The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

The creator of the wildly popular award-winning podcast Hardcore History looks at moments of societal collapse and other apocalyptic events from the past as a way to frame the challenges of the future.

Do tough times create tougher people? Can humanity handle the power of its weapons without destroying itself? Will human technology or capabilities ever peak or regress? No one knows the answers to such questions, but no one asks them in a more interesting way than Dan Carlin.

In this work of speculative history, The End is Always Near, Dan Carlin looks at questions and historical events that force us to consider what sounds like fantasy; that we might suffer the same fate that all previous eras did. Will our world ever become a ruin for future archaeologists to dig up and explore? The questions themselves are both philosophical and like something out of The Twilight Zone.

Combining his trademark mix of storytelling, big history and weirdness Dan Carlin connects the past and future in fascinating and colorful ways. At the same time the questions he asks us to consider involve the most important issue imaginable: human survival. From the collapse of the Bronze Age to the challenges of the nuclear era the issue has hung over humanity like a persistent Sword of Damocles.

Inspired by his podcast, The End is Always Near challenges the way we look at the past and ourselves. In this absorbing compendium, Carlin embarks on a whole new set of stories and major cliffhangers that will keep readers enthralled. Idiosyncratic and erudite, offbeat yet profound, The End is Always Near examines issues of existential risk that are rarely presented, and makes the past immediately relevant to our very turbulent present.

This isn’t just a history book; it’s a thought experiment with the highest possible stakes. What can the ghosts of fallen civilizations teach us about our own survival?

• Hard-to-Answer Questions: Explore the same kinds of deep, philosophical questions that fuel the Hardcore History podcast: Do tough times make tougher people? Can civilizations regress? And are we doomed to repeat the past?
• Historical Case Studies: Journey from the mysterious collapse of the Bronze Age to the fall of the brutal Assyrian Empire to understand the patterns of how great societies end.
• The Nuclear Threat: Step into the Cold War room during nuclear near-misses and ask whether humanity can truly handle the power of the weapons it has created without destroying itself.
• Humanity’s Great Filter: Confront the idea of the ‘Great Filter,’ a challenge that all intelligent life might face, and ponder if pandemics, environmental collapse, or war will be the one that gets us.