This blog site was created by me to consider technological, scientific, and societal changes from the pre-21st century to the present and then beyond to 2100. Think about how the human experience differs from 180 CE to the present. In less than 1,900 years, the human population of the planet has grown from a little over 300 million to 2.5 billion by 1950 and over 8 billion today. You can’t add that many humans to the planet and not leave a profound footprint.
Along with population have come advancements in technology. The Roman and Han Empires represented the advanced civilizations of their time in 180 CE. Both relied on water, wind, animal and human power to build their worlds. How far removed we are less than 1,900 years later.
During China’s Han Dynasty science and technological advances included the invention of paper, suspension bridges, the wheelbarrow, seismograph, blast furnace and more. Roman technological advances didn’t quite measure up to those from East Asia but included concrete, hard-surfaced roads, aqueducts and the modern Julian Calendar. If you think I forgot to mention the watermill under Rome, that was invented by the Greeks before Rome’s conquest of the Eastern Mediterranean.
These were the advances humans made to alter the world using the intellect of a mere 300 million minds. In the 21st century with 8 billion-plus minds and growing to 10 billion to mine, how different will the world be in 2100? What will be the advances in science? What technological wizardry will we unveil? When there are no more hidden realms on Earth to study, will we go extraterrestrial? This was going through my head as I reached the 21st lap of my morning swim.
To describe this century as the most important in human history, past, present and future, would seem an ego and homocentric comment. It may, however, be the truth because, by the end of this century, human population growth will level off and begin to decline. We will be dealing with the ongoing fallout from climate change requiring us to alter how and where we live. We will rely on technologies to sustain us through changes to the environment and will encounter roadblocks and crises by mid-century that will test our collective wisdom and resolve. We will face future wars far different, and more lethal than what is going on today and has in the past. Our advances in technology and science will revolutionize work, travel, our cities and homes, our bodies, and our minds.
If you think humans are urban-centric today, by 2100, nearly 90% of us will call cities home. The playing field for economic and social activity will be levelled by satellite networks like Starlink and its current nascent competitors. This ubiquitous access to global communication will alter education, technology sharing, and commerce. Add artificial intelligence (AI) and robots to the mix and expect a world far different than the one we live in today.
How we produce energy in the future is already on the horizon today. Burning fossil fuels to produce electricity and move things around will come to an end. Instead, electricity produced through fusion and renewable sources will be what powers the world as the 22nd century unfolds.
Our understanding of genetics will allow us to re-engineer our bodies. We will eliminate genetic and epigenetic diseases. We will move from the corrective medical world of today to a wholly preventive one. Will there be designer babies? Very likely. Will we enhance our genes to add new human capabilities? Also likely. Will we be capable of living to age 200? If we want it to happen and some of us do, then it will be a done deal.
This is what goes through my head every time I reach the 21st lap of my swims. It is pretty nerdy stuff. But if you are intrigued, the next time I write about this subject I will share with you what I think as I swim the 30th lap and the year 3,000.
]]>There is, however, another narrative described by Kyle Harper, Professor of Classics at the University of Oklahoma, in a recently published book entitled The Fate of Rome. The story it tells describes the golden age of Rome’s empire as coincident with a period known as the Roman Climate Optimum, equated with its equivalent, the Medieval Warming Period which has been well described in recent history texts. The Roman Climate Optimum was a benign, warmer, wetter period in and around the Mediterranean Sea, the heart of the empire. And during this period the empire’s population reached its maximum, probably close to 100 million in population. Egypt was the breadbasket of the empire with annual bumper crops blessed by the yearly Nile inundations which varied little throughout the period.
What affected the Empire’s weather in such positive ways? The likeliest explanation is an environment that saw little in the way of variable conditions imposed on it. There were no major volcanic eruptions on the planet that could alter the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface. Annual monsoon records in the Indian Ocean showed consistency. Also true was the reliability of the North Atlantic Oscillation which proved to be a steady benign influence on the Mediterranean climate.
The growth in population, and the expansion of trade with other parts of the planet including Han Dynasty China, India, and Africa, created an avenue for disease transmission along trading routes. The first of many shocks to strike the Empire in the latter part of the 2nd century was a pandemic described as the Antonine Plague. Disease proved to be more destabilizing than all of the court intrigue and military maneuvering typically described in Roman history books. Added to disease came climate change with changes to the North Atlantic Oscillation, periodic failures of the Indian Ocean monsoon, and a resulting decline in crop yields first and foremost in Egypt, and then elsewhere in the Empire.
These were but the first of many environmental and pandemic convulsions to beset the Roman world from the late 2nd-century to the rise of Islam in the 7th. When the Antonine Plague ended the Empire recovered to a degree but never to the peak level of population known in the mid-2nd. Then the mid-3rd-century experienced drought and the return of a pandemic, the Plague of Cyprian. Once more the Empire reeled and saw its population drop dramatically. Changes in political leadership and an almost total dissolution of the Empire followed only to be restored in the late 3rd and the beginning of the 4th century.
Add to this decadal drought in the Central Asian steppes and you have the beginning of the mass migration of tribal groups pressing in the east on the borders of Han China and in the west on the Roman frontier. Waves of mass migrations reached the Rhine and Danube. A pandemic-depopulated Empire took many of these tribes in having them serve in the military to defend the frontier often against their compatriots. Rome granted these refugees of climate change citizenship, land, and homes in plague-emptied villages and towns. In these post-pandemic times, it was no wonder that many in the Roman world turned to the religion of Christianity in search of a better future. Writing at the time describes the beginning of the end of days.
The Empire managed to recover and in the 4th century recentered itself on Constantinople, the new Rome. This was coincident with a return to a more benign climate in the Nile valley and through much of the eastern Roman world. That was not the condition of the steppes of Asia where a megadrought forced native populations to search for greener pastures and water. The pressure on Rome’s frontiers was relentless.
Then came the Huns from the Central Asian steppes, who in the late 4th and beginning of the 5th century, defeated Roman armies and sacked Rome itself. The Empire split in two with a western and eastern half. Roman authority in the west slowly disintegrated as tribes from beyond the Rhine and Danube continued to press into the imperial heartland. By the late 5th century the emperor of Rome was no more. Legions and garrisons in different parts of the western half of the empire continued to hold out for decades before finally the waves of new immigrants overwhelmed them.
The Eastern Roman world remained intact and by the beginning of the 6th century sufficiently recovered to begin a reconquest of the western half of the Roman world. Spain, North Africa, and Italy were once more part of the Roman world. But another pulse of climate change and pandemic ended the restoration attempt.
The first known global pandemic, the Bubonic Plague, arrived along trade routes bringing the bacterium Yersinia Pestis spread by fleas carried on the bodies of rats. When the rats died from the plague the fleas transferred to human hosts. Minimal estimates of lives lost believe 50% of the empire’s population died. Constantinople lost more than half of its population. Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean such as Alexandria and Antioch were turned into ghost towns. The reach of the Bubonic Plague ended at the edge of the Arabian desert leaving places like Mecca and Medina unscathed. The plague was facilitated by climate change. It spread from its Asian origins to the Roman world along the same routes of migrating tribes fleeing megadroughts.
Without the Bubonic Plague facilitated by climate change it is doubtful that Islam would have risen to succeed the Roman Empire in Northern Africa, and the Middle East, let alone conquer Persia which was also subjected to the pandemic. One can draw a conclusion that the caprice of nature was more responsible for the end of the Roman world than all the political subterfuge and civil wars that we read about in Roman history. Climate and pandemics don’t appear in these books that describe Rome’s emperors and its history of conquest and triumphs.
Why is that?
Because it is only recently that climatologists and epidemiologists have looked into the past to understand historical patterns in weather and disease transmission. In the study of Rome, they have found a stark example of how climate change can alter history in dramatic ways. Climate change and accompanying pandemics did more than destroy empires. They also may have been the driving force for the arrival and spread of universal faiths as in the case of Christianity, and later Islam.
So what does this have to do with the present?
Humans today are altering Earth’s climate through the burning of fossil fuels and the carbon emissions these fuels create. Not only is the climate in play, but so is much of Earth’s biodiversity, and ocean sea levels. Changes in precipitation patterns, megadroughts, a population approaching 7.5 billion and climbing, creeping food insecurity, mass extinctions of fauna – these are characteristics of the present Earth.
The Romans of the mid-2nd-century didn’t see what was coming. The Romans in the 4th were less certain and found comfort in a new universal faith. The Romans of the 6th were devastated and never recovered. Are we the people of the planet to be equally blind to what may lie ahead if we don’t alter our course, or should we be accepting of a fate produced by our own unwillingness to alter course?
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