born.” But that was back in the fourth century. American apocalypticism has a much more recent history, from Shaker predictions the world would end in 1794 to famed radio evangelist Harold Camping’s calculations that the apocalypse was coming in 1994—and then, when that didn’t happen, in 1995. Camping went on to announce that the end times would commence on May 21, 2011, after which would come “five months of fire, brimstone and plagues on Earth, with millions of people dying each day, culminating on October 21st, 2011 with the final destruction of the world.” When none of this came to pass, Camping said, “We humbly acknowledge we were wrong about the timing,” although for the record no individual ever humbly acknowledged anything while referring to themselves as “we.” I’m reminded of something my religion professor Donald Rogan told me once: “Never predict the end of the world. You’re almost certain to be wrong, and if you’re right, no one will be around to congratulate you.”
Camping’s personal apocalypse arrived in 2013, when he died at the age of ninety-two. Part of our fears about the world ending must stem from the strange reality that for each of us our world will end, and soon. In that sense, maybe apocalyptic anxieties are a by-product of humanity’s astonishing capacity for narcissism. How could the world possibly survive the death of its single most important inhabitant—me? But I think something else is at work. We know we will end in part because we know other species have ended.
“Modern humans,” as we are called by paleontologists, have been around for about 250,000 years. This is our so-called “temporal range,” the length of time we’ve been a species. Contemporary elephants are at least ten times older than us—their temporal range extends back to the Pliocene Epoch, which ended more than 2.5 million years ago. Alpacas have been around for something like 10 million years—forty times longer than us. The tuatara, a species of reptile that lives in New Zealand, first emerged around 240 million years ago. They’ve been here a thousand times longer than we have, since before Earth’s supercontinent of Pangaea began to break apart.
We are younger than polar bears and coyotes and blue whales and camels. We are also far younger than many animals we drove to extinction, from the dodo to the giant sloth.
* * *
In the spring of 2020, a few weeks after the emergence of a novel coronavirus began to shut schools and clear out grocery stores in the U.S., someone sent me a collection they’d made of times I’d publicly mentioned my fear of an infectious disease pandemic. On the podcast 10 Things That Scare Me, I’d listed near the top, “a global disease pandemic that will result in the breakdown of human norms.” Years earlier, in a video about world history, I’d speculated about what might happen “if some superbug shows up tomorrow and it travels all these global trade routes.” In 2019, I’d said on a podcast, “We all must prepare ourselves for the global pandemic we all know is coming.” And yet, I did nothing to prepare. The future, even in its inevitabilities, always feels vague and nebulous to me—until it doesn’t.
After my kids’ school closed, and after I’d found a mask that I’d bought years earlier to minimize sawdust inhalation while building their tree house, but long before I understood the scope of the pandemic, I called my brother, Hank, and told him I was feeling frightened. Hank is the levelheaded one, the sane one, the calm one. He always has been. We have never let the fact of my being older get in the way of Hank being the wise older brother. Ever since we were little, one of the ways I’ve managed my anxiety is by looking to him. My brain cannot reliably report to me whether a perceived threat is really real, and so I look at Hank, and I see that he’s not panicked, and I tell myself that I’m okay. If anything were truly wrong, Hank wouldn’t be able to portray such calm confidence.
So I told Hank I was scared.
“The species will survive this,” he answered, a little hitch in his voice.
“The species will survive this? That’s all you’ve got for me???”
He paused. I could hear the tremble in his breath, the tremble he’s been hearing in my breath our whole lives. “That’s what I’ve got for you,” he said after a moment.