If the end of the world is coming, what exactly
are you going to do about it? Clearly there are some situations
that are pretty much out of your hands. For instance, if the script
of Armageddon were to suddenly leap out of the pages of that weird
fictional universe where Bruce Willis is not only the world’s
best damn oil driller, but also man’s last great hope for
salvation, then you’re pretty much screwed. Let’s face
it, the dinosaurs were much bigger and much tougher than you are,
but even they couldn’t deal with the fallout when some very
large doo-doo hit a very large prehistoric fan. If anything could
survive an end of the world disaster of those proportions it would
probably be a rat or a cockroach, which however you look at it,
would make the world a pretty unpleasant place to be anyway.
So what about the other potential threats? One of the most feasible ‘end
of the world as we know it’ scenarios is the outbreak of
a global disease pandemic. In recent years there have been some
pretty serious outbreaks of various types of H1N1 influenza viruses.
These little buggers are highly contagious, very adaptable and
quick to infect. But for the sake of argument, let’s take
the worst-case ‘Hollywood’ scenario where some malevolent
government agency accidently releases their latest bio-weapon on
an unsuspecting public. Clearly the reality of the situation is
that, faced with a potential global disaster such as this, most
governments would take the harshest and most serious measures of
containment possible. That means that if you lived anywhere in
the vicinity of the outbreak, the likelihood is that once again,
you’d be screwed. If something like that went global and
killed off most of the population of the planet, those left would
almost certainly descend into a feral, violent existence of dog-eat-dog,
man-eat-dog, dog-eat-man, everybody eat canned meats until the
supplies finally run out - situation. Not a happy time at all.
One of the side-effects of everybody dying from
a terrible disease is that there wouldn’t be anyone left
to maintain even the basic infrastructure of modern society, and
so the few that are left would be living in an essentially broken
down remnant of our consumer age. The big yellow ‘M’ would
still be there, but there would be nobody home. But what if the
tools of modern society were destroyed, but all the people still
remained. This is the scenario that we might face if solar radiation
from the sun’s flares were to suddenly knock out the vast
majority of the electricity grid. So reliant are we on the flow
of electricity from those little holes in the wall that if this
were to happen, economies would collapse, citizens would riot,
a state of emergency would be called, wars would be fought, and
personal safety could no longer be expected even in your own home.
Imagine having no street lights, limited transport because fuel
stations have no electricity for the pumps, trains cannot run,
houses are no longer heated, food and water shortages, communication
breaks down, society crumbles. Bad times! Unless you happen to
be the leader of your own underground army with access to food,
water, weapons and other essential supplies, once again, you’re
probably screwed.
Although we might have moved on a little from the cold war era,
on-off relations between Russia’s increasingly neo-Stalinist
leaders and western countries such as Britain and the United
States make the possibility of a nuclear holocaust at least a
vague possibility. Such was the propagation of nuclear arsenals
by the USA and the Soviet Union in post-war period, that even
after many of them have been decommissioned, there are still
enough bombs to melt a few layers off the surface of the Earth.
In the event of a nuclear war, most of the western world would
be utterly obliterated, and what remained would be a barren radioactive
landscape with almost no life-giving properties whatsoever. Any
survivors there were would have to pick among the dust and debris
for scraps of food, fighting off similarly starving poor sods
and their dirty grabbing fingers. Basically there is simply no
good that can come of it, and yet again, you’re screwed.
Nuclear holocaust = VERY bad times.
All of these scenarios seem to have a recurring
theme, in that whatever the cause, no matter where the finger
of blame can be pointed, it is always the little guy that gets
screwed.
So while governments task their boffins with creating increasingly
sophisticated ways to kill their perceived enemies in far flung
places, instead of spending our taxes on medical research or
renewable energy sources, it pretty much boils down to the fact
that whatever
your political, religious or social ideology, you are probably
screwed! That is unless you live in a lead-lined bunker far from
anywhere that all the other ill-prepared suckers might choose
to venture, and also that you don’t mind living a lonely, solitary
existence. For the average Joe in most of these situations, the
best you could hope for is to live out the last hours of your miserable
existence in a hellish world of rats and cockroaches ever so slightly
longer, courtesy of that extra layer of fat you gained from over-indulging
on pizzas and fast-food hamburgers. A terrible state of affairs
that even that damn burger clown couldn’t paint a smile on.
The
only thing that any of us can really do to stave off these
terrible end-of-the-world disasters is to act like proper human
beings, in other words – humanely! Whether you believe
in Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Santa or none of them, taking a vested
interest in the welfare of others is the only way we will collectively
make it through the next millennia. Getting off our backsides
to vote for leaders that are not war-mongering, historical revisionists
and profiteering megalomaniacs is one way of doing it. Taking
account of our own actions and how they might affect the environment
not only on your own doorsteps, but on the rest of the world
as well, is another. Alternatively you can continue to sit in
front of the goggle box eating hamburgers and wait for the end
of the world to come to you. If you’re lucky, when the
end does come, it may even be televised.
End of the World Science