How Irish blueprint could save us all from destruction

It's a ray of hope, says man who studies ‘End of the World'

- LUKE Kemp tends to avoid small talk.

It makes him a bit nervous when it turns to 'so what do you do?'.

That's a hazard of the job when your life's work is studying the end of the world as we know it.

Kemp works at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University in the UK.

His daily routine is spent researching the end of days, and the risks that could causes today’s highly interconnected society to break apart and collapse - taking with it everything we know and love.

When this column previously spoke to him, he had just published a paper titled 'Climate Endgame' which studied the eerie similarities between the collapse of former civilisations and the pathway that our own is speeding along.

His latest project is unlikely to improve his line in small talk.

In a new book - 'Goliaths Curse' - he appears to have grown even less optimistic about the likelihood that humanity will choose to avoid doomsday.

But he does give us one last hope. A throw of the dice with an idea that, as it happens, Ireland has shown itself to be a world leader at.

But first the bad news.

Having spent seven years studying 400 societies from the past 5,000 years, the Australian-born academic found key indicators of collapse all around us.

The main one is inequality which has gone hand in hand with the downfall of all civilised societies in history.