“Hi, professor ____?” It was me, calling up one of my favorite teachers from college to ask for a grad school recommendation.
“Yes?”
“Hi, it’s Jay Stanley. . .”
“Jay! How have you been? Are you still worried about spontaneous global eco-collapse?”
Okay, it was true. When I was in college, I was fond of talking about the danger that our global ecosystem might die, not gradually, but suddenly and catastrophically. It was done with an eye to the reaction that I would get, but it was also an expression of real fears.
Admittedly, I have a fondness for the apocalyptic. Maybe it started when I was in high school and I became convinced that the Reagan administration was going to blow up the world with the kinds of moves it was pulling like its insane, still-baffling decision to place Pershing missiles in Europe (thereby lessening the time a Soviet launch commander would have to distinguish between a genuine incoming missile warning and a flock of birds to 10 minutes from 30. If he thought they were real missiles, he'd launch at us -- brilliant move, Ronnie). The possibility of nuclear war seemed VERY real to this suburban Californian kid in 1984 and 1985. For one thing, where I lived was ringed with military sites – March Air Force Base a couple of miles away and other bases nearby in San Bernardino etc. A few times I remember seeing contrails heading up into the sky and wondering if the end were 27-32 minutes away (or whatever -- at the time I knew precisely). Fortunately they turned out to be just missile tests or jets flying vertically or something.
Was my preoccupation with apocalypse crazy? There are rational reasons for it. Unlike those who expect the end because of their reading of the ambiguities of the Bible or Nostradamus, or the ravings of a cult leader, it made sense in 1984 to worry about thermonuclear holocaust, because it was probably more likely to happen then than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
True, people throughout time have predicted apocalypse nearly constantly. Eventually someone will be right I guess, but it is a form of narcissism, to believe that of all times when people could live, WE are alive in the special end-time. Even to think that there’s a God who has a special antipathy for us is narcissism (why should He really care about our particular debaucheries more than those of all the other times in history?) Of course, fear of nuclear war or eco-collapse need not be religiously based -- they are perfectly consistent with the view that we are alone in a meaningless universe where nothing is too bad to happen. But perhaps there is still an echo of such narcissism. Perhaps there is also an element of boyish wishful thinking that something so –- well, exciting will happen –- combined with the youthful sense of fearlessness and certainty that *I*, somehow, would survive it.
Of course there are also powerful psychological drives to minimize the possibility of apocalypse. The psychologist Robert Jay Lifton became famous for his series of books taking apart our collective denial and avoidance strategies when faced with the real possibility of nuclear holocaust. Those same theories can now be applied to the environment and other threats. People who live comfortably find it hard to conceive that their world could collapse (the enjoyable Spielberg movie Empire of the Sun has a good portrayal of this: 1941 British colonists in Shanghai living in denial as the Japanese close in on their privileged lives). People are often stubbornly resistant to accepting the reality that they're living under a level of danger and insecurity that they find psychologically intolerable. Perhaps all those Republican Senators prattling on about global warming being a hoax aren't just shilling for corporate interests; it may also be an expression of the deep-seated cowardice of the conservative (more on that another day).
Anyway, say what you may about however crazy or rational my fears may be, the result is that I’ve kept an eye on the subject. Here are seven ways that the end of life as we know it could take place. They're in no particular order.
- Spontaneous global eco-collapse
- Peak oil crisis
- Nuclear terrorism or accidental discharge or launch or war
- Meteor!
- Global pandemic, natural
- Global pandemic, artificial
- Gray goo!
I plan to post a blog entry on each of these in coming weeks.
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