© 2024 Jan Herca (license Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0)
¶ The prediction
In the middle of the 21st century, the global economy of the planet will suddenly collapse. Two dramatic events will occur to produce this debacle. The first will be a significant decrease in the reserve of energy raw materials, which will no longer allow for an increase in the industrial production. This will happen despite the desperate attempts of the most industrialized countries in the world to introduce all kinds of alternatives into the economy, such as biofuels, photovoltaic and wind energy, or biomass. The second event, even more dramatic, If anything, it will be a rather sudden change in the planet’s global climate caused by the halting of the North Atlantic Ocean Current (AMOC). This halt will cause a small glaciation in some areas of the north of the Earth and terrible desertification in the south. At the last minute, a collective and global effort will be attempted to reverse this situation, which has been ignored for years, but all this will be irrelevant. It will be too late; we will have passed the point of no return long before, and the consequences of this will be too late. Both events will be catastrophic.
We live on a finite planet, and everything we can do with it is finite. There may be no limit to human ambition and the desire for profit, but there is a limit to the lack of long-term vision and for an irresponsible use of wealth. Finally, all this ambition and waste, all this unconsciousness and irresponsibility, will crash against the only possible reality like someone crashing against a wall.
¶ A Brief History of Unreason
Since the beginning of the industrial age in the late 18th century, we have increased the exploitation of the earth’s resources like never before in human history. We have created economic and productive growth like never before, largely due to the discovery of the great energy and versatility contained in fossil fuels. This has created an ever-growing economy that could continue to grow indefinitely as long as this supply of fossil fuels could continue to come in at an increasing rate and at a reasonably low cost. It seemed that there were enough resources to continue growing at this unbridled rate for centuries and centuries without having to worry about the future, about our children’s children.
But that was at the beginning. As the 20th century progressed, many countries joined in this exploitation of resources at an unbridled pace. The population of the planet, far from decreasing, has not stopped increasing, something that has undoubtedly been fueled by this growing economic boom. The problem is that planetary overpopulation is approaching crazy limits. [1] In just 24 years we have gone from 6 billion inhabitants (in 1999) to 8 billion inhabitants (in 2023). We are currently growing at a rate of about 74 million people per year. [2] It is estimated that by 2040 we will be 9 billion, in 2050 11 billion and in 2100 15 billion. But this will never happen. Long before then the economic and industrial system that has brought us here will collapse irremediably, incapable of sustaining such madness any longer. And then we will live through the most abrupt, most enormous, and most tragic period of transition in terms of loss of human life that the Earth has ever witnessed.
It will be a new era in the history of the world. And in the future, this age of ours will be studied for a long time as an example of human unreason, of human lack of sanity, and of the havoc that can be wrought on a civilization by a lack of vision, a lack of true ideals, and a lack of deep guidance based on our divine spirit.
Capitalism, like communism, is only ideological visions about how to organize our productive lives. But when these systems take over people’s lives, and there is only a mere desire to possess more, to have more, to appear more… that only leaves our soul empty, hopeless, hollow, and soundless. That takes away the great benefits of having private property, of being able to save for the future, of enjoying more time for ourselves, and above all, of being able to grow as people in an integral way, not only through material enjoyments.
Capitalism in much of the world, if not all of it, has long since outgrown these beneficial effects. Now it is running wild, looking ahead, moving forward with its eyes fixed on the immediate ground, unaware of the destruction it causes in its wake, unaware of the abyss that opens before it. In 1971, the decision was made to abandon the gold standard as a mechanism for limiting the issue of currency [3]. Now the currency is called fiat (the US dollar), a mental fiction designed by and for unlimited growth. Money is no longer money, it is just a piece of paper that can be printed without limit and injected into the economy as long as there is a strong and growing economy that responds to the value of that money.
Now it is about growing, growing at all costs, growing even when the means to do so are exhausted. In that case, we must look for something else that will allow us to continue growing. But not growing a little at a time, but growing more and more, at a higher rate than we grew the year before. A recession must be avoided at all costs, and if it cannot be avoided, then rushed through, cheating the system as much as possible. We must ensure that the money-making factory that is the world never stops.
But what happens when we run out of oil? The answer used to be that oil was a long way from running out; it was not a concern now. However, we are years away from that happening, not decades. [4] The International Energy Agency (IEA) has set the peak of conventional crude oil (peak oil) in 2006. This peak in production marks the moment when extracting new crude oil becomes increasingly difficult and more expensive, and therefore less profitable, and marks an inevitable downward trend in its production. The first years after the peak (we are already experiencing them) will be characterized by an increase in the problems to meet the demand of this growing, energy-hungry world that does not want to stop its machinery, but to press the accelerator to the floor. As the years go by, the shortage will become more noticeable until it reaches an unsustainable point. There will be a crash in the economy not because oil has run out, but because we will not be willing to pay more for it and see our pace of life decrease.
Then the capitalists will emerge who will not want this to happen under any circumstances. As a solution, they will propose that we must burn every last thing on Earth that can burn rather than stop the machine. So, after oil, there will be a few years of unbridled, unrestrained production of unconventional oil, natural gas, coal and biomass. And we will again think, excitedly, that everything is solved for the rest of the century. However, we do not realize how irreplaceable conventional oil has become for our economies. Neither by extracting all the oil we can from under the ground (fracking), nor by using all the natural gas or coal, nor by cutting down all the forests on Earth into kindling and burning them in furnaces, will we achieve more than a few years of reprieve. Fortunately for future generations, our destruction will not last long. The most optimistic estimates for natural gas stated that there would be a guaranteed supply until 2069 if consumption did not grow [5], but it has grown without stopping and will do so even more when it tries to replace oil. All the signs indicate that peak gas will occur before the end of this decade (2020-2030). What will we do when gas begins to become scarce?
There are capitalists who think that technology will always provide the means to replace one production with another, that the money-making machine will always be running, that there is nothing to worry about. We will simply have to invest intelligently and be the smartest, because some technologies will go away, but others will come. Like stone, bronze and iron. You have to be with the winning technologies, that’s all. And the world will continue to move forward the same way forever.
But this is not the case. Technology has advanced enormously in recent decades. We are living in the age of inventions. But no invention can surpass the limits of physics. We can milk them, we can improve their efficiency, and we can overcome previously unthinkable obstacles, but we’re never going to make oil that’s the same as this oil without expending more energy than the same oil will give us. Energy doesn’t come out of nowhere.[6] It’s transformed from something that contained it into something else, and we’re bound to incur some losses in the process. So there’s not going to be any fancy, magical technology that’s going to allow us to have an equivalent of oil in the ages to come. To do that, we’d have to somehow figure out that there are situations in the universe that violate the second law of thermodynamics (good luck with that!).
Because the issue of the collapse that is coming upon us has nothing to do with energy shortages. We have a power plant near the Earth of unimaginable proportions, capable of supplying energy for many billions of years to 50,000 earths like ours, and also at a very economical price: zero euros. But we have to understand one thing: that energy does not come in bottles. It is not oil. It does not allow for the industrial waste that has been done in recent times. We have more than enough energy in the Sun to supply a world full of people up to reasonable limits and living reasonable lives. Consuming in a way that is consistent with the speeds at which that energy can be supplied to us. In other words, the free bar of madness is going to end and a new era of economic decline will come first, and then of stationary stabilization. An era in which we will have to learn (those who are here will have to learn) that it is not possible to survive on this planet without considering the entire production process in a cyclical and circular way, where the waste of some is the productive source of others, as nature has been teaching us for millions of years.
¶ The end of the seasons
At the end of the era known as the Pleistocene (between 2.5 million years and 11,700 years ago) there was a transition from a long glacial period that lasted several thousand years to a warmer period that progressively achieved a retreat of the ice. This ice had come to cover large areas of northern Europe, Russia, Canada, and had also appeared in small glaciers in South America, Asia and the Middle East.
The victory of warming over the ice gave rise to a new era, the Holocene, which is the period in which we live today. It was a time characterized by a much milder climate in general, which allowed for large new migrations across the continents and increasing agriculture on larger arable land. It was the time when our civilization was established.
However, before this period of climatic bonanza began, an event occurred that has been amply documented in geological remains. Suddenly and abruptly, in a few decades, this increasing warming that the Holocene predicted suddenly changed, and in some areas of the Earth a small glaciation occurred. This is what is known as the Younger Dryas[7]. It was a sudden cooling that could reach 10°C in some areas, and that lasted almost a thousand years, from 12,900 to 11,700.
If anyone has seen Roland Emmerich’s movie “The Day After Tomorrow” and removes the exaggerations that make the story happen in just a few weeks and puts 20 years in instead, they will still have an accurate view of what happened during the Younger Dryas.
It is not known exactly what caused this sudden change in temperature, but it is suspected that it may have been due to a destabilization of the North Atlantic Ocean Current (AMOC). This current is responsible for carrying warm water from the Gulf of Mexico to northern Europe. It is what allows the climate of northern Europe to be milder even when it is at the latitudes of Canada. But this current is very sensitive to sudden changes, such as, for example, a huge influx of fresh water.
And that is exactly what we are doing. In the last hundred years, humans, due to an indiscriminate use of fossil fuels, are overheating the climate of the planet. This increased heat is progressively melting the polar caps, and all this frozen water is being poured into the oceans. In recent years, alarming studies have appeared that speak of a notable slowdown of the Atlantic current.[8] It seems clear that we are on the verge of causing a destabilization similar to that which, through natural processes, already occurred at the end of the Pleistocene.
When it happens, which many scientists estimate will be just a few decades away, the most destructive climatic phenomenon in human lives ever seen in our history will take place on the face of the Earth. Because the Younger Dryas, although it must have also been a severe setback for the civilization of our ancestors, certainly did not have an effect like that which something similar will have on a world with almost 9 billion inhabitants that will also, at the same time, be facing the worst crisis in energy resources it has ever had to face.
Large areas of Europe will be buried under snow, covering all countries from Germany and Poland to the north. A good part of Canada and the northeastern United States will suffer the same fate. The south of the planet, for its part, will be spared from the winter cold, but will suffer very long periods of drought that will wipe out the entire Amazon rainforest. The habitable places on Earth will be drastically reduced.
And there will be nothing we can do to stop this. These currents do not have a switch that can be pressed to reverse these processes. Only a coordinated effort by all the countries of the world to unite their most advanced technology and the best scientists could find a solution, a solution that would make it so that we would not have to wait centuries and centuries for everything to return to normal. But does anyone really believe that this union of governments will happen? On the contrary. History has given us clear evidence that when ambition and profit prevail in a civilization, it, in its worst hours, brings out the darkest part of itself. What can be expected from this period is nothing more than a terrible harvest of world wars between nations to ensure a privileged place on this new world map. A terrible “game of musical chairs” where whoever has the most powerful army will choose the best chair without caring about the fate of the rest of the world, which will see how there are fewer and fewer chairs to sit on.
¶ Exaggerations?
Perhaps the reader of The Urantia Book may find the above statements to be mere exaggerations. Since the Fifth Revelation reveals that we live on a special planet, chosen from among millions of other planets as the site of the last incarnation of our celestial ruler, some may be tempted to think that nothing bad can happen to us. That the planet is “the darling” of Michael, the Creator Son, the ruler of more than three million worlds like our own. [9] “It cannot suffer such a serious setback as that described in the preceding paragraphs. Something will happen before such a catastrophe occurs. Some celestial agency will intervene to stop our madness. Or, if it does not, it is because no matter how crazy we have become, these catastrophic predictions will never come true.” Surely many think so.
The reader who thinks so may have overlooked the fact that The Urantia Book is very prolix in describing catastrophic situations such as the one described above without ever implying that such dramatic events involved special celestial intervention. Yet, in response to events that would not cause alarm to many, especially concerned celestial rulers sent out celestial agencies claiming to be responding to a “planetary emergency.”
Let’s review the book:
“This was a time of biologic tribulation, the age when life nearly vanished from the face of the earth and from the depths of the oceans.” UB 59:6.2
All life on Earth has been on the brink of complete extinction several times. This is something that science knows well. Five major mass extinctions of life have occurred before. «Many biologists think that we are on the verge of the sixth, the Holocene mass extinction, which will be caused by humans.» https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_extinction
Entire races and peoples have been allowed to go extinct without any divine intervention preventing it:
«Before the unification of the several races their relentless warfare sometimes results in the obliteration of whole peoples; the orange and green men are particularly subject to such extinction.» UB 52:2.5
Nothing prevented the disappearance of the civilization of Dalamatia, the first advanced civilization in history:
“One hundred and sixty-two years after the rebellion a tidal wave swept up over Dalamatia, and the planetary headquarters sank beneath the waters of the sea, and this land did not again emerge until almost every vestige of the noble culture of those splendid ages had been obliterated.” UB 67:5.4
Not only is the disappearance of civilizations not prevented, but sometimes such disappearances are timed to occur. There are not immediately apparent benefits to the disappearance of these advanced civilizations. Eden, the second most advanced civilization in history, also followed the fate of Dalamatia:
“We do not regard the submergence of Eden as anything but a natural occurrence, but it does seem to us that the sinking of the Garden was timed…” UB 73:7.2
The book confirms that a massive flood was allowed to occur in the past, causing the greatest death toll yet:
“Presently the Sicilian land bridge submerged, creating one sea of the Mediterranean and connecting it with the Atlantic Ocean. This cataclysm of nature flooded scores of human settlements and occasioned the greatest loss of life by flood in all the world’s history.” UB 80:2.4
Entire civilizations that endured for thousands of years, far longer than the recent empires, eventually collapsed through no restraint:
“For twenty thousand years the culture of the second garden persisted, but it experienced a steady decline until about 15,000 B.C.” UB 78:5.1
“The cultural age of the second garden was terminated by the increasing infiltration of the surrounding inferior stocks” UB 78:6.8
The Andites, the inheritors of the culture of Eden, were not spared the downfall of their civilization:
“About 2500 B.C., … By the time of the establishment of the rule of Hammurabi the Sumerians had become absorbed into the ranks of the northern Semites, and the Mesopotamian Andites passed from the pages of history.” UB 78:8.10
It is not the concern of the celestial rulers to save civilizations but rather the cultural and spiritual achievements of these civilizations:
“Civilizations are unstable because they are not cosmic; they are not innate in the individuals of the races. They must be nurtured by the combined contributions of the constitutive factors of man—science, morality, and religion. Civilizations come and go, but science, morality, and religion always survive the crash.” UB 16:9.5
Jesus gave his apostles advance warning of future dramatic events in Israel so that they might keep safe. The apostles believed that He would do something to save them (and the Hebrew people), but that was not the case. Hundreds of thousands of Jews perished:
“As his followers awakened to the fact that their Master was not going to function as a temporal deliverer, and as they listened to his predictions of the overthrow of Jerusalem and the downfall of the Jewish nation, they most naturally began to associate his promised return with these catastrophic events. But when the Roman armies leveled the walls of Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and dispersed the Judean Jews, and still the Master did not reveal himself…” UB 176:4.2
Even Jesus himself spoke of the possibility of the world coming to an end:
“The downfall of nations, the crash of empires, the destruction of the unbelieving Jews, the end of an age, even the end of the world, what have these things to do with one who believes this gospel, and who has hid his life in the surety of the eternal kingdom?” UB 176:3.2
Perhaps a world may occasionally need a fresh start, a fresh beginning that will prevent the mistakes of the past from being repeated based on a dramatic lesson learned.
There are events that may provoke emergency intervention, but only in cases where the entire human race is in danger:
“… If some physical catastrophe should doom the planetary residence of an evolving race, the Melchizedeks and the Life Carriers would install the technique of dematerialization for all survivors, and by seraphic transport these beings would be carried away to the new world prepared for their continuing existence. The evolution of a human race, once initiated on a world of space, must proceed…” UB 51:2.3
Human evolution is therefore assured, and the future of mankind is bright. Thanks to the Book we know of the Ages of Light and Life UB 55:0.1. But nothing in the Book allows us to suppose that we shall get there without first passing through many failed civilizations which fell from grace amid severe tribulations UB 48:7.14.
We speak of planetary emergencies, but to the actual beings who rule the destinies of the inhabited planets these emergencies do not correspond to what we would normally consider as such:
The Melchizedeks are widely known as emergency Sons, for they engage in an amazing range of activities on the worlds of a local universe. When any extraordinary problem arises, or when something unusual is to be attempted, it is quite often a Melchizedek who accepts the assignment. UB 93:0.1
Revealed truth was threatened with extinction during the millenniums which followed the miscarriage of the Adamic mission on Urantia. Though making progress intellectually, the human races were slowly losing ground spiritually. About 3000 B.C. the concept of God had grown very hazy in the minds of men. UB 93:1.1
And it was in consequence of having been thrown so completely on their own resources that Machiventa Melchizedek, one of the twelve planetary receivers, volunteered to do that which had been done only six times in all the history of Nebadon: to personalize on earth as a temporary man of the realm, to bestow himself as an emergency Son of world ministry. UB 93:1.3
Thus it appears that emergency celestial interventions do occur, but they are for the purpose of keeping spiritual truth from being lost in the world, not to maintain civilizations, much less to maintain their failing economic systems.
The two great evils plaguing present-day civilization are a lack of spiritual vision and an inordinate desire for profit. These cancerous plagues are undermining our future and will be the source of a new Third World War. This dramatic statement is not gratuitous; it comes from the revelators’ analysis of our time:
“Twentieth-century secularism tends to affirm that man does not need God. But beware! this godless philosophy of human society will lead only to unrest, animosity, unhappiness, war, and world-wide disaster.” UB 195:8.5
“Urantians should get a vision of a new and higher cultural society. Education will jump to new levels of value with the passing of the purely profit-motivated system of economics. Education has too long been localistic, militaristic, ego exalting, and success seeking; it must eventually become world-wide, idealistic, self-realizing, and cosmic grasping.” UB 71:7.3
“With scientific progress, wars are going to become more and more devastating until they become almost racially suicidal. How many world wars must be fought and how many leagues of nations must fail before men will be willing to establish the government of mankind and begin to enjoy the blessings of permanent peace and thrive on the tranquillity of good will—world-wide good will—among men?” UB 134:5.17
“To the secularistic revolt you owe the amazing creativity of American industrialism and the unprecedented material progress of Western civilization. And because the secularistic revolt went too far and lost sight of God and true religion, there also followed the unlooked-for harvest of world wars and international unsettledness.” UB 195:8.7
“Another world war will teach the so-called sovereign nations to form some sort of federation, thus creating the machinery for preventing small wars, wars between the lesser nations. But global wars will go on until the government of mankind is created. Global sovereignty will prevent global wars—nothing else can.” UB 134:6.4
I am sure that some are tempted to think that these last paragraphs of the Book refer to the first two world wars (the very time at which they were written), and that they do not refer to our present future. [10] I would ask them to consider these questions: Has our present world, that of the second decade of the 21st century, improved in spiritual vision and in the decrease of the desire for profit, compared to the first quarter of the 20th century? Or is everything rather going for the worse? And is the present UN, the United Nations Organization, that global planetary government of which revelation speaks?
It is time to end this review of The Urantia Book with a final quote that seems to confirm quite well the prediction I made earlier about a future small ice age, and which surely more than one reader will have taken for an exaggeration:
…And as long as the polar regions continue to be covered with ice, it is hardly possible for another glacial age to occur, regardless of future land elevations or modification of ocean currents. UB 61:7.11
That is, the revelators confirm that the polar ice caps are that life preserver that prevents the appearance of new ice ages. That means that the destruction of the polar ice caps that we are producing with global warming could certainly give rise to a new ice age, whether it were a major one or not. And let’s look at the phrase “future modification of ocean currents” because it seems prophetic. This is exactly what scientists are now discovering is happening with the important AMOC current. That is, without the cushion provided by the polar ice caps, a change in ocean currents will no longer be a harmless thing.
So, predictions or exaggerations?
¶ For further reading
- ¿Cómo terminará el capitalismo? Ensayos sobre un sistema en decadencia. (How will capitalism end? Essays on a system in decline.) Wolfgang Streek. Traficantes de Sueños. 2017.
- Petrocalipsis. Crisis energética global y cómo (no) la vamos a solucionar. (Petrocalipsis. Global energy crisis and how we are (not) going to solve it.) Antonio Turiel. Alfabeto. 2020.
- Sin energía. Pequeña guía para el Gran Descenso. (Without energy. A short guide to the Great Descent.) Antonio Turiel. Alfabeto. 2022
- El otoño de la civilización. Texto para una revolución inevitable. (The autumn of civilization. Text for an inevitable revolution.) Juan Bordera and Antonio Turiel. Escritos Contextatarios. 2022.
- Colapso. Capitalismo terminal, Transición Ecosocial, Ecofascismo. (Collapse. Terminal Capitalism, Ecosocial Transition, Ecofascism.) Carlos Taibo. Catarata. 2016.
- Tecnofeudalismo: El sigiloso sucesor del capitalismo. (Technofeudalism: The stealthy successor of capitalism.) Yanis Varoufakis. Deusto.2024
¶ Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#/media/File:Annual-World-Population-since-10-thousand-BCE-1-768x724.png ↩︎
According to The Urantia Book, in our use of fossil fuels mankind is going backwards and not forwards. UB 69:8.12 The revelators do not have much regard for this era of mechanization and use of inorganic energy that eliminates the need for human and animal labor. The first era of mechanization has led to a massive extinction of animal species that are no longer seen as useful (reducing species to purely productive ones). The second era is upon us, the era of AI (Artificial Intelligence) that promises to leave millions of human beings out of work. These are the effects of an economic model that only seeks profit and growth at all costs, even at the expense of leaving the planet empty of living beings. ↩︎
https://www.wcrp-climate.org/news/science-highlights/2043-2307-amoc-paper ↩︎
Urantia is the sentimental sanctuary of all Nebadon. UB 119:8.8 ↩︎
When the Book says in UB 195:6.4 that "the “The worst of the materialistic era is over” refers to the years before World War II, the 1930s, when that paragraph was written. And the fact that we have passed the worst of that era did not prevent us from a world war. So, the worst of the materialistic era is over, yes, but we are still far from having left it behind. ↩︎
