2025: A Space Opera

Humanity: a tale of clever apes who built skyscrapers and spaceships only to choke on their own exhaust. The same ingenuity that birthed fire and philosophy now fuels a headlong sprint toward oblivion. In the next couple of years, the window for surviving on Earth’s surface—without retreating to climate-controlled, fortified bunkers, or at least heavily guarded, gated communities—may slam shut. Cascading climate chaos, driven by our psychological flaws and amplified by unchecked systems, is not just a crisis; it’s a curtain call. The stage is set for a finale that’s equal parts tragedy and farce, and the audience is us—laughing, crying, and clutching our denial like a life raft.

Our species’ rise was a masterclass in ambition and creativity, traits that let us tame fire, invent the wheel, and dream of the stars. But those same traits birthed greed and narcissism, now supercharged by technology’s godlike power. The Great Filter, that cosmic choke point hypothesized to block civilizations from interstellar permanence, isn’t just a technological or environmental hurdle. Fundamentally, it's psychological, rooted in the selfishness that festers when ambition outpaces empathy. We’ve built tools to reshape the planet, but our minds—still wired for tribal squabbles and short-term wins—can’t handle the responsibility. The result is a world teetering on the edge, with the next few years poised to decide whether we sputter out in a haze of CO² or retreat underground like roaches.

The evidence is grim. Fossil fuels are peaking—coal, oil, gas—all set to decline not because of some noble shift to renewables, but because we’ve won't stop, "can’t" stop, burning through them. Without affordable energy, the metals and minerals that prop up our factories and farms become pipe dreams. Industrial output will tank, agriculture will follow, and the global economy—built on the fantasy of endless growth—will unravel. Add to that dying ecosystems, vanishing freshwater, and chemical & microplastic pollution so pervasive it’s in our blood, and you’ve got a planet that’s less “home sweet home” and more “hostile alien wasteland.” Climate change isn’t the only villain; it’s the ringleader of a circus of catastrophes, from resource wars to nuclear brinkmanship. And yet, we call this mess “progress,” as if progress means accelerating toward a cliff.

The psychological roots of this disaster are as old as our species. Paleobiologist Olev Vinn’s theory of inherited behavior patterns suggests we’re haunted by the ghosts of Homo erectus’s territoriality and Homo heidelbergensis’s hunting obsession. These traits—aggression, greed, tribalism—worked fine when we were hunting mammoths, but pair them with coal mines, oil wells and nuclear arsenals, and they’re a death sentence. Our 100-year failure to curb fossil fuel use, despite screaming warnings, mirrors the Easter Islanders who chopped down their last tree for a statue, or the Maya who overfarmed their way to collapse. It’s not stupidity; it’s a structural flaw in our wiring, a mismatch between our Stone Age brains and our sci-fi toys. Technology’s promise of control feeds narcissistic fantasies, blinding us to the collective good. We’re not just incompetent; we’re seduced by our own power.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the systems we’ve built to amplify our worst impulses. Capitalism, whether the state-managed version in China or the oligarch-ruled version elsewhere, is an extractive machine that thrives on growth and collapses without it. Both the U.S. and Chinese economies assume infinite resources on a finite planet, ignoring the math. When it hits the wall, stagnation and decline kick in, and no amount of denial can stop it. The U.S. economy, financialized to the hilt, is a house of cards waiting for a breeze. China’s growth miracle, built on coal and concrete, is just as brittle.

The political landscape is even bleaker, a carnival of delusion and manipulation. In the U.S., a third of the population lives in a manufactured reality, where truth is a punching bag for social media, propaganda, and performative lies. This didn’t happen overnight. It started in 1980, when fossil fuel billionaires and religious fundamentalists—both authoritarian to the core—forged a pact to dumb-down America. The Republican Party and Southern Baptist Convention, fueled by neoconservative dogma and neoliberal greed, gutted public education, offshored jobs, and peddled a science-denying Christian nationalism that eroded the wall between church and state. The fall of the Soviet Union supercharged their hubris, spawning fantasies of global dominance through military might and media control. George W. Bush’s presidency was the high-water mark, with neocons dreaming of remaking the Middle East while oil barons backed Israel to lock in energy profits, climate be damned.

Fast forward to 2025, and the chickens are roosting in a post-truth hellscape. Donald Trump’s presidency, propped up by neofascist ideologues like Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, is the rotten fruit of this decades-long project. The MAGA base, weaned on a diet of kayfabe and apocalyptic dispensationalism, clings to Trump like Weimar Germans did to Hitler—a strict father figure promising salvation amid chaos. Fossil fuel and tech elites, like German industrialists backing fascism to crush socialism, prop up Trump to fend off progressive movements. They know the planet’s on borrowed time, but profit comes first. The base’s cultish loyalty, despite worsening conditions, is fed by narratives of rapture and culling straight out of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth or Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind. U.S. support for Israel, tied to both oil interests and end-times prophecy, is just another log on the fire.

The billionaire class, meanwhile, is already hedging its bets. They’re not denying climate change—Thiel, Musk, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt all acknowledge it—but they’re banking on a deus ex machina. AI, they claim, will fix everything: cancer, climate, you name it. Never mind that AI’s a speculative bubble, guzzling energy and public funds while delivering more hype than solutions. Schmidt’s push to “let ’er rip” with coal and gas to power AI is less optimism and more desperation, a Hail Mary from a man who knows the clock’s ticking. Thiel’s even wilder, calling Greta Thunberg the Antichrist and framing regulation as a biblical evil worse than climate collapse. It’s not denial—it’s a rationale, a story they tell themselves to justify torching the planet for one last payday. Most people need a narrative to sleep at night, and the one about AI gods and orbiting space stations works...for Them.

Their luxury bunkers are real, and their space stations with aquaponic greenhouses are on the drawing board, although the idea of a Martian colony is likely just a cover story. Theirs is a secular rapture in which the chosen ones are lifted up while the rest of us fry. It’s the latest chapter in a history of shocks and exploitation. Milton Friedman, the patron saint of neoliberalism, said change comes from crises, real or manufactured. The New Right, his ideological heirs, have spent decades engineering crises to gut regulations, privatize everything, and concentrate wealth. Reagan and Thatcher sold it as utopia—a rising tide lifting all boats—but now it’s apocalyptic, a final battle where the winners bunker down before rocketing skyward, and the losers burn. The shocks aren’t surprises anymore; they’re the system’s heartbeat, a staccato rhythm of volatility that keeps the masses dazed and the elites untouchable.

The Covid pandemic was a dress rehearsal. Billionaires doubled their wealth, some openly toying with eugenics—let the virus “cull the herd,” they mused. That callousness has bled into climate policy, where deportation to Salvadoran gulags, or mass die-offs, are shrugged off as necessary. Supremacist ideas, always simmering, surge to rationalize these horrors. Wealth concentration, another neoliberal triumph, has birthed oligarchs who see themselves as gods. Musk, Thiel, and their ilk are proving that the rules don’t apply to them. When they’re told otherwise, it sparks rage—a counter-revolution not for equality, but for absolute dominion. They don’t want wealth; they want everything. F. Scott Fitzgerald would recognize these "careless people," who smash up things and creatures and then retreat back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it is that keeps them together, and let other people clean up the mess they've made.

The war on science is the final nail. Trump’s administration, in a fit of “pandemic revenge,” is gutting research, from NOAA’s climate models to Princeton’s earth system programs. The excuse? Climate science causes “anxiety” in youth. The real reason? Science threatens profits. If the data’s true, regulation follows, and billionaires like Musk—who raged when his factories closed briefly during Covid—can’t stomach that. Joseph Bast, former head of the Heartland Institute, admitted as much in 2011: if climate science holds, deregulation dies. So they “took another look” at the science, and denial became a mission. It’s not ignorance; it’s strategy, a middle finger to reality itself.

The next couple of years are critical because the tipping points are here. CO², etc. emissions are pushing Earth toward uninhabitability, with feedback loops—melting permafrost, collapsing ice sheets—kicking in faster than models predicted. Resource scarcity, from freshwater to rare earths, is sparking conflicts that could go nuclear. The global economy, tethered to fossil fuels, is a ticking bomb. Without a drastic pivot—regulation, degrowth, rationing—the surface will become a death trap for anyone without a bunker. Gated communities won’t cut it; only reinforced, climate-controlled fortresses will shield the ultra-rich. The rest of us will be "culled."

Collectively, humanity has survived ice ages and predators, even the Early- to Middle- Pleistocene Transition, when our total population was reduced to about 1,280 individuals for over 100,000 years. In the next Transition, however, we'll have been undone by our own cleverness. The Great Filter is us, trapped in a feedback loop of narcissism and denial. The billionaires know it, which is why they’re building escape pods. The MAGA faithful sense it, which is why they cling to Trump, associate him with Jesus (which is already beyond weird) and, somehow, combine their messages (see Trump Bible), in the hope of being saved, if not "raptured," when the shitstorm hits. The rest of us are stuck in the middle, remembering history yet doomed to watch as fools repeat it.

Ultimately, though, there's no reason to despair, if one has a rigpa (unconfused knowledge) of the Big Picture. Observe the Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance of the Cosmos. Shiva dances while trampling upon a demon who symbolizes spiritual ignorance. He dances within a cyclically closed arch of flames (prabha mandala), which represents the cosmic fire that creates and consumes everything, in cyclic existence. The fire also represents the evils, dangers, heat, warmth, light and joys of daily life. He looks calm, even through the continuous chain of creation and destruction that maintains the universe, showing the supreme tranquility of the Atma, the true, eternal, impersonal Self; the witness-consciousness. His upper right hand holds an hourglass-shaped damaru drum. A specific hand gesture (mudra) is used to hold the drum, symbolizing the rhythm of creation and time. His upper left hand contains Agni or fire, which signifies destruction. His lower right hand is in the abhaya mudra gesture as a sign to not fear. The lower left hand is bent downwards at the wrist with the palm facing inward, the arm crossing Naṭarāja's chest, concealing his heart from view, representing tirodhāna, which means “veiling, occlusion, concealment.” For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known (1 Corinthians 13:12). If that isn't Good News, I don't know what is.