At this point it
can be lost on no one, whether of a religious or secular bent, that the end of
the world is at least a possibility in our own lifetimes. Of course, “the end”
is perpetually “nigh” for a certain breed of doomsaying prophet, and they’ve
been consistently wrong up until now...or we wouldn’t be here to worry about it
today!
But the more
powerful science has made man (who retains his flawed nature...just read any
version of the Faust legend for a pretty incisive look at the trade-off we’ve
made), and the more it’s enabled him to see the universe as it is, the more
aware we become of what a fragile miracle life on this Earth is. Here are just
a handful of the ways it could go down:
1.
Thermonuclear war
This is the one
that defined the era from 1945 (when the U.S. first “demonstrated” the bomb) or
at least 1949 (when the rival Soviets, thanks to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,
showed off theirs) to the ostensible end of the Cold War in 1991. For fifty
years, the world lived under the constant shadow of atomic holocaust. Thank God
we survived. Yet is our complacency, since the bipolar conflict gave way to
chaos, really warranted? Nuclear weapons did not go away, and the U.S. and
other countries remain locked in the logic of endless competitive new weapon
development. Who even knows what they’re up to now, in our own country or
abroad? Someday, surely, all these technological wonders of murder will be
used.
2.
Environmental collapse
Here is an issue
that has been absurdly clouded by our left/right paradigm, the ridiculous
“enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic that divides us so neatly into two
parties. You’re not supposed to be a conservative and care about the
environment. Well, it doesn’t take an etymological genius to see that
“conservation” and “conservative” share a root. Personally, I’m an agnostic
leaning toward believer in global warming. But to me that’s almost a moot
point; we’ll certainly find out the truth if we just hold on.
The larger
question is: even if this particular catastrophe is a false alarm, will there
ever be any externality created by the behaviors of every-man-for-himself
capitalism that will kill us if we don’t regulate it? If so, and the global
warming debate is the dress rehearsal, I don’t want to see the show. We need to
take the idea of “freedom” more seriously by soberly considering its limits.
The tragedy of the commons is a real problem, and there must be some middle
ground between Big Brother and anarchy.
3.
Supervolcano / Meteor strike / Solar event
I have refrained
in this post from postulating a Biblical apocalypse per se because I
don’t pretend to be qualified to assess such a possibility. But it is possible
to imagine a TEOTWAWKI scenario without invoking religious paradigms, that
involves no direct human cause and is unpreventable. If the supervolcano under
Yellowstone were to erupt, or a giant meteor were to appear and no Bruce Willis
to stop it, or a solar flare lashed out and fatally irradiated our planet, it
would mean that, whatever your beliefs, for all practical purposes, God had
ended us. And it’s not only possible, it’s inevitable, especially now that the
dream of human spaceflight is being mothballed: the sun will eventually (though
we’re talking about billions of years here) engulf the planet, and there’s
nothing we can do about it.
Rather than
letting this fact, or the equally incontrovertible small-scale equivalent of
our own certain death, cause us despair, we should allow it to throw into
relief the tremendous preciousness of our lives, and live them as if they were
fleeting, for they are.
Melissa Miller
is a blogger and freelance education reporter. Bewildered by the proliferation
of accredited online associate degrees? Melissa can help break it down for you. Send any feedback to melissamiller831@gmail.com.
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