Every time a tree falls down in the park someone thinks it is the end of the world. I disagree with these people but there are some strange things going on, I will admit. I don’t understand their motivation. Even if they are right, and there was nothing any of us could do about it, what is the point in harping on the fact? How could that be productive?
And the notion that the “World” could be coming to an end is about as arrogant a statement as anyone could make. I am no scientist, but read my lips; The World (Earth) isn’t going anywhere. Not for billions of years when the sun swells up and engulfs us along with Mercury, Venus and probably Mars. One way or the other, no matter what we do, this rock is going to be floating around space for a long, long time after we have either left or terminated each other.
According to non-Christian people, much smarter than me, our world has been around for about 4.55 billion years. Humans have been around for somewhere around 195 thousand of those years. Most of those 195 thousand years were spent, by our knuckle dragging ancestors walking around, trying not to freeze to death. So you can really only count about the past 6 or 7 thousand years of history as being anything we should pay attention to. And this is being generous. Most of that 6 or 7 thousand years was spent by people, running around desserts, chopping one another’s heads off. Not exactly a progressive society. Only in the past 5 or 6 hundred years, have we really begun to grasp Earth Science and the laws of physics that are at work all around us every day.
The average human being on Earth lives for 78 years. That’s 78 years against 4.55 billion of which we have only been self aware of how things work for about 600. There have always been people so paranoid and crazy, yet arrogant in their beliefs, that they think that our planet is going to end within the miniscule amount of time they are walking around on it.
Our cosmos has a much slower Swatch. As far as our Earth and Solar System and Galaxy and Universe are concerned, 78 years isn’t enough time to microwave a hot pocket. Our planet couldn’t blow its nose in 78 years. Mowing your lawn, takes thousands of years on a planetary level. For this reason, and many others, there is no F’ing way that the world is going to come to an end within our lifetimes. The probability of that happening is so infinitesimally remote that I am comfortable with calling it, impossible.
There have always been earthquakes, there have always been floods, and there have always been hurricanes. The difference between these events now and when they happened a few hundred years ago are the amount of people affected by these events. Katrina would not have been a problem, if New Orleans hadn’t gotten in its way. Japan is so insanely populated, that of course something like this earthquake is going to be a major humanitarian disaster. Birds and fish die. I don’t know why they are deciding to die in huge numbers, all at the same time, but it’s not because the world is ending, I will guarantee you that.
We don’t do ourselves a whole lot of favors within our own human nature. Human beings, no matter where they are on the planet, love to live around the oceans. As we have industrialized and built up ports and traded with each other over the years, the major population centers have had to be built along the coasts. This is right where most of the horrific shit happens on our planet, which turns something like a flood, running 6 miles inland, into a catastrophic calamity of biblical proportions. Nearly every coastline on our planet has human being after human being, literally stacked up on top of each other to the point where they can barely move. But we can’t seem to understand why a flood would take so many of us out.
Now, the planet aside, is it possible for life on Earth to end within our lifetimes? Again, no, life on this planet isn’t going anywhere for a long, long time. The quality of our life could suck a lot more as the years go by but it isn’t going to kill us all off. Human beings would have starved to death if they didn’t learn how to stand on their back legs and reach for leaves to eat. They survived ice ages and famine, and predators trying to eat them. Some crazy assholes even believe that we survived a planetary flood on a big wooden boat, that one dude named Noah built, and put two of every animal on the planet onto. If we can pull that shit off, we can stomach a flood or an earthquake or a hurricane or a few dead birds every once in a while.
I am a lot more worried about the progressive dumbification of our species that seems to be doing nothing but accelerating as the years go by. To me, this is what’s going to ruin all of our lives. I am a lot more worried about the collective IQ of our voting population then I am about a volcano or tidal wave. Democracy only works if you have people who can understand what it is that they are voting for. As soon as you don’t, like we have now in this country, you can just tell people that they will get free bacon if they vote ‘NO’ on issue 6… and then they will. And then the schools won’t get funded and then our country gets even stupider. Eventually, you end up with a country of illiterate people, living under bridges, drooling on each other.
But still, this won’t kill us. We will still be “alive”, the planet will still be spinning around the sun. If anything, the dumber we get, the better off the planet will be. Eventually, we will all be so stupid, that nobody will remember how to run the coal plant or how to release the chemicals into the river. Nobody will be able to build the cars that spew the exhaust into the atmosphere. We will all just be sleeping in huge piles, trying not to freeze to death while drawing pictures of penis’s on each other’s foreheads, and laughing our asses off.
At which point, the planet will recover, and we will either have to re-evolve of just finally die off completely. At which point, who really cares which way this, goes? We won’t be smart enough to even understand what the hell is happening around us anyway.
Either way, the world is still going to be here, and there will still be plenty of time for some other bag of jelly to crawl out of the ocean and learn how to eat leaves and eventually evolve into the next great species. Who will again, build up the planet to the point where it starts to affect the weather. And who will eventually become arrogant enough to tell people that the world is coming to an end.
I think the Earth has a way of keeping our numbers at a level that it can handle. And I am not sure 7 billion of us rats with credit cards and cell phones, is in that range. It certainly doesn’t seem so. How this works, is beyond me.
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