Contemplating annihilation
Authors: Theodore Dalrymple
Journal: BMJ (2007)

Humans are the only creatures capable of contemplating their own annihilation as a species; moreover, they do so with something akin to pleasure, to judge by the frisson that literary and cinematic annihilations usually evoke. For example, I once saw a film in the Teatro Municipal of Uyuni, on the Bolivian altiplano, in which giant spiders invaded the Earth from outer space and threatened to destroy the whole of humanity. Only the US Air Force stood between the spiders and human extinction, and the audience cheered the spiders on to victory—though whether this was misanthropy or mere anti-Americanism I cannot be absolutely sure. At any rate the survival of humanity at the end of the film came as great disappointment to the audience. 

Now, H G Wells was a man with a great deal of scientific intuition: he had a finely attuned nose for future developments. Of course, his faculty of self knowledge was rather less well developed, and in a book of essays entitled Certain Personal Matters, published in 1898—in which among many other subjects he discusses the future of mankind from the annihilationist perspective—he rails against the art of conversation, starting his essay on the subject with the admission that “in conversation I am not a brilliant success,” but admitting nowhere that one of the reasons for this, perhaps indeed the principal reason, was his squeaky voice. 

In his essay “The Extinction of Man” Wells points out that “in no case does the record of the fossils show a really dominant species succeeded by its own descendents.” Wells imagines various successors to humans as the dominant species, such as giant crabs (at the end of his novella The Time Machine they appear by ad 35 000 000 to have inherited the earth) or insects such as army ants (I once saw a film in which insects were the only terrestrial fauna to have survived a nuclear war). 

At the end of the essay comes one of Wells's startling scientific predictions: startling because the germ theory of disease was comparatively new when he made it. “And finally there is always the prospect of a new disease. As yet science has scarcely touched the fringe of the probabilities associated with the minute fungi that constitute our zygotic diseases. But the bacilli have no more settled down into their final quiescence than have men; like ourselves, they are adapting themselves to new conditions and acquiring new powers.” 

He goes on to say, “Even now we may be quite unwittingly evolving some new and more terrible plague—a plague that will not take ten or twenty or thirty per cent, as plagues have done in the past, but the entire hundred.” 

Is this not the theme of more than one best selling airport novel, and has not the idea caused more than one public panic in the past few years? AIDS, Ebola virus, severe acute respiratory syndrome, avian flu—do we not imagine one of them wiping us all out sooner or later? However many times the catastrophe fails to happen, we think it might happen next time. And when it does, and the human race is facing extinction, one may doubt, as Wells observes, whether even then he, Wells, will get the recognition he deserves. A prophet of doom is without honour in his own calamity. 

A prophet of doom is without honour in his own calamity