Technically J

You are fearing AI, aren't you? Well. If so, a historian can only laugh at you. 1. First of all, just 5 years ago people thought COVID would end international travel, trigger the collapse of everything, etc. They thought we would be wearing masks forever. 2. In the 2010s, they feared that climate change could trigger civilizational collapse in 10 years. 3. In 2010, they also thought peak oil would be reached in 5 years. It was like a certiainty. The exact reverse happened. 4. In 2012, millions worried that the end of the Maya Long Count calendar foretold a global catastrophe. 5. In 2008–2009, people feared that experiments at the Large Hadron Collider could accidentally create a black hole capable of destroying the Earth. 6. In the 1980s, people feared that a nuclear winter following a US–Soviet war could destroy modern civilization and perhaps threaten humanity itself. 7. In the 1980s, people feared that AIDS might develop into a vastly larger global demographic catastrophe. 8. In the 1970s, people feared that population growth would outrun the world's capacity to produce food. 9. In the 1970s, people feared that industrial civilization would exhaust essential natural resources within decades. 10. In the 1970s, some scientists and journalists worried about substantial global cooling. 11. In the 1960s, people feared that the population explosion would produce mass famine on a planetary scale. This was the "demografic problem" of the moment. 12. In the 1960s, people feared that radioactive fallout was progressively poisoning the entire biosphere. 13. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, millions had exceptionally good reason to fear that nuclear war could begin within days. 14. In the 1950s, people feared that thermonuclear war could destroy civilization within their lifetime. 15. In 1910, some people feared that Earth passing through the tail of Halley's Comet would poison the atmosphere with cyanogen gas. 16. Around 1900, writers and scientists speculated about the exhaustion of coal, demographic pressure, degeneration, and the eventual collapse of industrial civilization. 17. In the late nineteenth century, people worried that astronomical collisions—comets striking Earth in particular—could annihilate civilization. 18. During the revolutionary and Napoleonic era, Christian millenarians interpreted revolution and continental war as possible signs of the Apocalypse. 19. During the seventeenth century, wars, plague, famine, comets, and religious conflict repeatedly generated expectations of divine punishment and approaching apocalypse. 20. In the sixteenth century, the Reformation produced intense eschatological expectations: Catholics and Protestants could each identify the opposing religious order with forces preceding the Apocalypse. 21. In 1534–1535, the Anabaptist regime at Münster was built partly around the expectation that a new sacred order associated with the End Times was arriving. 22. After Constantinople fell in 1453, some Christians interpreted Ottoman expansion through apocalyptic prophecy. 23. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, famine, plague, war and unusual celestial phenomena repeatedly activated expectations of the Last Judgment. 24. Around the year 1000, some Christians certainly entertained eschatological expectations. 25. Early Christians lived with a particularly powerful expectation: Christ would return, the dead would rise, history would terminate, and judgment would follow. History is boring. It's always the same thing over and over again.