are necessary for any social, intellectual, political, scientific, or other change. We need outliers, and that implies that we need a wide variety of people from those who require constant care to those who can imagine what couldn’t be. But having that breadth of intellectual capacity does not require seven billion people. It doesn’t even require one billion.

    Perhaps there should be stringent requirements for becoming an adult such as walking across the Sahara Desert from Timbuktu to Oran, or maybe camping out near the South Pole for a few months (either Winter or Summer), or something else along those lines.

So reader, what do you think? Must it begin here and now, or can we put things off forever? Do we need a new world order, or should we crawl along as we have for these past millions of years?