Just read the last five pages of the thread, and some discussion on this topic in another (economics) forum I frequent, and have come to one conclusion:
As it stands, humanity is well and truly fucked when the next major pandemic hits.
To be fair, it’s probably well and truly fucked, anyway, given the intensifying Dunning-Kruger effect across regions and knowledge domains.
But the next pandemic is likely to be the quickest destruction event, simply because of the growing distrust in expertise and rejection of historical analysis in favour of rage politics and anecdotal belief systems.