For someone studying the collapse of civilisation, Dr Luke Kemp seems cheerful enough.
On Wednesday we’re speaking across time zones; he’s winding down in the UK while I’m opening my laptop and, apparently, confronting the end of the world.
I tell him I’m not sure who has it worse: me, starting the day discussing Armageddon, or him, who has to try and sleep afterwards.
“I’m fine talking about it before going to bed,” says Kemp, “but hopefully I don’t depress you too much.”
Often referred to as Dr Doom by the media, Kemp is a research affiliate at the University of Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. He holds a PhD in international relations, and has advised governments and the World Health Organisation on environmental policy.
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“I study the end of the world and how we got here,” reads his LinkedIn blurb.
As for where “here”, actually is, the news according to Kemp isn’t great. His first book, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, was published in 2025 and doesn’t pull any existential punches.
“We live in a uniquely dangerous time,” he writes at the outset. “Our world is scarred by a pandemic, beset by unprecedented global heating, riven by inequality, dizzied by rapid technological change, and living under the shadow of around 10,000 stockpiled nuclear warheads.
“The climate change we face is an order of magnitude (ten-fold) faster than the heating that triggered the world’s greatest mass extinction event, the Great Permian Dying, which wiped away 80–90 per cent of life on earth 252 million years ago.
“Viruses can now spread at the speed of a jet plane, and computer viruses at the speed of an internet connection.”
On Wednesday, when asked how he actually sleeps, Kemp says he manages “surprisingly well. You obviously build in buffers to deal with this stuff and emotionally distance yourself”.
Kemp spent about seven years writing the book, surveying 5000 years of human civilisation to identify commonalities among societal collapses. He found history is remarkably consistent on at least a couple of factors that come before the fall.
“Whether you're looking at the very earliest farmers of Europe or the US; the very first cities or states all of them have a pattern within which you see rising wealth inequality and concentrations of power before they become unstable and collapse.”
Kemp says that just as we’ve seen it happen with the world’s largest empires - like Rome and the Han Dynasty - we’re seeing it now as well.
“We often tend to look at the US and think it’s unique that they have democratic backsliding, the rise of the far right, increasing polarisation, declining trust in public institutions and rising socio-political violence but these are traits happening across all of the OECD.
“And what unites them is they all started happening after we started to have rising wealth inequality in the 1980s and 90s.”
Regarding those ancient collapses though, Kemps says they weren’t always the unmitigated disasters we might imagine. For many ordinary people, the end of large, extractive regimes could bring a kind of relief — fewer taxes, less domination, and a return to smaller, more self-sufficient ways of living. In some cases, there is even evidence that health improved in the aftermath.
“Those collapses also took generations to play out ... people may not have noticed the fall of an empire expect for the change in a tax collector. ”
But any modern comfort in that idea is short-lived, because the conditions that once allowed people to weather collapse no longer exist.
“Most of us can’t return to hunter gathering or subsistence farming because we’re dependent on global industrial supply chains. And even if everyone could go hunting and gathering the world can’t support 8 billion people trying to do so.”
Where previous collapses were regional, today’s world is tightly bound together — economically, technologically, and politically — into a single, global system. Not a series of empires, but one vast and interconnected “Goliath” that should it falter, will take us all down in fall.
“Yes, like the fuel crisis,” says Kemp of the oily elephant in the room.
“This is something we’ve been warning of for ages. Having a deep globalised, interdependent world is good in the best of times when you have flourishing trade but in the worst of times it can be a liability.
“A bigger factor is we’re facing much larger threats than we have historically. We have roughly 10k nuclear weapons that on any given day, any bad day, could result in 5 billion lives being lost.”
Kemp is also surprisingly hopeful about what he found in his work. Writing the book has left him far more optimistic than he was when he started.
“I rediscovered a faith in most people. Most people are pretty decent, kind, altruistic and good at self-organising.
“We see this during natural disasters and also during collapse ... if we freak out and kill each other enmasse every time there’s a crisis, then it’s a recipe for evolutionary suicide.”
The other thing that’s changed for Kemp is his faith in democracy, something his studies found “tends to work” when people are truly equal.
“When you look at what people actually think about nuclear weapons, climate change or even AI they tend to be in favour of much safer measures. There is ample evidence that democracy can save the world.”
In the meantime, his chapter Don’t be a Dick, offers us all a couple of ways that we can start making a difference.
“One is to be democratic and share power with people around you - whether in its relationships, the workplaces or any other environment.
“And the second is if you’re building your career, don’t work for companies who are doing global damage and lying to he public - like the fossil fuel industry, arms manufacturers and even AI companies.”
Kemp remains hopeful. Even after he researched 5000 years of civilisation, and even after he crunched all the numbers, averaged out the predictions of various scholars, then arrived at a one-in-three chance of global collapse by the conclusion of the 21st century.
He does believe we still have time to steer this global ship around. Dealing with all the dangers - the nukes, poverty, AI etcetera - is like a Pokemon problem, he says: “You’ve got to catch ‘em all.”
And if we don’t, there is one final thing to consider.
“Will we at least get zombies?” I ask Dr Doom about the imminent end of the world.
“I wish. Unfortunately we’re just stuck with zombie-like leaders and institutions that keep on rambling forward even though they’re long dead in their purpose and ability to do good.”
Luke Kemp will be appearing at Auckland Writers Festival 12 – 17 May. For more information and tickets visit www.writersfestival.co.nz.
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