THE END IS ALWAYS NEAR
Apocalyptic Moments from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses
Dan Carlin
William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Dan Carlin 2019
Cover design by Jack Smyth
Cover image © Getty Images/flubydust
Dan Carlin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008340926
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008340940
Version: 2019-09-24
To Brittany, Liv, and Avery
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1: Do Tough Times Make for Tougher People?
Chapter 2: Suffer the Children
Chapter 3: The End of the World as They Knew It
Chapter 4: Judgment at Nineveh
Chapter 5: The Barbarian Life Cycle
Chapter 6: A Pandemic Prologue?
Chapter 7: The Quick and the Dead
DO YOU THINK that modern civilization will ever fall and our cities will ever lie in ruins?
It sounds like an overused science fiction theme, with the archaeologists of the future carefully poking around the rusting skeletons of New York, London, or Tokyo’s skyscrapers, subways, or sewers; removing our dead from their graves and studying them like we do ancient Egyptian mummies; trying to decipher our language, unlock the code that is our writing, and figure out who we were. To imagine our tombs, buildings, and human remains being treated the way we today treat ancient archaeological finds might seem unimaginable, but there’s a pretty good chance that’s what the mummy being excavated thought about his time and place, too.
There’s no right answer to a question like that, of course. Many of the questions raised in this book fall into that same unanswerable class. Maybe that’s part of what makes them intriguing.
Just noting past evidence and extrapolating it out to future events can get weird quickly. To imagine things that have happened many times in history repeating in the modern era is to dabble in science fiction. It is a very thin membrane that separates factual history from unprovable and speculative fantasy. The instant in which we all live is the point at which those two things—the hard chronology of recorded names and dates and the what-ifs and alternate realities of possible futures—intersect. To imagine the twenty-first-century world being hit with a great plague like the great disease pandemics of the past is fantasy, yet it’s also extremely possible and has happened many times before. What’s the connection between the factual past and the speculative future?
I am told that any conventional book should answer questions or should at least provide an argument. If that’s true, this will not be a conventional book. It’s more of a collection of loosely connected vignettes. I have no argument, which is consistent with the approach we take in the podcast as well. My approach is that of a nonexpert, for that is what I am. Historians, political scientists, geographers, physicists, sociologists, philosophers, authors, and intellectuals in general have all weighed in over the eras on all the sorts of issues we ponder in this book, each doing so using their own methods and viewing them through their own eras, specialties, and cultural lenses.
While a modern geographer might cite global historical analogies to make an argument about a civilization “falling,” or a physicist provide the math to determine the likely