Enough about sailing and back to issues of the day. This post is a serious one and not for the faint of heart.

So, how about AI’s mass extinction of humans that the Tech Bros are warning us about? That is hardly a pleasant topic, and some would argue that for someone at my advanced age—mid 80s—that such a horrendous idea is irrelevant. Yet this is what we are being told by the Tech Bros, who, by the way, are the ones responsible for getting us into this mess. Something like a mass extinction takes a long time so why should we old folks worry? But what about our children and grandchildren? Human life wiped out in 10 years?

What are we to make of all this? The timing may be off but they may have a point.

Let’s start off with the Big Picture and how we got to where we are in the first place. This is what we now know, thanks to the Web, Hubble and Kepler telescopes and all the new technology and the legacy of geniuses like Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein:

The universe began with a Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago. Cosmic dust began to form “planetary systems” with a star in the middle, surrounded by objects called planets. Assisted by gravity, planetary systems began to form galaxies consisting of millions of planetary systems, billions for some galaxies. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is estimated to have over 100 billion planetary systems, perhaps as many as 400 billion. Scientists now believe the number of galaxies in the universe number in the trillions. They also believe that eventually the universe will run out of hydrogen and die. But wait! Some scientists also believe that our “universe” is part of a multiverse. These concepts and ideas are where science and religion converge. It is above our paygrade as Homo sapiens on the planet Earth to begin to comprehend fully.

And what about us, the Planet Earth?

Our solar system came into being about 4.5 billion years ago and our star (the sun) is about halfway through its life of about ten billion years. In other words, we only have a few billion years left before the solar system vanishes, but since our sun will become a red giant before it fizzles out, we on the planet Earth have only about a billion years left before life on Earth will vanish due to high temperatures. “Only” a billion years.

And how long have Homo sapiens been around? We are newbies—only about 300,000 years. Hey, that is no time at all! And what about us modern humans? The first writing (Sumerian) did not emerge until around 6,000 years ago, about the same time as the wheel was invented and fire was harnessed. And the population of us humans? At the time of the Great Axial Age—2,500 years ago—when “modern” religious thought was developing, the estimated population of the planet Earth was only about 150-200 million people. Preindustrial revolution—only a 150 years ago— it was about one billion. Today it is over eight billion.

Excuse me? Do we really think that life as we know it as it is today will just continue indefinitely? Of course not. The “advanced life” of us Homo spiens has been around only a few thousand years. And there are ominous signs that we are getting perilously close to the edge. Is “our time in the sun” as top dogs on the planet Earth coming to an end?

But here is what is pertinent. Mass extinctions it turns out are part of the history of life on the planet Earth. In fact, there have been five mass extinctions over the 4.5 billion years that have eliminated between 75-95 percent of all life at the time of each extinction. This may sound dire but each time a mass extinction happened, it created possibilities for new life forms to emerge.

Thanks to AI here is a summary of the five mass extinctions:

1. Ordovician–Silurian Extinction
   • Around 444 million years ago
   • A rapid global ice age caused sea levels to drop sharply, destroying shallow marine habitats and eliminating about 85% of marine species, including primitive trilobites and brachiopods.

2. Late Devonian Extinction
   • Around 375 to 360 million years ago
   • Extensive plant evolution changed soil nutrients and triggered massive algae blooms, draining oxygen from the oceans and killing about 75% of species, heavily hitting coral reefs and early fish.

3. Permian–Triassic Extinction (”The Great Dying”)
   • Around 252 million years ago
   • Cataclysmic volcanic activity in Siberia released massive greenhouse gases, acidifying oceans and warming the planet. It remains Earth’s worst crisis, wiping out 96% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrate species.

4. Triassic–Jurassic Extinction
   • Date: Around 201 million years ago
   • Intense volcanic eruptions from the Central Atlantic magmatic province drove rapid climate change, destroying about 80% of species but crucially clearing ecological space for dinosaurs to dominate the land.

5. Cretaceous–Paleogene Extinction
   • Around 66 million years ago
   • Description: A massive asteroid struck the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, blocking sunlight with ash and dust, collapsing the food chain, and eradicating 75% of life—including all non-avian dinosaurs—which allowed mammals to rise.

So the question is not “if” life, as we know it today, will eventually come to an end on this fragile planet but when. And what we are hearing now from scientists and other experts who follow this sort of thing is that it might be a lot sooner than we would like. In fact, scientists tell us that we are already in the Era of the Sixth Great Mass Extinction caused by what we humans are doing to eliminate other life forms on the planet.

Here are the biggest existential threats that we are facing right now on the planet Earth, which should come as no surprise, and which could play a role in the Sixth Mass Extinction including the question of whether we humans become one of the casualties.

· Climate change. Despite the denials by Trump and many of his followers, global temperatures are rising and are having a devastating impact on life on our planet and surely will get worse if we can’t do better than we have been doing. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List has documented over 900 animal and plant species explicitly driven to extinction in modern times, though scientists estimate the actual total is significantly higher due to unrecorded losses. Rising sea levels, forest fires, floods, enormous storms and devastating droughts are already happening. Humans are already being affected and it will only get worse if we do not change course.

· Nuclear weapons. The global nuclear situation today involves roughly 12,000 active warheads across nine countries, with major powers reversing decades-long reduction trends by expanding their arsenals. Russia and the United States have about 5,000 each—twice as much as was the case only a few decades ago— and the era of post-Cold War disarmament has ended. The nuclear bombs today are bigger and far more destructive than what were used on Japan in World War II. A full blown nuclear holocaust could end most life on the planet and usher in the Sixth Mass Extinction, which would include us humans. And it would only take one nuke to ruin your day if you happened to be living near a nuclear bomb explosion.

And who is walking around being followed by a soldier carrying the briefcase with the nuclear code? What if Trump had a really bad day? In fact, this week he threatened Iran with total and complete destruction of the entire country and culture, which will happen “very quickly.” This could mean only one thing….

· Other weapons of mass destruction. Besides nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction are grouped into three other categories: chemical, biological, and radiological weapons. I have not been able to find out how many of these weapons exist though there are certainly a lot. International treaties exist, but it is not clear how strong the treaties are and the use of any one of these weapons could have catastrophic results.

· Artificial Intelligence. As you know, some of the Tech Bros are giving humans only a decade before we could be eliminated by AI. This warning is starting to get attention and raise some eyebrows. This week Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) and Dario Amodie (CEO of Anthropic) made speeches at the United Nations, warning of the dire consequences if AI goes unregulated.

What does this mean for us? I know that I do not sound like an optimist but in the short term—the next few decades—I am hopeful we will muddle through. It is the long term which I am worried about.

These questions also bring us closer to the meaning of life. We humans are spiritual creatures by nature. Thanks again to AI, here is a capsule history of human religion on the planet Earth:

· 400,000 years ago: The earliest disputed evidence of intentional placement of objects with the dead comes from sites like Sima de los Huesos in Spain, involving Homo heidelbergensis.

· 100,000 to 300,000 years ago: Early intentional burials by Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens (such as at Shanidar Cave) suggest a growing concern for the dead and early ideas of an afterlife.

· 50,000 years ago: Clear, widespread symbolic culture, art, red ochre use in ceremonies, and complex grave goods emerge with modern human behavior during the Upper Paleolithic.

· 12,000 years ago: Monumental architecture dedicated to communal rituals appears at sites like Göbekli Tepe, marking the rise of organized religious structures.

· 3,000-2,200 years ago: The great Axial Age and the origin of modern religions. This is the era of Greek philosophy and the time that the Old and New Testaments were written along with the Upanishads in India, the early Buddhist writings, the Zoroastrian texts and the writings by the disciples of Confucius.

But where does this leave us now? Some orthodox and fundamentalist Christians may argue that God is all powerful and all good and will not allow humans to destroy the planet. Others like me are not so sure. Embry and I have been loyal members of our neighborhood Episcopal church for over 40 years. My equivalent of receiving a purple heart medal that the army gives out is the Master of Divinity degree I received from Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1968. I have thought about these questions—a lot! I believe that there is a spiritual component to our humanity and to life on Earth. But I am also the first to admit that we are entering a dangerous period in world history; and if past history and science have any bearing, it is probable that yes, a Sixth Mass Extension could include the human race, and if not the Sixth then perhaps the Seventh Mass Extension, but needless to say those of us living today will not be around to find out. And for me the ultimate meaning of life—and the vast universe—remains a mystery.

So, what do we do now?

We should do what we can to decrease the likelihood of a nuclear war and the misuse of all weapons of mass destruction including chemical and biological weapons. We must reverse the rise of global temperatures, reduce the misuse of the natural resources of the planet, and reign in and regulate artificial intelligence. This starts at the political level and the election of intelligent, caring human beings, a rarity in the current administration in the United States and in many other major world powers.

And like the ancestors before us, in the meantime most of us humans will soldier on trying to do the best we can, hopefully being kind to others and marveling at the mystery of life on this small, blue planet in an average solar system, in a typical galaxy, in a universe that contains trillions of galaxies.

If you can figure all this out and what it means, you are a whole lot smarter than I am.

Next post on Tuesday: Is there intelligent life on other planets? Stay tuned.