14

What Now?

(1945–present day)

How the whole world was bound into a single system of global finance, trade and commerce. Can the earth and its living systems sustain humanity’s ever-increasing demands?

 

ON A WINDSWEPT, treeless, barren moor, three weird witches dance around a bubbling cauldron, casting spells that let them gaze into the future: ‘When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning or in rain?’

Such is the setting for this opening scene of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, about a man who would be king. It also works well as a backdrop for the final one thousandth of a second to midnight that represents the extraordinary sixty years that have followed the Second World War when seen on the scale of earth history as a twenty-four-hour clock. In that tiny fragment of time so much changed in both the human and the natural worlds that no number of books can hope to tell the whole story.

To help us see the job through, these witches will now conjure up the ghosts of three thinkers from the past whose prophetic insights bring into sharp focus dilemmas of today that may yet determine the future for all living things.

Can capitalism survive?

The ghost of Karl Marx haunts anyone who believes in the supremacy and wisdom of the human system of economic organization called capitalism. Marx believed it to be merely a necessary historical phase which would one day be replaced by an altogether fairer society (see page 271).

In the first three weeks of July 1944 more than 700 bankers, representing the forty-four nations allied against Hitler’s Germany, met in secret at Bretton Woods, deep in the forests of New Hampshire. Their goal was to devise a robust financial system that would not only repair the damage done by two devastating World Wars but would minimize the risk of such conflicts ever happening again.

The bankers agreed on the two wars’ main causes. Industrialized nations had ignored the sacred mantra of free trade, as originally spelled out in the eighteenth century by Adam Smith (see page 253), and had instead engaged in a pernicious cycle of mercantile protectionism, exploiting their colonies as security for raw materials (for making goods) and consumer markets (for selling them). A series of economic blocs had competed for global supremacy, leading inevitably to conflict, especially when times got tough.

The stock market crash of 1929, which led to a period now known as the Great Depression of the 1930s, was one such time. Instead of a global system of central banks co-ordinating rescue, each colonial empire was confined to the limits of its own trading system – such as the Sterling Area in the British Empire. If Britain was struck by a slump, its colonies suffered appalling hardships as the one-way flow of produce to the mother nation stalled. Workers in the factories of the industrialized motherland suffered too, since few consumers in its overseas markets could now afford to buy finished goods. Spiralling unemployment led to social unrest which could be settled only by massive state intervention, often implemented through rearmament programmes, potentially leading, as in Nazi Germany, to global war.

The Bretton Woods system was designed to prove Marx wrong. Capitalism was not doomed, but required a single global system that allowed the free flow of capital and goods without exchange controls and government taxes. In the changed conditions following two World Wars, imperialist nations that had previously relied on their colonies for economic strength were now encouraged to relinquish them and establish an international collaborative financial framework instead. Free trade agreements would allow Smith’s invisible hand of market forces to regulate the supply and demand of goods, taking away from individual nations the power of economic blackmail as well as the threat of being sunk without trace.

Welfare states, democracy and universal suffrage

It was also thought that governments should create a ‘safety net’ for the welfare of their citizens, providing payments in the event of unemployment, healthcare for the poor and state pensions for the elderly and infirm. Welfare states were designed to alleviate economic hardship sufficiently to eliminate the likelihood of French-, Chinese-, Russian- or German-style popular revolts. Further reforms included universal adult suffrage, adopted between the wars by countries like Britain, which, after protracted lobbying by suffragettes, extended the right to vote to all women over the age of twenty-one in 1928. The huge nation of India followed in 1950 after gaining its political independence. The voting rights of blacks were at last enforced in the United States following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and women finally got the vote in Switzerland in 1971. South African blacks were eventually enfranchised after the racist apartheid system collapsed in 1994, and on 20 January 2009 the United States inaugurated its first Afro-American President, Barack Obama.

During the sixty years after the Second World War, free trade, welfare states and democratic governments underpinned by universal suffrage came to dominate the politics of much of the human world. The principles of capitalism and free trade were enshrined in a system of global exchange championed by the World Trade Organization, established in 1995. By 2007 it had 123 nations as members, with most of the world’s remaining countries – including Russia, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Ethiopia, Algeria and Afghanistan – waiting to join.

The Soviet Union and China had not been party to the Bretton Woods Agreement. In October 1949 Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China declared itself a one-party state. The communists’ defeated political rivals, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, fled to the small island of Taiwan, where they remain to this day, as capitalist converts firmly tied to the Western camp.

Between 1945 and 1991 China and the Soviet bloc confronted the capitalist West with closed, centrally managed systems backed up by massive armament programmes. Thanks to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), atomic weapons ultimately helped keep the peace between the ideologically divided communist East and the capitalist West during what was called the Cold War.

A number of flashpoints arose during this period that could have led to global war. They include the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the Korean War (1950–3), the Vietnam War (1964–75) and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979). But then, starting in 1985, the Soviet Union (USSR) began to disintegrate through economic stagnation, and its satellite countries in Eastern Europe and around the Baltic Sea (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) snatched at the greater political and social freedoms offered to them by reforming Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Following a failed coup in 1991 the Soviet empire finally collapsed as former republics declared their independence – in December 1991 fourteen out of the fifteen Soviet states signed the Alma Ata Protocol effecting the dissolution of the Soviet Union. On Christmas Day President Gorbachev resigned as President of the USSR, declaring the office extinct, and even Russia became a capitalist democracy of sorts. On 1 May 2004 seven former Soviet bloc countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary) formally joined the European Union. Romania and Bulgaria joined later, on 1 January 2007.

China remained a communist one-party state. Economic reforms introduced by party leader Deng Xiaoping in 1978 have brought it increasingly within the capitalist system of commerce and trade, culminating in its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. Communist China is modern capitalism’s biggest growth area. The Asian economies of China and India have almost limitless supply of cheap manpower (see power of rice, pages 122–3). As a result, they are now on a path to take over from the United States as the kingpins of global capitalism.

Meanwhile, the imperial powers of Europe let their former colonies go. Sometimes the process happened peacefully, sometimes not. It took years for some of the new countries to find their feet – especially those, like French-controlled Algeria, whose populations included thousands of settlers from the colonial motherland.

The discovery of oil, and the rise of extremism

Nations in the Middle East were transformed not only by political independence, but by the discovery beneath their deserts of huge reserves of crude oil.

In the 1930s disaffected British diplomat Jack Philby handed the United States a precious gift, through his close friendship with Arab ruler Ibn Saud. Following the collapse of Ottoman power at the end of the First World War, Ibn Saud conquered the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and formed a new kingdom which he named after himself – Saudi Arabia, recognized internationally by the Treaty of Jeddah on 20 May 1927. Largely thanks to Philby’s influence, US oil companies were granted exclusive rights to prospect the Saudi desert for oil.

By 1938 their searches had borne fruit. Aramco, formed by the American oil industry to exploit the reserves of Saudi Arabia, soon became the largest oil company in the world. By 1950 its profits were so huge that Ibn Saud demanded a 50 per cent share, threatening to nationalize the firm. In the end the US government compensated Aramco’s shareholders by providing them with a tax break called the Golden Gimmick, equivalent to the amount siphoned off by the Saudi regime.

The oil money pouring into the Middle East transformed the influence of the region’s rulers, whose grip on power was backed up by their sponsorship of a strict form of Sunni Islam. Wahhabism was an eighteenth-century reform movement, founded by Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, that sought to purify Islam. It was subsequently adopted by the House of Saud, which had historically ruled the region of Najd in central Arabia, where Wahhabism first took hold.

Backed with money from the oil-hungry West and with tight control of Islam’s holiest cities, this creed spread quickly through the region via religious schools, newspapers and outreach organizations. When Western powers created the State of Israel in 1947, carved out of Palestinian lands where the majority of the existing population were Muslims, a potent mix of Islamicism and anti-Western sentiment exacerbated the long-standing hostility between the Jewish and other Middle Eastern peoples that had its origins back in the pre-Christian world (see page 147–8). Racial war, bitter hatred and international terrorism still pour from this Middle Eastern conflict, which remains unresolved.

Between them, cheap Chinese labour and the rich oilfields of Arabia underpin today’s global economy. They demonstrate that capitalism has no intrinsic requirement for democracy, despite some of its leading advocates declaring otherwise.

The desire for personal enrichment through the never-ending acquisition of material possessions – which Marx called ‘commodity fetishism’ – has, since the end of the Second World War, provided a common incentive for people to collaborate in business regardless of colour, politics, race or creed. Capitalism has proved remarkably robust. Despite a succession of crises such as the Middle Eastern oil shock of 1973, the Latin American debt crisis (1981–94), the great global stock market crash of 1987, the East Asian financial meltdown of 1997 and the hedge-fund crisis of 1998, the scheme of central bank interventions first proposed by the Bretton Woods bankers in 1944 has managed to recalibrate and rebalance the global economic system to keep underlying growth on track. Until 2008 the United States had avoided serious recession, with only two brief interruptions in 1987 and 2000, leading some politicians to claim that the traditional capitalist boom-and-bust cycle, one of Marx’s main criticisms of the system, had finally been put to rest thanks to modern economic management.

However, the ‘credit crunch’ that began in the summer of 2007 has caused such optimists to reappraise their faith in free markets. Without massive central government intervention in many of the world’s leading economies, including the US and Britain, the capitalist financial system would have completely collapsed during 2008. As a result, many of the world’s biggest banks went either bankrupt or were taken over by taxpayers.

The enemies of ‘free trade’ fight back

Unfortunately, the system of free trade, proudly trumpeted by advocates such as Ronald Reagan (US President 1981–9) and Margaret Thatcher (British Prime Minister 1979–90), has proved in reality to be far from free. Massive subsidies for farmers in Europe under the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), introduced in 1958, meant that the playing field was uneven. Poor countries in Africa, whose economies had been shaped by their colonial past, depended on income from food exports to feed their people. But the rich countries artificially depressed prices through subsidies and import taxes, claiming that they had to do so to protect the livelihoods of their own farmers.

Mountains of European butter, lakes of wine and stocks of cheese and grain that far exceeded what Europe itself could consume were dumped at rock-bottom prices, putting Third World farmers out of business. Although many of these market abuses have since been addressed they have left a deep legacy of mistrust. Lacking an industrialized base, many poor countries have been forced to borrow funds from First World banks. Unable to pay back their loans, they have been caught in a vicious spiral of dependency. To add to their economic woes, many colonies won their political independence only for their governments to fall into the hands of corrupt, despotic rulers, who, with weapons sold to them by developed nations, greedily clung to power. Ethnic and tribal disputes have in many ex-colonies replaced the tyranny of arbitrary foreign rule.

These are some of the reasons why capitalism has failed to make amends for the colonialism of the past. Desperate people are resorting to desperate measures. While refugees flood from the barren wastes of places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia, terrorist groups recruit suicide bombers to their cause in the repressed oil-rich states of the Middle East. Fourteen of the nineteen terrorists who smashed three American airliners into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on 11 September 2001 came from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Their actions were an extreme example of a devastatingly effective new way of making desperate voices heard. With such a dramatic increase in international terrorism, fuelled by the politics of envy, race and inequality, the spectre of Marx’s warnings lives on in the twenty-first-century ‘War on Terror’.

Can human populations keep on rising?

Witch number two conjures up a ghost no less haunting. Thomas Malthus was so concerned about rising levels of human populations that he prophesied a time when nature would take revenge (see pages 256–7).

The massive increase in the population of the world during the twentieth century is directly linked to rising economic wealth. At 78.8 years, life expectancy in Britain is now thirty years higher than it was in 1900 – and more than thirty-two years higher than in sub-Saharan Africa today. By far the biggest recent increases in population have been in Asia. China and India between them contain nearly half the world’s overall population of 6.7 billion – a number projected to rise to more than nine billion by 2050.

The fact that so many more people are now crowded on to the same-sized planet has dramatically changed life on earth in the last sixty years. Natural habitats have been devastated by rapid industrialization and the growth of towns and cities. Deforestation, mining, deep-sea trawling and intensive agriculture are some of the main causes of the massive decline in the number of species on earth.

A sixth mass extinction?

A sixth extinction event may turn out to be no less profound than the five previous mass extinctions that are known to have occurred in prehistory (for an example, see Permian Mass Extinction, page 40). Human activities over the last few hundred years are now thought to be responsible for increasing natural rates of extinction by as much as 1,000 per cent, with some experts estimating that two million different species of plants and animals may already have fallen victim to habitat loss, increased farming, pollution and infrastructure projects such as the building of dams. The rate of extinctions today is reckoned to be between one hundred and one thousand times greater than the historic norm known as the background rate. According to the World Conservation Union Red List of Threatened Species, as many as 52 per cent of all major living species are in jeopardy; plant extinctions head the list, with 70 per cent of species reported to be at risk.

Deforestation accelerated dramatically during the twentieth century, especially in the tropics, as demand for hardwood products rose to new heights. Between 1920 and 1995 nearly 800 million hectares of tropical forests were cleared, an area approaching that of the United States of America. Between 1980 and 1990 roughly 15.4 million hectares of forest – an area almost double the size of the United Kingdom – were felled each year.

Such destruction has been driven by economics, usually regardless of the human or natural cost. Poor people in post-colonial countries desperately need a crop they can easily and cheaply trade for cash. Gang violence has become synonymous with illegal logging. There have been more than 800 land-related murders in the Amazon region over the past thirty years. Sometimes things got personal. Sister Dorothy Stang was an American nun who devoted her life to educating people living in the Amazon rainforest as to how they could extract natural forest products without resorting to cutting down trees. After reporting illegal loggers to the Brazilian authorities she began to receive death threats. On 12 February 2005, as she walked to a meeting in her village, she was shot by two gunmen at point-blank range. They then emptied another five bullets into her dead body.

Chopping down trees destroys more than just animals, insects and humans. It also sterilizes the earth itself. Soil quality is severely compromised in areas with no trees because the ground is exposed to erosion by the weather. Deforestation is also thought to have a significant effect on rainfall patterns, since it is through the natural process of transpiration that much of the world’s water, locked up in the ground, ends up seeded in clouds (see page 29).

Hunting by humans is another major cause of extinctions. One extraordinary example, which occurred in the late nineteenth century, is the case of the North American passenger pigeon. These birds were once so numerous that their flocks regularly stretched more than a mile across the skies during springtime migrations from the south to their breeding areas in New England. Human hunting began in earnest in the 1860s and 1870s to provide a source of cheap meat for the growing cities on the east coast of the United States. In 1869 Van Buren county in Michigan sent more than seven million of the birds to markets in the east. Such extreme levels of hunting meant that by 1914 the passenger pigeon, a species which once numbered more than five billion individuals, was added to the list of the extinct.

The same story may soon be repeated for thousands of other species, some as common as the cod. A study released in 2006 concluded that one third of all fishing stocks worldwide have now collapsed to less than 10 per cent of their previous levels and that if current fishing trends continue the seas will be virtually empty of edible fish by the year 2050. Bottom-trawling, the practice of dragging long trawl nets along the sea floor, churns up seabeds so severely that the damage to deep-sea ecosystems is far greater than any amount of man-made pollution that leaches into the oceans.

Pollution caused by the huge rise in human population is another reason for the rapid decline in the diversity of living things. Air pollution comes from the burning of fossil fuels, causing rainwater to become acidic. Metal foundries and petrochemical plants are sources of poisonous contaminants that destroy delicate ecosystems. Landfill sites release methane and harmful chemicals like cadmium, found in discarded electronic products, which poison the surrounding soil. In 2007 Britain had the worst record for landfill use in Europe, discarding some twenty-seven million tonnes of waste into dumps that now extend across 227 square kilometres.

Today the number of households in China is increasing at twice the rate of its population growth due to increasing divorce rates and more families living apart as young people seek employment in cities. If everyone in China led a lifestyle similar to that of people in Europe and America, it would require roughly double the amount of raw materials currently used by the world’s entire population. Just to keep up with China’s huge demand for power its government is currently commissioning two new coal-fired power stations every week.

The perils of global warming

The need for resources to power the economic growth driven by the capitalist system led to an increase in global oil production to almost eighty-three million barrels a day in 2005.

The consequences of burning fossil fuels are now well understood. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased dramatically since the 1800s, when fossil fuel deposits ignited man’s first wholly independent source of power, in the form of high-pressure steam (see page 260). Between 1832 and 2007 levels of CO2 have risen from 284 parts per million to 383. Carbon dioxide, like methane, is a gas which has a major impact on the earth’s temperatures by absorbing infrared radiation. Its increasing levels in the atmosphere are reckoned to be the most likely cause of a recent rise in global temperatures that has already led to the shrinking of many of the world’s major glaciers, melting of the ice caps, changes in sea levels and shifting patterns of rainfall.

The geopolitical effects of global warming are already starting to unfold. A war in Darfur, a region of western Sudan the size of France, began in February 2003. It was triggered by decades of drought and soil erosion, probably caused by changing rainfall patterns as a result of global warming. In an echo of what provoked Mongolian tribes to unite under Genghis Khan (see page 206), camel-herding Arab Baggara tribes moved from their traditional grazing grounds to farming districts further south in search of pasture and water. As a result of their attacks on the non-Arab population more than 2.5 million people are thought to have been displaced by October 2006, of whom approximately 400,000 have died of disease, malnutrition or starvation.

Further south in Africa, the HIV virus is destroying the human immune system, causing the death of millions of people left defenceless against common infections. First diagnosed in 1981, the virus somehow jumped the species barrier from monkeys to humans. Since then it has killed more than twenty-five million people, mostly Africans, and infected as many as forty-six million more. There are currently more than a million orphaned South African children, most of them infected themselves, since their parents died from the disease, which is easily passed through body fluids such as breast milk.

Is this what Malthus predicted when he said that one day the human population would be levelled by nature’s intervention through ‘sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague’, and ‘gigantic inevitable famine’?

Can science find a solution?

The most agonizing question of all is that of the third and last witch. Her visions belong to the ghost of the man who many regard as the most influential scientist, naturalist and thinker of all time.

The reason Charles Darwin was so reluctant to publish the theories described in On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man was simply that their conclusions led to the question of whether humans are fundamentally different from other animals. Many people today find Darwin’s prophetic warning that ‘Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin’ hard to accept, either for religious reasons or simply because evidence from all around suggests that humans are not susceptible to the same rules of survival and extinction.

Mankind’s ability to sidestep nature’s systems shows no sign of abating. Since the Second World War his cunning has developed systems that have radically changed the way we relate to each other and to the world around us. Televisions, computers, video games, mobile phones, text messaging and the Internet have taken ordinary people into unnatural worlds where no wildlife can possibly get in their way. Seasons have been abolished as obstacles in the way of consumer choice, with the emergence of air-conditioned supermarkets which can source and deliver tens of thousands of different lines of refrigerated foodstuffs from around the world, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.

Broadcast media, which emerged in a truly mass-consumer form only in the 1950s, transformed the ability of manufacturers to sell their products through advertising. Modern economic growth can now rely on marketing agencies developing elaborate strategies for convincing millions of consumers to buy products not found in nature that no one really needs. Fashions and fads are essential ingredients in modern man’s ‘virtual world’, which further increases the distance between the human world, nature and other living things.

Western science is the self-appointed protector of man’s artificial world. Synthesized drugs have engineered longer lifespans; couples who can’t have children naturally now have the chance through IVF; and slim-hipped women who in the past would probably have died during childbirth can now elect to have Caesareans that minimize the risks to their own health.

Such innovations tamper with the fundamental fabric of nature herself – the path of natural evolution through which species survive or fail based on each generation’s natural adaptations to its surroundings. Artificial selection has been applied by humans to animals and plants since the advent of selective breeding and agriculture more than 10,000 years ago, but modern science, with its recent understanding of life’s genetic code, DNA, aspires to giddy new heights. In the short term its aims are to help genetically engineer out life-threatening diseases or to develop drought-resistant crops. In the long term such ‘solutions’ compound the problems of ever-increasing human populations making demands on the same resource-depleted, environmentally wrecked planet.

How far distant is this approach from Hitler’s attempt to interrupt nature’s flow to produce his master race, weeding out the weak from society, allowing the strong and wealthy who can afford expensive treatments to prosper and thrive?

Dilemmas, ancient and modern

Despite modern appearances, are humans really so different, so apart from nature? What will happen when the earth’s oil runs out? The global addiction to fossil fuels is likely to prove even harder to kick in the twenty-first century than imperial China’s addiction to imported opium in the nineteenth (see page 272). Unless dramatic new levels of investment are made in nuclear energy and renewable energy sources, man’s fossil-fuel-dependent virtual reality could be unplugged by global conflicts over increasingly scarce energy supplies. Financial markets may buckle under the weight of inflation as demand for food and energy soars.

The mantra of ever-increasing economic expansion assumes a world with limitless resources. As discovered by the Roman Empire (see page 163), territorial and economic growth cannot be assured ad infinitum. Plundering the wealth of other continents – a Roman habit inherited first by European explorers and later by Western governments and business corporations – has already been stretched to its limits by the takeover of North America by European settlers and the Scramble for Africa. For how much longer can cheap Asian labour subsidize living standards in the democracies of the West?

What about developing alternative lifestyles that are more sustainable in the long term? Darwin concluded that man has evolved, inescapably, as part of the natural world. Perhaps now is the time to relearn how to live within nature’s means, as some, like Mahatma Gandhi and his followers, have tried to demonstrate. Switch off the electricity, turn out the lights, sell the car, grow vegetables, walk to work, bring back the small local school, learn a craft, buy only what you need, make your neighbours your friends and have fun in simple, traditional ways such as playing cards, storytelling, drama, dancing and building dens outdoors.

But Darwin’s conclusion that humans evolved in the same way as all other life forms suggests that people aren’t naturally well adapted to long-term, rational planning. It has always been the blind watchmaker – nature – that determines, however randomly, the long-term state of life on earth, while individual species either collaborate or battle in the here and now. Evolution depends on the strongest survivors passing on useful traits to their successors, while the weakest fall into obscurity and eventually extinction.

Humans today appear to follow their natural instincts every bit as much as their ancestors did. Modern democracies, like hedge-fund managers, plan around the here and the soon-to-be. Their concern is not with making sacrifices in the present for the sake of alleviating possible risks in an uncertain future. As one twenty-first-century President of the United States famously declared, modern Western lifestyles are ‘blessed’. The pursuit of life, liberty and happiness in the present is what most often seems to count.

Those who hold this view believe humans should continue to live as they do now, except perhaps for a few tweaks here and there. These are the sceptics who believe that all the fuss about finite raw materials and overpopulation is some elaborate hoax propagated by fanatics and societies’ envious have-nots.

Others believe humans, unlike other animals, do have within themselves the capacity for a rational escape from their evolutionary origins. Huge investment in a search for new sources of raw materials, for example by colonizing the moon, could be a stepping stone for exploration elsewhere. Techniques to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions before they leak out into the atmosphere could be perfected and made mandatory throughout the world. Proposals to limit CO2 emissions could be driven by a comprehensive trading system in which governments, companies and individuals bid to purchase a fixed number of credits that cap the total amount produced. Consumers could make a start by making short-haul aeroplane flights morally unacceptable – a modern-day taboo, to take a leaf out of the Australian Aboriginals’ book (see page 166).

Such efforts would have to be applied globally, in a rational, consistent and universal manner. Governments would have to agree to caps on CO2 emissions for their military operations too. Thousands of years of tribal conflict, more recently manifested in nationalistic pride and sporting contests, would have to be set aside for the sake of the greater global good, and for generations to come. It could happen. The European Union and the United Nations are examples of attempts to end centuries of tribal rivalries that have got in the way of collective, thoughtful, long-term policy.

Three final questions as the clock strikes midnight

What if the depletion of the earth’s finite natural resources does bring about the fall of global capitalism? What if climate change really is the beginning of nature’s check on the exponential rise of human populations? What if humanity’s evolutionary instincts prevent it from collectively reaching beyond the short-term satisfaction of its immediate material desires? If the warnings of Marx, Malthus and Darwin do indeed come to pass, their prophecies will take centre stage in the next act in the drama that is life on earth.

Now, at last, the clock finally strikes midnight on our twenty-four-hour history. What on earth happens next promises to be a lively beginning to the first one thousandth of a second in a brand new day.

 

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