Kitabı oku: «2030: The Last Chance. Why Superhuman ai could save humanity»
© Vladimir Dubkovskiy, 2026
ISBN 978-5-0070-6563-4
Created with Ridero smart publishing system
This book is about the future of humanity at the moment when several existential threats are converging into a single point.
Climate destabilization, nuclear war, engineered pandemics, and the rapid advance of artificial intelligence are not separate crises. They are parts of one “perfect storm” for which modern civilization is not prepared.
Most books about AI offer two scenarios: superintelligence will destroy humanity, or it will become an electronic god that builds paradise on Earth. Vladimir Dubkovskiy offers a different view. In this book, ASI is considered neither an executioner nor a savior, but a possible instrument for stabilizing a world that human beings can no longer hold together on their own.
But the book’s central question goes deeper than technology: if superintelligence is truly coming, what in the human being is worth preserving?
The author searches for an answer at the intersection of science, philosophy, history, the theory of consciousness, and spiritual tradition. His conclusion is both alarming and hopeful: the emergence of another intelligence may become not the end of human civilization, but its last chance to return to the meanings it has lost.
© Dubkovskiy V., 2026
Author’s Preface
This book is an invitation to reflect on the questions that will determine the fate of humanity in the coming decades.
On one side stand the growing threats of nuclear war, engineered pandemics, and climate catastrophe. On the other stands the realization that the old ways of solving problems no longer work, while human nature remains essentially what it was thousands of years ago.
Into this fracture, into this “perfect storm,” enters something that has never existed before: artificial intelligence. Not merely a tool, but a new form of intelligence. And that changes everything.
There are many facts in this book, but facts are not an end in themselves. Facts without meaning are as ambiguous as a knife in a human hand: it may be the weapon of a murderer or the instrument of a surgeon. That is why, while examining the threats before us, I continually return to the questions that are usually left outside the discussion: Why are we here? What makes us human? And if we create an intelligence that surpasses our own, will we be able to exist with it on the same planet?
The answers to these questions will determine not only how we meet superintelligence, but also what kind of human beings we will have become by then.
Chapter 1.
The Perfect Storm
“But the day will come when Ra will take back all life, scorching the living and turning all that blooms into desert…”
— From the Egyptian Coffin Texts,Middle Kingdom period.1
The fear of the End of the World has been part of human life since time immemorial. It can be compared to ocean waves: at times they sweep over the land in a destructive tsunami, then for a while recede and grow calm — only to return soon after and crash down upon humanity with renewed force.
How well founded is this fear? And if it is, when and how will the End of Days arrive?
In ancient times, fear of the End of the World was not merely a superstition, but a complex cultural and psychological mechanism. It helped people explain, and give meaning to, terrifying phenomena that led to the deaths of vast numbers of human beings: volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts, earthquakes, epidemics.
Wars, invasions, and the fall of empires were experienced by contemporaries as harbingers of the End of the World. So too were solar eclipses, the appearance of comets, and the coincidence of planetary cycles.
What, then, leads modern people — far removed from the superstitions of earlier ages — to return to the theme of the End of the World? There is a whole series of objective reasons for this, visible even to the naked eye.
The first is the steady increase in both the number and the power of natural disasters. Each such event becomes a reminder of an ancient fear, as though reviving humanity’s archetypal memory. And although we explain these phenomena in the language of science, the emotional reaction remains the same: anxiety, a sense of approaching danger, a foreboding of the end.
Yet probable death as a result of climate catastrophe is only one facet of apocalyptic fear. Humanity also carries the memory of other forms of mass death.
The pandemic of 2020—2021 painfully reminded us of earlier epidemics — plague, smallpox, measles, malaria, AIDS — that claimed hundreds of millions of lives.
The possibility of a Third World War has once again become a subject of discussion in the media and in expert circles.
Not long ago, the subject of nuclear weapons was under an unspoken taboo. After the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, people rightly concluded that the use of such weapons by either side would inevitably lead to the destruction of all humanity. Yet now the possible use of nuclear weapons is discussed almost casually — at expert forums, on television programs, across social media. What half a century ago was considered unthinkable has become part of the everyday information environment.
And quite recently, a fourth rider has joined these “three horsemen of the Apocalypse,” born in the depths of modern technology: artificial intelligence. What only yesterday seemed a technological miracle is now perceived as a potential threat. The media are filled with predictions of the imminent emergence of a superintelligence that will break free of human control and destroy humanity.
And historical “roots” were quickly found for this threat as well: the medieval legend of the Golem, a monster created by man that first served people, then slipped out of control, began destroying the city, and brought harm to its inhabitants.
It is obvious that a direct link has survived between modern apocalyptic moods and ancient psycho-cultural mechanisms. We can see archaic structures of consciousness being clothed in digital and scientific garments.
Climate anxiety is a new “Great Flood” or a new “Great Winter of Ragnarök,” only stretched out over time and confirmed by models. We see the same archetypes: coastlines under water, crop failures brought by drought, migrations of peoples. Chaos no longer comes from the gods; it is generated by a broken “covenant” with nature.
A pandemic is a direct parallel to pestilence as a biblical punishment or a sign of the end. A global, invisible threat that disrupts the familiar order has activated the same archetypes: the search for the guilty (“sinners”), the expectation of a “saving vaccine” (a miracle), rituals (self-isolation, masks as new taboos).
The nuclear threat is an apocalypse of fire — pure and instantaneous. It parallels the purifying fire of Christianity and Ragnarök in Germanic and Norse mythology. The symbol of “nuclear winter” unites the archetypes of fire and ice.
Artificial intelligence is a creation that has slipped beyond its creator’s control — the Antichrist risen against God, the enemy of Christ and his false substitute, seeking to draw human beings after it.
Fear of the End of the World is fed by the daily stream of news about yet another temperature record, forest fire, military conflict, political crisis, or breakthrough in AI-related research. One might say that this stream has come to function as an apocalyptic calendar, and that we ourselves search it for — and find in it — the “signs of the end.”
Various numbers and graphs — for example, rising CO2 levels or the curve of disease growth — become sacred omens interpreted by a new class of “priest-scientists.”
Scientific data have become a new language for describing the same ancient catastrophes. We mythologize scientific facts by fitting them into familiar narratives of the end.
So the structure of apocalyptic thinking has remained the same; only the context and the “scenery” have changed.
We have not changed. We have simply recoded archaic myths into the language of science and technology.
At the same time, a break with antiquity should still be noted.
Ancient myths, even the darkest of them, always contained hope: the salvation of the righteous, the renewal of the world, the coming of a savior — Vidar in Norse mythology, Jesus Christ in Christianity, Kalki in the Hindu tradition.
Modern apocalypses grounded in science are stripped of any built-in “happy ending.” In scenarios of nuclear winter or climate collapse, there is no room for divine intervention or guaranteed renewal. It is a pure, meaningless end.
That is what makes modern apocalyptic fear especially toxic: it paralyzes rather than mobilizes, unlike the fear of sin, which once mobilized people toward virtue.
To sum up this interim conclusion, one may say that the ancient fear of the End of the World has not gone away; it has simply been transformed — and in recent years even intensified. And the blame for this lies not only with sensation-hungry journalists who sensationally dwell on each new catastrophe, whether natural or man-made. Scientists and countless experts in many fields have also begun speaking of the probable End of the World.
What we see, then, is rational scientific analysis and fear of the end merging in the public imagination into a single cultural symbol — one that may also be described by the term “perfect storm.”
In its modern meaning, a perfect storm is a metaphor for a rare and catastrophic event arising from the simultaneous convergence of several unfavorable factors. Each factor is dangerous in itself, but their combination produces a qualitatively new, unprecedented crisis with devastating consequences.
This term perfectly captures the logic of modern apocalyptic expectation. That is precisely how modern people perceive global risks: climate change, nuclear tension, pandemics, artificial intelligence. These are no longer separate threats, but a single system capable of generating a crisis for which humanity is unprepared.
Thus, the “perfect storm” has become a scientific-metaphorical analogue to the biblical plagues of Egypt — a vision of the end as a cascade of interconnected catastrophes.
In the following chapters, the author’s view of the probability of the End of the World in the foreseeable future will be presented on the basis of a detailed examination of each of the risk factors listed above.
Chapter 2.
A Fragile Planet
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot1
“There is no Plan B because there is no Planet B.”
— Ban Ki-moon, 8th Secretary-General of the United Nations2
The Great Flood
The threat of perishing in the waters of a global flood is rooted in the biblical story of the Great Flood and in numerous ancient myths.
Mainstream science interprets the material traces discovered in different regions of the planet as evidence of severe but local flooding, and therefore sees no reason to elevate such events to the rank of a probable apocalyptic scenario.
As an argument against a Great Flood that covered the whole earth, scientists long pointed to glaciological calculations suggesting that it would have been impossible for such a volume of water to appear that “all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered,” as the Bible says.
But later, scientists themselves found that water.
In the late 2000s, the seismologists Jesse F. Lawrence and Michael E. Wysession of Washington University in St. Louis, analyzing an anomaly in seismic attenuation beneath East Asia, proposed a model according to which the upper part of the lower mantle may contain a volume of water comparable to that of the Arctic Ocean.3
According to Joseph R. Smyth and Steven D. Jacobsen, the mantle transition zone may contain very large volumes of bound water and may be regarded as one of the largest internal water reservoirs on Earth.4
Ancient myths speak of a global flood that destroyed a significant part of humanity in the distant past, and these are among the most widespread myths in the world. They appear in Mesopotamia (the Epic of Gilgamesh, the myth of Ziusudra/Utnapishtim), in the Bible (Noah), among the Greeks (Deucalion), in the Hindu tradition (Manu), and in the myths of the peoples of the Americas, Asia, and Oceania.
David R. Montgomery, professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington in Seattle, analyzed about two hundred flood myths from different cultures. He concluded that around 70 percent of them contain common elements: the waters come suddenly, only those who managed to climb a mountain or build a boat survive, and after the flood the world is repopulated.
Montgomery argues that such a convergence of details is unlikely to be accidental. It resembles, rather, multiple independent testimonies to one and the same event, seen from different vantage points.5
Researchers of the flood broadly agree on one point: behind all these ancient traditions stands some real cataclysm, traces of which ought inevitably to be detectable even today.
Traces of the Flood
We will return a little later to the probable causes of such a cataclysm; for now, let us turn back to the material and cultural traces of the Flood discovered in different parts of the planet.
In studies of the seabed at depths of up to 100 meters, scientists have discovered numerous stone artifacts dating from 6,000 to 9,800 years ago. In 1994, stone structures were found in the coastal waters of Israel, near Haifa, the remains of a settlement that had existed roughly 9,000 years ago. Seeds of flax and barley found there also point to the former presence of developed agricultural land. And there are many similar examples.
The traces of the Great Flood have been found not only underwater; they have also been discovered high in the mountains.
In the 1950s, American archaeologists led by Professor Ralph Solecki of Columbia University discovered the large Shanidar karst cave in the mountains of Kurdistan in northern Iraq. It is located on the bank of the Great Zab River, a tributary of the Tigris, at an elevation of about 750 meters above sea level, near the Turkish border.
The cave was impressive in scale: its entrance was an opening 25 meters wide and 8 meters high, beyond which lay a grotto of more than 1,000 square meters with a height of up to 15 meters. On the walls and ceiling, archaeologists found a thick layer of ancient soot and ash, evidence of long-term human habitation.
Excavations showed that the cave had been inhabited for 100,000 years. Its compacted floor formed a cultural layer about 15 meters thick, beneath which lay solid limestone.
Archaeologists opened this layer and analyzed the household objects of ancient people and various natural formations found within it. In the end, scientists concluded that about 12,000 years ago a powerful wall of water burst into the cave and washed away a three-meter layer of soil. At the same time, a strong earthquake occurred, causing the ceiling to collapse and enormous blocks of stone to become mixed with the lower strata.
It is noteworthy that between the layer formed about 12,000 years ago and the one formed 29,000 years ago, the soil layer corresponding to a 17,000-year interval is completely absent.
Researchers link this catastrophe to a global cataclysm, for example, the Great Flood.
Radiocarbon dating confirmed both the age of the layers and the time of the catastrophe — about 12,000 years ago.
It is important to note that in many similar cases, depositional layers overlie soil or a cultural layer, while new soil accumulates above them again — something that points to a single catastrophic event.
These findings fundamentally alter the assessment of tsunami risk for coastal regions, showing that the scale of past events may have vastly exceeded anything observed during the historical period.
The traces of major natural cataclysms that occurred on Earth in different periods of its history show that our planet has repeatedly undergone dramatic events leading to mass extinctions of a significant share of species over geologically short periods of time.
Great Extinctions
Scientists report five great mass extinctions that occurred on Earth in different eras.
1. The Ordovician — Silurian extinction (about 443 million years ago).
Scale: about 85 percent of marine species disappeared, since life at that time was concentrated mainly in the oceans. The drift of the continent of Gondwana toward the South Pole caused global cooling, glaciation, and a drop in sea level. This disrupted circulation, producing stagnation and oxygen depletion in the oceans.
2. The Devonian extinction (about 372—359 million years ago, in a series of pulses).
Scale: up to 75 percent of species perished, especially marine fauna.
3. The Great Permian — Triassic extinction (about 252 million years ago).
Scale: 96 percent of marine species and about 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrates died out.
4. The Triassic — Jurassic extinction (about 201 million years ago).
Scale: about 50 percent of all species disappeared, especially large amphibians and many reptiles.
5. The Cretaceous — Paleogene extinction (about 66 million years ago).
Scale: about 76 percent of all species perished, including the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and large marine reptiles.
Most of the great extinctions are associated with rapid climatic changes — warming or cooling — as well as ocean acidification and anoxia caused by major geological processes such as volcanism and impacts. In the course of these events, the biosphere underwent a kind of “reset,” removing some forms of life from the planet and opening the way for new ones.
Visitors from Space
What caused catastrophes on such a grand scale? On this point scientists are nearly unanimous: they were triggered by the impact of large comets or asteroids striking the Earth. This conclusion rests on material traces that have been remarkably well preserved to the present day.
Among them is the iridium anomaly — a thin clay layer found worldwide with an anomalously high concentration of iridium, a metal extremely rare on Earth but common in asteroids. And of course there are the impact scars themselves, impressive in their scale.
In South Africa lies the largest and oldest confirmed impact crater on Earth, known as Vredefort. Scientists estimate its age at about 2.023 billion years.
The event was so powerful that, according to one hypothesis, it may have completely melted the ice sheet existing on Earth at that time, triggering abrupt warming.
Sudbury (the Sudbury structure), Ontario, Canada.
This is the second-largest impact crater. Its age has been determined to be about 1.849 billion years. It was formed by the impact of a body 10 to 15 kilometers in size. The strike was so powerful that it melted enormous volumes of mantle and crustal rock.
Today the Sudbury Basin is one of the world’s largest sources of nickel. About 10 percent of global nickel is mined there, along with copper and precious metals. This is a direct “inheritance” from an asteroid.
On the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico lies the Chicxulub crater, about 180—200 kilometers in diameter. It is the key material evidence for the asteroid-impact hypothesis as the cause of the Cretaceous — Paleogene extinction. Radioisotopic dating places the age of the crater at about 66.043 ± 0.011 million years.
Scientists have calculated the size of this dinosaur killer at 10 to 15 kilometers in diameter. It struck the Earth at a speed of about 20 km/s (72,000 km/h), and the energy of the impact was about 10^23 joules — roughly two million times more powerful than the strongest thermonuclear bomb. The heat released would have been enough to boil all the oceans of the planet, at least locally.
Scientists say that the Chicxulub crater is not just “a hole left by an asteroid.” It is the key geological archive of an event that changed the planet’s climate within hours and determined the subsequent history of life, clearing the way for mammals and, ultimately, for human beings.
One of the most acute mysteries troubling the scientific community is what happened at the boundary of the Holocene, 12,800 years ago, when the gradual warming of the climate was abruptly replaced by a sharp cooling that lasted nearly 1,300 years. This is the so-called Younger Dryas cooling, identified by geologists more than a century ago, though its causes long remained unknown. It was precisely during this period that major changes occurred in the megafauna of northern Eurasia, including the disappearance of woolly rhinoceroses and, soon afterward, mammoths from most of the continent.
A possible answer appeared in 2006 with the publication of The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes, in which a group of American researchers proposed the hypothesis of a comet impact on the ice sheet that at that time covered Greenland and much of Canada. This cosmic strike led to a fundamental reorganization of the entire climate system of the Northern Hemisphere. In North America, all mammals weighing more than 40 kilograms died out, and with them ended the history of the so-called Clovis culture.6
(Clovis culture was the first widely recognized culture of nomadic hunters and gatherers in North America, existing about 13,400—12,750 years ago.)
This is perhaps the most controversial, most fiercely debated, and at the same time one of the most durable catastrophic hypotheses of the past twenty years.
In 2007, a group of scientists led by Richard B. Firestone suggested that these were traces of a cosmic catastrophe.
They presented their hypothesis in an article published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America), one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world. There they wrote:
“An extraterrestrial impact approximately 12.9 ka contributed to abrupt environmental change that triggered Younger Dryas cooling, biomass burning, widespread extinctions and human cultural changes at the end of the Clovis period”7.
Martin Sweatman wrote in a 2021 review:
“The vast majority of evidence now available strongly supports the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis”8.
It is well known that NASA takes the threat of an asteroid collision with Earth very seriously. Thanks to the efforts of its specialists, the orbital parameters of 90 percent of all asteroids larger than 700 meters have been identified and determined. In the course of this work, scientists focused attention on the asteroid Apophis (2004 MN4), 270 meters in diameter, which in 2029 will pass through a certain point near Earth’s orbit. Depending on how it passes that point, it could return in 2036 and pass much closer still.
Scientists themselves acknowledge that the reliability of such forecasts is still far from high, and that a dangerous asteroid could appear unexpectedly. A vivid example is the close flyby of the Halloween asteroid (2015 TB145), which passed Earth on October 31, 2015, at a distance of 1.3 lunar distances. It was detected only three weeks before the event. Its size is estimated at 500—600 meters, already close to the threshold of global catastrophe. A collision with Earth would have led, if not to the complete collapse of our civilization, then at the very least to the end of civilization in the form we know it.
In this connection, one may recall another similar case that demonstrates the reality of cosmic threats.
On June 14, 2002, an asteroid roughly 70—120 meters across passed Earth at a distance of about 120,000 kilometers. That is less than one-third of the distance to the Moon (about 384,000 km) and within the range of geostationary satellite orbits (about 36,000 km).
The crucial fact is that it was detected only on June 17, three days after its closest approach.
The reason was not scientific negligence but a “blind zone” on the Sun-facing side. 2002 MN approached Earth from the daytime sky, immersed in bright sunlight. Ground-based optical telescopes cannot see objects near the Sun.
Of course, science does not stand still, and methods for detecting dangerous celestial bodies are constantly improving. Space telescopes are being placed in orbit to increase the visibility of such objects. Yet the risks do not thereby disappear, because no reliable means of preventing such a catastrophe yet exist.
To sum up these preliminary findings, one may conclude that floods of varying scale occurred in different periods of Earth’s history. Some of them can reasonably be classified as great floods, above all those caused by the impact of large cosmic bodies on the Earth. These catastrophes struck suddenly and brought about rapid and devastating climatic changes.
Such catastrophes may well have served as the basis for the many myths of the Great Flood. The geographical spread of these myths suggests that the flood affected a large part of the planet and dealt a heavy blow to Earth’s biosphere.
The cosmic threat remains a real source of intense End-of-the-World fear even today. A large asteroid carrying destruction for humanity may appear near Earth unexpectedly, slipping past existing monitoring systems, while effective means of destroying it at a safe distance from Earth still exist only in the cult Hollywood blockbuster Armageddon (1998), directed by Michael Bay.
The scale of catastrophe that could follow a collision between Earth and a comet or large asteroid is vividly illustrated by an event that occurred in 1994, when Comet Shoemaker — Levy 9 struck Jupiter. Its trajectory might have brought it toward Earth, but Jupiter lay in its path and captured it with its immense gravity. The giant planet literally tore the comet’s nucleus into multiple large fragments — some up to 2 kilometers across — which then plunged into Jupiter’s atmosphere at a speed of 64 km/s.
Within hours, a dark spot 12,000 kilometers across — close to the diameter of the Earth — appeared in Jupiter’s atmosphere. The energy released in the collision was estimated at 6 million megatons of TNT equivalent, 750 times greater than the entire nuclear arsenal accumulated on Earth.
Humanity witnessed such an event for the first time. It proved that collisions between celestial bodies are not merely a theory but an ongoing reality, and it forced people to think seriously about similar risks for Earth.
It is not difficult to imagine what would happen to Earth in the event of such a collision.
