Throughout the history of human civilisation, every culture has had its own idea of the future. The crushing disappointments that are so often part of the human condition have sometimes led to crises of confidence in the future, replacing hope with despair. But most have learned from their life experiences and the stories told by their elders that what we do in the present, when informed by the knowledge of the past, can shape the future in objectively better ways. Our planet is 4.5 billion years old.

While the future can’t be predicted with certainty, it is certain that the future of Earth is shaped by a number of factors including the Sun’s evolution as well as a variety of interconnected environmental, technological, social and economic trends. About the evolution of the Sun renowned astrophysicist Stephen W. Hawking says in his seminal book A Brief History of Time: “A star is formed when a large amount of gas (mostly hydrogen) starts to collapse in on itself due to gravitational attraction. As it contracts the atoms of gas collide with each other more and more frequently and at greater and greater speeds the gas heats up. Eventually, the gas will be so hot that when the hydrogen atoms collide they no longer bounce off each other, but instead coalesce to form helium. The heat released in this reaction, which is like a controlled hydrogen bomb explosion, is what makes the star shine.

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The additional heat also increases the pressure of the gas until it is sufficient to balance the gravitational attraction, and the gas stops contracting. It is a bit like a balloon… Star will remain stable like this for a long time, with the nuclear reactions balancing the gravitational attraction. “Eventually, however, the star will run out of its hydrogen and other nuclear fuels. Paradoxically, the more fuel a star starts off with, the sooner it runs out. This is because the more massive the star is, the hotter it needs to be to balance the gravitational attraction. And the hotter it is, the faster it will use up its fuel. Our Sun has probably enough fuel… [But] when it runs out of fuel, it starts to cool off and so contracts.” The fate of our Sun would be settled down in a possible final state of a “white dwarf”.

The ‘white dwarf’ is considered ‘dead’. Death means our Sun will run out of fuel in its interior. It will cease the internal thermonuclear reactions that enable stars to shine as mentioned above. It will swell into a red giant, whose outer layers will engulf Mercury and Venus and likely reach the Earth. Life on the Earth will end. Entropy, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, causes all isolated physical systems to break down over time and is responsible for the irreversibility. Ilya Prigogine discovered that in an open system ~ that is, a system that imports flows of energy from outside the system into it, through it and out again not only breaks down, but as the flow of energy continues, the system then reorganises itself at a higher level of complexity. Prigogine was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of a major corollary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The Earth itself is an open system that imports energy from the sun that flows into and through the elaborate patterns of energy transfer that make up the earth system, including the oceans, the atmosphere, the various geochemical processes, and life itself. The energy then flows from the Earth back into the universe surrounding it as heat energy in the form of infrared radiation. The essence of the emergent crisis of global warming vis-a-vis climate changes that we are importing enormous amounts of energy from the crust of the Earth and exporting entropy into the previously stable, though dynamic, ecological systems upon which the continued flourishing of civilization depends. For over six millennia, human settlements have thrived in the same climatic niche, characterised by an annual mean temperature range between 110C and 150C.

But with global warming, 19 per cent of the Earth’s surface is projected to experience an annual mean temperature of 290C or higher by 2070, affecting 2.3 billion people and driving climate migration. Researchers have modelled to predict how warm the planet Earth will be. Their model predicts global surface temperature with a threshold as high as 600C in future. Notably land temperatures are depicted to be considerably higher than those over oceans, carrying profound implications for habitability of our planet. About 92 per cent of Earth would be inhabitable for mammals. The dual culprits behind this grim prognosis are the escalating levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a more luminous Sun. The coming together of these would be volcanoes which would shoot carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Roughly 250 million years from now, the Sun would be 2.5 times more luminous than now and lead to further heating of the planet.

Climate change is expected to have many disastrous effects on the planet, including sea level rise, drought, extreme weather events, flooding, wildfires, agricultural challenges, impact of disease patterns, ecological disruptions and species extinctions. In the words of Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of UN: “The world is reaching the tipping point beyond which climate change may become irreversible. If this happens, we risk denying present and future generations the right to a healthy and sustainable planet ~ the whole of humanity stands to lose.” Biodiversity is essential for the processes that support life on Earth, including humans. Without a wide range of animals, plants and microorganisms, we cannot have the healthy ecosystems that we rely on to provide us with the air we breathe and the food we eat. Human actions are compounding the severity of the on going sixth mass extinction on Earth. Mass extinction occurs when 75 percent of the world’s species collapse in less than 2.8 million years.

The current rate at which entire genre of vertebrates, or animals with spinal cords, are going extinct is 35 times greater than the last million years, according to a study published in the peer reviewed journal PNAS in September 2023. The rapid growth of human civilization ~ in the number of people, the power of technology, and the global economy ~ is colliding with approaching limits to the supply of natural resources on which billions of lives depend.

Our consumption patterns are mocking Earth’s resources. Humanity’s footprint already exceeds the planet’s regenerative capacity by 50 per cent. About 85 per cent of the world’s population lives in countries running on a biocapacity deficit. “Growing per capita consumption coupled with declining per capita biocapacity amounts to a growing gap between ecological supply and demand. This overshoot becomes apparent in the form of climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, soil erosion, food scarcity and other problems,” says the Living Planet Report 2014. Consumption patterns are riddled with ironies. Resource-rich countries remain poor, while per capita consumption of developed countries continues to steadily grow.

The economic disparities may lead to social unrest and hinder progress in global issues. The world is facing a global food crisis, with rising food prices and food shortages in many regions. Nearly 282 million people faced high levels of acute food insecurity in as many as 59 countries in 2023, with extreme weather being the second most significant factor driving the crisis, revealed the 2024 Global Report on Food Crisis (GRFC). The report confirms the enormity of the challenge of achieving the goal of ending hunger by 2030. In spite of the impressive increase in food production in the last half century and despite severe warnings in centuries past that humanity was reaching hard limits in its ability to provide more food for more people, many experts are nearly unanimous in pointing to multiple threats confronting the ability of the planet world to expand food supplies.

Migration is a dynamic event influenced by various socioeconomic and political factors; the reasons might vary from region to region. According to a World Bank Report entitled Ebb and Flow, in the climate–optimistic world, water has the ability to amplify the existing movement of people and add urgency to the challenges faced by migrants. Further, the report points out that water deficits result in five times as much migration as water excess. From 1970 to 2000, water unavailability led to a 10 per cent rise in migration. The GRFC 2024 mentioned that in 2022, around 53 million people were internally displaced across 25 countries due to various food crises.

As our scientific revolution accelerated, the invention of powerful new tools and the development of potent new insights led to exciting ways of seeing the world and expansive optimism about the future. What we believed and learnt during the early stages of technology revolution seemed no longer relevant to the hyper-accelerated pace of change. The emergence of new and powerful forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents not just the extension of yet another human capacity, but an extension of the dominant and uniquely human capacity to think. It is abundantly obvious that we as a species have become dominant on Earth because of our capacity to make mental models of the world around us and manipulate those models through thought to gain the power to transform our surroundings and exert domination over the planet.

In the words of Nobel Laureate Al Gore: “Human civilization has reached a fork in the road we have long travelled. One of two paths must be chosen. Both lead us into the unknown. But one leads toward the destruction of the climate balance on which we depend, the depletion of irreplaceable resources that sustain us, the degradation of uniquely human values, and the possibility that civilisation as we know it would come to an end. The other leads to the future.”

(The writer is a retired IAS officer)