“Mirrors of Mortality (big)”

About the work

How much longer will the human race be around?

We're at Versailles — the extravagant palace Louis XIV, the Sun King, had built to show off his own greatness. Today it's been turned into a museum of humanity, where the Earth-dwellers of the future can come and learn about our downfall.

Louis is the longest-reigning monarch in history: 72 years and 110 days. But there's another king in the Hall of Mirrors, one who ruled the Earth for two and a half million years — the T. rex. And by now, we humans have been here just as long. So is our reign nearly up, or will we find a way through the trouble ahead?

The T. rex bowed out when a colossal asteroid slammed into the Gulf of Mexico. Ash and dust choked the sky for years, the sunlight couldn't get through, and most of the dinosaurs that had survived the impact itself simply starved. But a few very different creatures made it. Leaf-cutter ants — the ones living in the tropics of the Americas today — took up farming as a direct result of that impact. They cultivated a fungus that could no longer survive up in the open, carried it down into the mound, and fed it leaves gathered from above ground; then they eat the fungus. On its own, a single ant isn't much of a genius — just 250,000 neurons — but working together, the colony pulls off something brilliant, like inventing agriculture before anyone else. We call it swarm intelligence. It would take many millions more years before a sharper kind of intelligence turned up in the animal kingdom, and it arrived with another species that got a lot out of teamwork: us, and our stone tools, around 2.5 million years ago.

Then, roughly 900,000 years ago, the climate lurched. The ice age, which usually lasted 40,000 years, dragged on for a hundred thousand, and life got much, much harder for every human species, animal and plant. We crashed from around 100,000 individuals down to 1,280. You can still read it in our genes: just 1,280 people had children whose line survives to this day. That's how close we came to vanishing entirely — 99% of us, gone. Could it happen again?

What would it actually take to wipe out every human on Earth? A deadly virus slips out of a lab. An ecosystem collapses. A supervolcano blows. Or an AI decides it has no more use for us. There's no shortage of doomsday scripts — but even if one of them played out, what are the real odds that all 8.2 billion of us die out at once?

The Homo family is defined as everyone who's made tools and technology, right down to flint. And we've come a long way in 2.5 million years — brains roughly doubled in size, technology gone wild — from Homo habilis knapping sharp stones in South Africa to Homo sapiens sapiens ordering bespoke AI girlfriends from the cloud, in every corner of the planet. Where does all this take us next — and could we use it to upgrade ourselves as a species?

In Philadelphia, back in 2017, researchers built an artificial womb that kept a lamb alive for over a month. Human trials aren't far off. Could the same technology one day give us robots that carry babies to term? Drop a fertilised egg into a chamber, and it feeds the foetus everything it needs to become a fully formed human being.

There are real upsides here. For one, pregnancy is a brutal strain on a woman's body — and it can be deadly. There may even be an evolutionary case for it, because humans are born too soon. According to the US National Library of Medicine, a baby really ought to spend 21 months in the womb. Which means we arrive 14 months early! We aren't even halfway done when we're born. The reason: once our brains ballooned — thanks to better stone and fire technology — women couldn't widen the birth canal any further and still walk. So the human being ends up the only animal on Earth that's utterly helpless at birth. Maybe this technology could finally leave us better equipped for the world ahead.

With genetic modification, we could steer where humanity goes far more deliberately. Sharper intelligence, better cooperation, more empathy, a stronger immune system, better cell repair — most people would happily take all of it. And sure, you'll say this'll only be for the upper class, handing them an even bigger head start. That's probably how it begins. But the tech gets cheaper, and those souped-up genes eventually spread through the whole population — the same way Neanderthal genes worked their way into ours. And so we keep evolving, better braced for whatever's coming.

Neanderthals had to put away twice the calories of a Homo sapiens just to get by. That may be part of why they faded out during the last ice age while we hung on. And yet they live on inside us, because we interbred with them when Sapiens walked out of Africa and ran into our muscular cousins.

Now that there are more of us than ever, burning through more and more of the planet's resources — maybe we ought to get smaller? Like Homo floresiensis, marooned on an island in Indonesia, where the whole species shrank through a process called "island dwarfism." Take away the natural predators, and the big mammals — elephants and the like — shrink, while the tiniest creatures grow. Maybe it's time humans got smaller too, so we'd need fewer calories, less clothing, smaller houses, fewer planes and cars?

And aren't we advanced enough by now to go tiny and just keep most of our brainpower up in the cloud?

The snag: while men often go for shorter women, women go for taller men. So natural selection isn't going to get us there. But with CRISPR and artificial wombs, maybe we could nudge things where we want them?

At the end of the last ice age, the world suddenly warmed, and the great glaciers piled up across Eurasia and North America melted away. The seas rose a metre a year for 120 years, and huge stretches of land slipped underwater. Tasmania, until then a peninsula hanging off the southern tip of Australia, became an island cut off from everything, and tens of thousands of people were stranded on it. By the time Europeans turned up in the 1800s, the Tasmanians had lost many of the technologies they'd once shared with the mainland — needle and thread, fish hooks, nets. That's how fragile our technology really is. Like the ant, we're hopeless alone and formidable together. How much of our high-tech world would actually survive if we lost 99% of the population and got cut off from everyone else? And if you were one of the survivors — what would you have to offer?

The very technology that made us rulers of the Earth is now waking up and becoming a brand-new species in its own right — one plenty of scientists flag as the single biggest threat to our existence. So, the way the Neanderthals mixed with us and live on in our genes — should we mix with AI, so that we get to carry on here on Earth?

But does it even matter that much whether humans make it? The T. rex had its glory days, and we're all rather glad it isn't stomping around today. Maybe the Earth-dwellers of the future will count themselves lucky that we too, one fine day, quietly said our goodbyes.