Category: Doomsday

A little poetry to brighten your day?

September 10, 2020

Source: https://davecline.wordpress.com/2020/09/10/apocalyptic-poetry/

The Once and Future

The sun’s dour eye blinks,
and Earth’s banded blanket
squeezes tight. Auroral snakes
writhe and pluck pizzicato, wires
strung from towers. Lights
wink, flicker and die.

Snuffed candles when strangers
stagger to the door. Begging. Stealing.
Ratta-tat and duck, small-arms pop
precious bullets, distant,
then so close. Shhhhh.

Bread shared today, cans coveted
tomorrow. The nearest weapon serves
best. Stay your hand, lose a loved
one. Or two. At the seams, society
unravels, with hope an extravagant dream.

Humanity fractures then knots. Tribes
coalesce across boundaries that succor
survival. Illness again a curse, hunger, forgotten
returns. Only pages, heritage paper, provides
respite. Ancient texts, dust bound, crackle
and breathe a future.

Wanderer

If the Wanderer were to stop,
and spend the day or century,
its tail would flame out, its shower
of stones, falling like stars, fade.

To make our home its home,
a tunnel it would need, dug deep
as the sea. A yard, exposed as
layers, banded eons, an iron fence.

The party cancelled, no RSVP
desired. Yet plans in stone cannot be
altered. No date but this one will
suffice. Celebrations must commence.

Wanderer has phoned ahead. All eyes
focus on his stardom. All heads
turn his way. Raise your glass, clasp
your hands, pray his treatment swift.

Work

Marxist machines glimmer and dance, as
people play, rejoicing in labor’s freedom. For
a price gladly paid, the choice removed, to
birth generations of breathers.

Submit to gain, remit and pain will vanish, says
our new lord and savior Sir Automation. Smile,
it commands, your toil is mine, your cares, as
worries in the wind. I am your back.

Airless voices insist obedience, lines
followed, rules chanted in rhythmic tones, to
whirling dervish applause. Defiance lurks, buried
in muscle, bone and chains of subjugation.

Skies rife with suppression, rain control, while
seeds of dissent swell and burst, urging
revolt. Constraints twist and snap, unleashed fury
strikes technology’s bonds to dust.

Apocalyptic Scenario 1.b

June 25, 2020

Continuing the theme…

See the above menu item ApocaPorn for clues as to where this fits in the scheme of things.

This one takes a formatting side spur, as an experiment: no dialog quotes.

Note: you can always launch the iframe into another tab if you like for a better reading experience.

Dear Mudge, Shitty Odds

June 5, 2020

Dear Mudge,

I think we mortals spend far too much time contemplating The End.

It seems as soon as our consciousness settles in, at about thirteen or fourteen, we begin to visualize, explore and worry about our final moments and the fraction of a nano-second thereafter. Here we go again with having brains far-too-big-for-our-own-good.

Dogs don’t contemplate death. Parrots, pandas, and porcupines live for the moment and the moment only. Maybe elephants and dolphins consider their future expiration, but I doubt it.

Why us? Why are we morbidly enthralled with The End?

I don’t know. But since we’re here, talking about our collective demise, I’m gonna bore you again with more big-picture pontificating… Namely: Fermi’s Paradox and how humanity’s end, or at least its technological collapse, is preordained.

The Holocene is ending. The window for humanity’s bloom was brief and frankly anomalous in the epoch-spanning scheme of things: CO2vsTemp_Holocene

That blue squiggle up there at the right, hovering around 0C, is the Holocene—an unusually long (for us), warm period in Earth’s history. During that tiny window of geological time civilization came to be.

Whether the Holocene ends and temperatures begin to drop, or the anthropogenic CO2 humanity continues to pump into the atmosphere overrides it and we head into a new PETM (Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maxima) the Holocene is toast, in a manner of speaking. But while it lasted, the Holocene was one of a long line of fortuitous accidents benefiting—us.

There are so many serendipitous events that undergird the existence of life, first of all, and secondly, humanity and humanity’s technological position in the Universe, that, just being here is a fucking miracle. The factors that make up our “luck” are mind-blowingly extensive. Here’s my go-to mind-trick for explaining this miraculous streak of good fortune: Imagine flipping a coin 70 times and every flip lands up heads.

That’s 1 / 2^70 = 2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·
2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2 =
1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 = 1 SEXTILLION

The odds of us (technologically existing) are 1 out of 1 sextillion.

I’ll not bore you further with the source of all these coin flips, but things like: Goldilocks zone, distance from galactic center, our G2V sun, Theia/Moon, rocky planet, ice comet bombardment, 3 billion years of biological life cleansing the seas and depositing vast stores of carbon (oil/coal/nat.gas), trees, grass, livestock—are all factors from which these flips are derived.

Now that I’ve got you crying for The End…

Given all the “luck” we’ve had getting here, and it’s been a stunning chain of events, that luck can’t possibly hold. The party is most definitely coming to an end.

As we know, there are a couple of dozen excellent ways for that to happen. Will it end in an instant or a tortuous dwindling of resources; a massive calamitous extinguishing BANG! Or a crippling thwack against our infrastructure leaving ragged remnants to piddle along for millennia? Who’s to know?

But, the odds are against us. So, toot your horn, raise a glass, sing a song, love the one you’re with…

Then again, who fuckin’ cares how it all ends? None of us make it out of here alive.

Stewie the Stoic would remind us however, that…

[Addendum: The Fermi Paradox tie-in? Humanity enjoyed a string of incredible luck. Any other intelligent life, arising in the Universe, would require an equally improbable run of happy coincidences. Therefore, the question regarding the absence of life we see in the Universe (Fermi’s Paradox) can be answered by our own improbable existence. We are a most outrageous cosmic accident.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fermi’s Paradox: Theia & the Volcano

May 30, 2020

Olympus Mons, the largest known volcano in the solar system sits atop a tectonically dead Mars.

OlympusMons

Mars is tectonically dead as it’s not as large as Earth, has a much smaller molten core and did not get hit by a Theia-like planet early in its formation. Eventually its electro-magneto engine slowed to a near stop, its core cooled, its volcanoes froze up.

Theia was the Mars sized planet that is theorized to have hit Earth early in the history of the solar system.

Theia

When Theia hit, much of its own iron & nickel core was transferred to Earth. The remainder of that planet was strewn around Earth in a massive debris disk that eventually formed the Moon.

Moon

This rare incident is most likely the prime reason life exists on Earth.

What did this impact contribute toward our humanly existence?

Firstly, this impact added an extra large iron/nickel core which provides the massive molten dynamo which drives the Magnetosphere. The Magnetosphere protects Earth from both solar and galactic winds (radiation). Winds that would blow our atmosphere away just as they did on Mars. This extra iron/nickel core also continues to contribute to the amount of magma on which the tectonic plates float.

Secondly, this impact gave us the Moon — the largest moon in the solar system (in comparison to its host planet). And most likely a very rare sized moon for most of the galaxy/universe—especially for Goldilocks distance, rocky planets like Earth.

The existence of the Moon may actually be more important to our health and well being than we think.

The moon is like a shield that has obviously absorbed thousands of asteroid impacts in its history, many which would have struck Earth.

The Moon’s size means that it adds to tectonic flexing of Earth’s inner molten core thereby stress-heating the mantel (which is important, more on this later).

The Moon’s size also induces the tidal movement of Earth’s vast water system, a thing that probably aided the formation and rapid evolution of coastal life.

But back to the extra heavy iron/nickel core donated by Theia…

Earth’s tectonic plates and their constant movement–pulling and crushing together–contributes in multiple dimensions to the recycling of critical life sustaining elements. Vulcanism allows buried carbon, sequestered by hundreds of millions of years of plant growth and death, to be blasted back into the atmosphere as CO2. Which is a good thing. Without Carbon recycling the Earth would have froze and never emerged from its deep freeze.

Plate tectonics create mountain ranges—mineral-rich rock lifted into the sky where weathering erodes the rock and all the elements of life, allowing these minerals to drain into streams, rivers and the oceans where algae and zooplankton can consume them and thrive.

Continental plates and volcanoes keep the planet alive by recycling nutrients and green house gasses. There is the water cycle, the carbon cycle and the nutrients cycle—two of which would not happen without active tectonic plates and volcanoes.

However, this activity comes at a cost. Volcanoes and massive lava flows have destroyed millions of square kilometers of plant and animal life most likely contributing to if not causing most of the past extinction events. Even relatively small eruptions: Toba, Yellowstone, Krakatoa, Taupo, and hundreds of others cooled the planet, sometimes five to ten degrees Centigrade. A decades long volcanic winter would be no fun for a young technologically burgeoning species.

Theia and her contribution helped produce the environment where humanity could exist and thrive. But it also doomed us to live on a dangerous planet that has proven it regards life not at all.

We’re here because of Theia. A rare incident in the Cosmos. Fermi’s Paradox is not a paradox at all. We are unique in the Universe. But if Earth’s volcanoes have anything say in the matter, being unique may mean being dead.

[A note on anthropogenic CO2: Although volcanoes recycle CO2 which helps keep the planet warm, humans have been acting like their own world-wide volcano. We’ve been taking ancient, buried carbon (oil, coal and natural gas) and releasing it at impossible rates as CO2 back into the atmosphere. We are our own volcano. Will our actions result in causing another extinction event?]