I reached out to Kelly in 2018 to ask if he had any thoughts on the status of the bet. “He is obviously losing,” he told me, adding that he’d tried to find Kirk Sale a few years earlier to see if he’d “double up” the stakes. We were in touch again earlier this month. I wondered how the bet would be decided now that 2020 has arrived. “We did not agree on who/how the bet was to be decided,” he said. “I just recently was able to track down Kirk Sale and asked him if he was planning to pay up if he thought he lost. I don't think he will pay or even admit he lost. He also noted that 2020 wasn't done yet, so I will reapproach him at the end of the year.”

Even back in 1995, this was a bet Kirkpatrick Sale never wanted to win. The original interview concludes with Kelly boasting, “Oh, boy, this is easy money! But you know, besides the money, I really hope I am right.” Sale ruefully replied, “I hope you are right, too.”

In recent years, WIRED has covered the environmental devastation of Puerto Rico and vanishing Antarctic glaciers. The magazine has covered the rise and fall of cryptocurrency. The magazine has covered the Occupy movement. And WIRED’s 2020 coverage has already included an article on the Australian wildfires that included the subheading “Welcome to the hellish future of life on earth.” Just reading the coverage in this magazine, the trendlines don’t appear good for Kelly’s optimism. We face greater economic inequality, greater social instability, and worse environmental disasters than in 1995.

What troubles me about Kelly’s optimism is what it denies and what it obscures. Focusing on the “Long Now” provides an escape from wrestling with the dark times we are living through. Pondering the next five millennia can be an invitation to ignore the troubles we face today.

Another WIRED correspondent, William Gibson, describes in his 2014 novel, The Peripheral, a slow-moving apocalypse called “the jackpot.” The jackpot, the reader learns, is “no one thing … multi-causal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way apocalypse stories liked to have a big event … No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone … antibiotics doing even less than they already did.” The jackpot kills 80 percent of the earth’s population over a period of 40 years. Those who survive eventually come to enjoy the trappings of radical advances in science and technology. They also have to cope psychologically with the guilt of being the privileged few. The ones who make it through the “deepest point of everything going to shit” come to say that they won the jackpot. (Gibson’s sequel, Agency, released last week, dwells on the question of whether the jackpot is still avoidable.)

Another author with deep roots in the tech scene, Doug Rushkoff, wrote an eye-opening essay called “Survival of the Richest” in 2018. Rushkoff was flown to a private island and given the largest speaker’s fee of his life to deliver his insights on “the future of technology” to an audience of five hedge fund billionaires. They weren’t interested in his prepared remarks. What they wanted to discuss was “the Event.” “That was their euphemism,” Rushkoff explains, “for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.” And what they really wanted to ask him was “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?” Rushkoff did his best, recommending that they were better off treating people well right now and working to prevent the Event. But he says the hedge funders laughed off his suggestion. They weren’t interested in preventing the jackpot; they were interested in winning it.