25 - Vulnerable Peoples in the Contemporary Era

Summary

Homo sapiens, and all other species inhabiting our planet, are by definition vulnerable to whatever nature throws at them. Sapienza-informed efforts to overthrow nature’s supremacy by harnessing its forces to human ends have simply upped the ante by producing conditions for the near or total obliteration of life on Earth. Since ‘Trinity’, the first detonation of a nuclear device, on 16 July 1945, and the subsequent development and escalation of such weapons of mass destruction, humanity has lived under a cloud of both suicidal and omnicidal foreclosure. Yet by a different, if closely related historical route, associated primarily with the burning of geologically sequestrated solar energy leading to global warming, the species has doubly confirmed its uniquely anthropogenic capacity to bring about not only its own demise but within the planetary record a sixth extinction of life-forms.¹ Indeed, in 2020, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, largely on the basis of these two possibilities, moved its symbolic Doomsday Clock forward to just 100 seconds to midnight.²