This book focuses on Greek classical historian Thucydides, his classification of the types of fear that made much of the world tremble, and the author’s relevance to case studies that I will examine and come from different parts of the world. It was tempting to subtitle the book “From Thucydides to the End- Times?” but that would have given me away as a deep-seated pessimist. Moreover, I could be mistaken for subscribing to a set of religious beliefs predicating history's final events, that is, the eschatological fate of humanity. Let me be more of a realist, then, and accept that we are living through an unprecedented series of crises at this time that we seem to be at a loss to resolve, while embracing a hopeful vision of what is to come.

That said, global scorching, particularly in implausible regions such as the Arctic and Antarctic, is worsening with each passing year. Population growth, unenforced borders, ethnic and religious conflicts, and even outright wars in Europe and beyond—nowadays fought with modern weaponry such as artificial intelligence, hypersonic missiles, kinetic earth-to-space weapons, and now commonplace drones—have become the new normal. Economic and social inequalities are unprecedented: in its January 2023 annual report to the World Economic Forum in Davos, the trustworthy British charity Oxfam claimed that the world population's top one percent acquired about two-thirds of the $42 trillion in new wealth created since 2020. We also cannot overlook the global tragedy caused by the COVID pandemic either: by January 2023 up to 700 million cases were recorded of which nearly seven million died from its symptoms. A lengthy list of regional and local catastrophes, complementing headline-grabbing global events, is too extensive to detail.

At the Davos Forum in 2023, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres remarked how the world is in a “sorry state.” It is “looking into the eye of a Category 5 hurricane.” Climate change, Big Oil, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in particular, had been “piling up like cars in a chain reaction crash.” Such facts do not augur well for progressing toward a plausible end-times.

Given the rapid expansion of institutions, governmental and nongovernmental, convening to meet on global crises that are fundamentally systemic and typically beyond their control, Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg summed up their efforts with a trenchant comment: “Blah, blah, blah…. There is no planet B. There is no planet Blah.”