I. A natural end ahead?
If everything has a beginning and an end, can humanity be the exception? If all stars and galaxies emerge and disappear obeying the same laws of physics, does every cosmic people, human and ET alike, follow the same cycle of social evolution?
All civilizations in space face the same reality: the universe, our shared habitat, is heading for demise. At the end of its expansion, started 13.7 billion years ago at the Big Bang, the universe will die out, either in absolute coldness (the Big Chill) or in complete disintegration (the Big Rip). While the inquiring humans may gain awareness of the course of the world, there’s not much they can do to change it. Humans are to the expanding universe what bugs are to the circling Earth. Even if, by moving elsewhere, humanity can survive the Milky Way’s scheduled collision with the Andromeda galaxy in 3 billion years or the Sun’s programmed death in 6 billion years, it can’t escape the end of everything.
With the ultimate fate of all life forms already written in the laws of nature, the remaining question is how exactly the smart and conscious peoples of the universe, humanity among them, will go? Willing or unwilling? In fun or in pain? For the end of humankind, different hypotheses, serious or wild, have been advanced. Most are catastrophic prophecies where nuclear war, environmental collapse, ET attack… force us into extinction. Few envisage a natural, calm and consensual fading away, similar to that of the human individual.
Such scenario, however, may be unfolding at this very moment: increasing number of human societies are not reproducing enough to maintain their populations. World population, according to UN projections, will begin to drop from mid-21st century, after an all-time peak of 9 billions. Is this downhill future the last stage in the natural life cycle of an intelligent species? Are we facing here the immutable law of nature that, so far, deprives us of (or saves us from) an ET visitor? Let’s think about this on the way to the peak, which will be reached within the lifetime of many of us.