I won't waste my breath trying to prove that Apocalypse is just around the corner. You either feel it in your bones or you don't, I guess. Most of us, when we look around today, feel like we're living in pretty much the same old world as we always have. The economy may be a little less stable, the gap between haves and have-nots a little wider, and violence and other antisocial behavior a bit more pervasive than in the past; but, without trying too hard, we can generally convince ourselves that either current negative social trends are temporary, or that they're an illusion (because people always tend to think things are getting worse).

Or take the environment. Sure, forests are disappearing, the oceans are increasingly devoid of life, the ozone has holes in it, and the weather has been warm and weird in recent years; but there is also increasing public awareness of the problems and ever-improving knowledge and tools with which to address them, even if there isn't quite the political will.

So where in all this do we see any real evidence that Apocalypse may be in the offing? We have to start, I think, by stepping back from the Earth and our moment in time, far enough to see ourselves whole. When we do, the first thing we notice is that our situation is unprecedented: For the first time, human society is truly global. There are many more of us alive today than ever before, and population growth is continuing largely unchecked. Meanwhile, food, fresh water, fuel, arable land, and clean air grow more scarce. This is a familiar equation, and I won't examine it here in detail — it’s the overall reality of it I’d like to hold in mind now.

The population explosion has been made possible largely by the development of new technologies, coupled with the extraction from the earth of vast quantities of nonrenewable and renewable but depletable resources.

One of the more impressive and powerful areas of technology is electronic communications: most people in the "developed" and "developing" areas of the world — something like half the population — now have instant access to one another and to news of the world.

When I was in high school in the early ‘60s, I found a fascinating article stuck in the very back of a collection of the year’s best science fiction. The author, an industrial analyst of some sort, had actually plotted the acceleration in various aspects of human life — everything from global population, to resource use, to the speed and efficiency of transportation and communication. He found that every single parameter reached a point in time where its curve wanted to go "asymptotic," that is, straight up: infinite growth, infinite speed. He predicted the infinity point would be reached sometime in the mid-'80s, if I recall. But he also made the case, borrowing an insight that originally came from the British physicist Dennis Gabor (Nobel laureate and inventor of holography) that, while accelerating curves could go asymptotic in the the realm of pure mathematics, in nature all such curves eventually roll over, and the depth of the plunge depends on how high the curve has been pushed.

This guy argued that we were pushing the global curve awfully high — that total resource use, for example, in the few years on either side of the peak of the curve, would be far greater than what had been used in all the years before, or what would be available for use in all the years after. That seemed to alarm him.

Of course, we might develop technologies — molecular nanotechnology is a good candidate — and harness energies (controlled fusion — cold, lukewarm, or hot — or "zero point" energy) that could propel us right past the hump and off into a boundless future (which would undoubtably carry us off-planet as well). I’m not saying we won’t. But I do think it’s clear that we stand now at the crest of a great wave of history, and that we must either surf the inevitable or get crunched as the wave breaks on the rocky shore of our physical and social limits.

Or maybe there’s another possibility, another dimension of human evolution into which we might tumble at the infinity point. Perhaps it was absolutely necessary that we push our historical wave to such impossible, tragic heights, just to give ourselves the chance to shoot off it, to transcend the binding curve of matter altogether.

Or, to put things in slightly more pedestrian terms, perhaps we have had to take things to their present extreme so that we might understand, in the most intimate and powerful way possible, our huge potential for accomplishing both good and evil, and learn to responsibly decide between them. We may need this great lesson, terrifying but enlightening, in order to go on to the next step in our journey toward a conscious partnership with Mother Earth.

However we choose to describe it — whether it's to be the "Last Days" of the Christians, the "Omega Point" of the Jesuit philosopher and scientist Teilhard de Chardin, or the "Singularity" favored by more secular types — I believe that what lies before us is the single most significant moment in the evolution of life on Earth (so far).

And when we look back from beyond it, I hope we will be able to conclude that our failures, monstrous as they were, were slightly outweighed by our successes, that Love just barely vanquished Ignorance, and that the human project was, after all, worthwhile.

But the question remains, if the wave is going to break, then when? There is evidence it is breaking right now. Take the phenomenon of "peak oil," for instance. Energy drives the global economy, and for now energy means oil. There is a wealth of data and analysis that says we will never again produce more oil than we do this year (give or take a year or two); and it follows that oil will never again be this cheap (give or take a few spastic flucuations in price, as the wave runs out), because the oil that is easy to find and process has been largely exhausted.

You may agree or disagree with that school of thought — just as you may or may not agree that global warming is real, or that overpopulation, famine, epidemic disease, endemic warfare, and runaway technologies are drastically worsening problems that feed on one another — but if your eyes are open you will at least have to admit that the potential for Apocalypse is substantial and growing, and that it may not be a question of whether, but when.

So when, already? I surely don't know; but as I look at the precarious state of the global economy, and particularly at America's crucial but increasingly schizophrenic role in it; and as I recall the nearly disastrous economic events of the 1990s — the Asian currency crisis of 1997, the Russian default and subsequent Long Term Credit Management bailout of 1998, the spending of nearly a trillion dollars worldwide to fix the Y2K bug — I can't help but believe that other potentially triggering events must lie in our near future. And has there ever been such a Perfect Storm of economic factors as the one blowing right over our heads, with the US sucking up more than 80% of the world's savings, even as the dollar plummets, the price of oil soars, and our ever-hungry populace scrambles to out-consume itself and keep the real estate and consumer-debt bubbles from bursting, for just one more year?

On the other hand, I think it's important not to overanticipate the falling of the sky. The global human enterprise is remarkably robust, and even though it may be headed toward general collapse, it will take its sweet time getting there. Could be next week, could be 20 years.

It could even be that we'll muddle through without getting all Apocalyptic about it. That's the view of James Kunstler. In The Long Emergency, he makes the case, tenuously, that we're plunging into an "epochal discontinuity," not an Apocalypse. Will the global economy, and the cities where it is managed, collapse? Certainly. Will there be a human dieoff in many areas of the world? Yep. But, he says, smaller cities and towns in the US will scrape by, because they have farmland around them and will be flexible enough to adapt to local food production and distribution. There will even be an up side, he claims, since "... we will return to many social relations and social enactments that we lost and that were of great value to us, such as working closely with other people on things that really matter to us."

Well, yeah. But how about the "social relations" among nations scrambling to stay atop an increasingly slippery Oil Peak; and how about the "social enactments" due the world's have-nots, who will be knocking with ever-increasing determination (and numbers) on the doors of us haves? (Interestingly, Kunstler predicts military and/or pirate invasions of the West Coast!)

A similar case is made by Ran Prieur. In "The Slow Crash" he imagines "the end of the world in moderation," a crash "that will be slower and more complex than the kind people who predict crashes like to predict." He runs down potential problems in the areas of energy, food, economy, disease, the environment, etc., and gamely wends his way through all of them, on our behalf. We're incredibly adaptable, he says, and not much inclined to go crazy and start killing each other just because we're hungry and things have gotten weird. He says that in Rwanda, Nazi Germany, and all those other 20th-century genocides, people killed for "for empty abstractions of race and religion and politics;" but it seems to me that those excuses for mass murder were nearly always underlain by desperate competition for scarce resources — and I suspect most political geographers would agree.

Whatever you call it, and however bad you expect it to be, I suspect that when the crunch does come, it will come first on the economic, then on the political and military, and finally on the general social front. The global economy is our greatest artifice, our fastest moving and most fragile creation, and the one most dependent on the vagaries of human psychology to keep it up and running, hour to frantic hour, New York-Tokyo-London, New York-Tokyo-London… When the Bull (or perhaps I should say, the Bear) really does get loose in the China (!) shop, you'd better be standing back.

"For what is this rough beast / Its hour come at last / Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born," William Butler Yeats intoned, a short century ago. Today the Beast is alive and thriving, the Four Horsemen are riding posse, and Apocalypse has already come to many corners of the globe. By and by, it might just jump out of your TV screen and bite you on the nose.

Next: Why It May Need to Happen