It has always felt like it’s the end of the world.

Since the dawn of human history, it has seemed as if history has been about to end. The fears and dreams that, at their extremes, fuel apocalyptic cults have always, in essence, been part of our mainstream cultures. The brevity of our own mortal lives has always been echoed in our nagging suspicion that our civilizations can’t endure very much longer.

Plagues, wars, and famines, earthquakes, floods, comets, and eclipses, and theological, ideological, and technological revolutions all made our ancestors certain that they were living at the end of days.

And so the resurgence of war in Europe and the escalation of conflict in the Middle East have in recent times – coming in the wake of a global pandemic unprecedented in living memory, and as climate change ramps up beyond the point of no return – along with the rise of artificial intelligence as a technology apparently designed to rob us of our livelihoods and our purposes and pleasures in life, and the ostensible demise of the free trade orthodoxies that have underpinned economic globalization and the prevalent geopolitical order for half a century – made it seem – to many of us in the West at least – that the end of the world has come… and indeed that it might be coming for some as something of a relief.

What’s different this time, though, isn’t that Armageddon is now rather more likely than it was, say, at the height of the Cold War, but how utterly irrational – how extraordinarily divorced from reality – our world seems to have become.

Things are now madder than the years in which MAD – the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction – was the crazy doctrine on which the shaky foundations of world peace had been perched.

In the United Kingdom, we have a Labour prime minister who seems determined to undermine the principles of social justice on which his party was built, to do even more damage to the nation’s economy, and to become even more unpopular than his immediate predecessors had managed during their disastrous periods in power.

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And in the United States, the White House is now occupied by a convicted criminal who once attempted to overthrow American democracy and who is now wrecking the economic and diplomatic bedrock from which his nation’s power and influence have grown for the last hundred years, a narcissist and sociopath whose speech and actions have plumbed new depths of incoherence and childishness.

Meanwhile, in Europe, countries that had been staunch havens of liberal democracy since the Second World War have moved toward the nationalist, xenophobic, and authoritarian populism of the Far Right.

The leader of one such radical right movement, Italian premier Giorgia Meloni, this month treated us to the unedifying sight of being the object of the leering gaze of a creepy old man with Day-Glo skin and square hair, as she became the latest in a series of European leaders – including the UK’s Keir Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron – to be obliged to prostrate themselves at the feet of the dead-eyed orange idol in the Oval Office.

April has also seen the unedifying spectacle of a senior British politician vying to outdo the stupidity of a Stateside counterpart (who had accidentally invited a hostile journalist to join a chat group which had disclosed and discussed highly classified details of ongoing military operations) by erroneously adding hundreds of MPs, former ministers, journalists, and even his own party leader to a private WhatsApp group.

It's also been the month in which an American multibillionaire spent many millions of dollars sending a minor pop star to the edge of space and in which another tech magnate and archetypal movie villain appears finally to have fallen out of favor with his customers, his shareholders, and his political master, a man whose office he’d used just a month earlier to stage the most surreal press conference since Britain’s Rishi Sunak decided to announce he was calling a general election by standing in the street outside his house in torrential rain and without an umbrella.

If this is the springtime of unreason, hell only knows what this summer may bring.

But even as the human race seems finally (and yet again) to have lost all hope, all sense, its mind, and the very plot itself, a vague glimmer of hope – the merest quantum of solace – has arisen some 700 trillion miles away, on a distant planet, where our astronomers believe they may have identified the faintest signs of extraterrestrial life, far, far away from all this madness, cut off by 124 light years from the madding crowd of shallow souls enslaved to social media chats and ChatGPT, proving that there might be a greater value in space exploration than photo opportunities for celebrity tourists.

This piece of news – which, if correct, might constitute the greatest scientific discovery in the history of our civilization – has gone largely unremarked in the western press, which has been much more concerned with a passing fashion for the latest innovation in artificial intelligence, its ability to create for its users images of their very own personalized toy action figures of themselves, a function of cutting-edge technology which has contributed even further to the infantilization of our species, and which we’ve found we cannot live without.

Here then, as a wise poet once suggested, we might at last cling desperately to the prospect of there being intelligent life in space… because there’s evidently none at all down here on Earth.