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“Lira for your thoughts,” he ventured lightly, hoping to pull her mind from the image of the spike-haired woman lying dead on the palazzo floor.
Sienna emerged slowly from her contemplations. “I was thinking of Zobrist,” she said slowly. “Trying to recall anything else I might know about him.”
“And?”
She shrugged. “Most of what I know is from a controversial essay he wrote a few years ago. It really stayed with me. Among the medical community, it instantly went viral.” She winced. “Sorry, bad choice of words.”
Langdon gave a grim chuckle. “Go on.”
“His essay essentially declared that the human race was on the brink of extinction, and that unless we had a catastrophic event that precipitously decreased global population growth, our species would not survive another hundred years.”
Langdon turned and stared at her. “A single century?”
“It was a pretty stark thesis. The predicted time frame was substantially shorter than previous estimates, but it was supported by some very potent scientific data. He made a lot of enemies by declaring that all doctors should stop practicing medicine because extending the human life span was only exacerbating the population problem.”
Langdon now understood why the article spread wildly through the medical community.
“Not surprisingly,” Sienna continued, “Zobrist was immediately attacked from all sides—politicians, clergy, the World Health Organization—all of whom derided him as a doomsayer lunatic who was simply trying to cause panic. They took particular umbrage at his statement that today’s youth, if they chose to reproduce, would have offspring that literally would witness the end of the human race. Zobrist illustrated his point with a ‘Doomsday Clock,’ which showed that if the entire span of human life on earth were compressed into a single hour … we are now in its final seconds.”
“I’ve actually seen that clock online,” Langdon said.
“Yes, well, it’s his, and it caused quite an uproar. The biggest backlash against Zobrist, however, came when he declared that his advances in genetic engineering would be far more helpful to mankind if they were used not to cure disease, but rather to create it.”
“What?!”
“Yes, he argued that his technology should be used to limit population growth by creating hybrid strains of disease that our modern medicine would be unable to cure.”
Langdon felt a rising dread as his mind conjured images of strange, hybrid “designer viruses” that, once released, were totally unstoppable.
“Over a few short years,” Sienna said, “Zobrist went from being the toast of the medical world to being a total outcast. An anathema.” She paused, a look of compassion crossing her face. “It’s really no wonder he snapped and killed himself. Even sadder because his thesis is probably correct.”
Langdon almost fell over. “I’m sorry—you think he’s right?!”
Sienna gave him a solemn shrug. “Robert, speaking from a purely scientific standpoint—all logic, no heart—I can tell you without a doubt that without some kind of drastic change, the end of our species is coming. And it’s coming fast. It won’t be fire, brimstone, apocalypse, or nuclear war … it will be total collapse due to the number of people on the planet. The mathematics is indisputable.”
Langdon stiffened.
“I’ve studied a fair amount of biology,” she said, “and it’s quite normal for a species to go extinct simply as a result of overpopulating its environment. Picture a colony of surface algae living in a tiny pond in the forest, enjoying the pond’s perfect balance of nutrients. Unchecked, they reproduce so wildly that they quickly cover the pond’s entire surface, blotting out the sun and thereby preventing the growth of the nutrients in the pond. Having sapped everything possible from their environment, the algae quickly die and disappear without a trace.” She gave a heavy sigh. “A similar fate could easily await mankind. Far sooner and faster than any of us imagine.”
Langdon felt deeply unsettled. “But … that seems impossible.”
“Not impossible, Robert, just unthinkable. The human mind has a primitive ego defense mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain to handle. It’s called denial.”
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