It was a balmy, bordering on uncomfortably hot day in Washington, D.C. on June 1, 2017.

The temperature in the capitol climbed to 85 degrees Fahrenheit, five degrees above the historical average, as a crowd of federal officials sweated in their suits. President Trump stood in the Rose Garden of the White House and proceeded to issue a statement most climate scientists would consider Orwellian.

After stressing his unwavering commitment to the American people, the President announced, “Therefore, in order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.”

The accord was a last-ditch effort by the international community to do something, anything really, to address climate change. As Trump’s predecessor and personal nemesis President Obama put it when he was still in office, the agreement between 196 nations was essentially “the best possible shot to save the one planet we’ve got.”

In an interview with The New York Times, renowned political thinker Noam Chomsky offered his two cents on the two most pressing issues facing humanity today — nuclear proliferation and climate change.

As we hit a point in human history when our global community’s ability to work together is strained, while developed nations experience a wave of authoritarianism not seen in over half a century, both climate change and nuclear proliferation threaten to end life on Earth as we know it.

Chomsky referenced President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords and a recent article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists as two vastly under appreciated canaries in the coal mine, warning us of just how close we are to the brink.

As we continue to chronicle the sixth mass extinction event in the planet’s history in real time, humans face a crucial point of no return. The systems we organized ourselves into over the course of the past several centuries created a political and economic landscape of nation states run on fossil fuels, and an international community undergirded by the constant threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction.

Ironically, the very innovations that allowed our population to expand so rapidly now threaten to eliminate us entirely. Today we sit on the edge of extinction, while academics like Chomsky and Stephen Hawking issue grave warnings and advocate for humans to become a “multiplanetary species.”

Modern homo sapiens have only existed for about 200,000 years, whereas the Earth is well over 4 billion years old. So far, we have been given no reason to believe our species will last longer than any of the others that have come and gone before us.

Any child with an elementary school education can recite the narrative of how dinosaurs once roamed the Earth, only to be wiped out when an asteroid struck the planet, altering the climate and destroying the resources dinosaurs needed to survive.

The circumstances we face today inevitably raise the question of whether our time in this universe is, in fact, nearing its inevitable end, or the intellectuals raising alarm bells are merely neo-Malthusians, preaching about a doomsday that remains perpetually on the horizon.

In this piece, I will argue that the myriad existential threats humanity faces including climate change, nuclear proliferation, mass extinction, and the resulting stalled global productivity assault our species on too many fronts for us to appreciate the scale of the threat we face, or to take any significant steps to avert catastrophe.

I will lay out the dire circumstances in which we find ourselves, point to the interrelated nature of these threats, and lead to the conclusion that it is unlikely humans will undertake the exhaustive efforts necessary to ensure our species will survive for another 1,000 years on Earth.