It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) by Roberts, Adam (reading in the dark .TXT) 📗

to become an Übermensch is to look into your soul and know, with absolute certainty, that you truly embrace the Eternal Return.

I suspect that for many people the idea of a ‘Big Bounce’ appeals because it evades the horrors of the heat death story, opening a secret door through which we can escape mortality. To me its implications are, in the strict sense of the word, appalling. The thought that I would have to live my life over and over in every detail, like being trapped in an infinite loop of Groundhog Day, a masterpiece of supreme existential terror,* provokes in me a profound existential revulsion. Grim though the prospect of the universal heat death is, the alternative is far worse. If those are our two options, then I know which one I’d prefer.

* Actually Wells doesn’t specify the year in which his final chapters are set, but this seems to me as good a guess as any.

* John Ray, Three Physico-Theological Discourses (1715), p. 315.

* Spoiler: they won’t be. The overwhelming likelihood is that none of the planets currently orbiting the Sun will be in their present orbits by that point. The thing to keep in mind is that our Sun is sweeping in a great arc around the outer hem of our galaxy; five billion years of its future will include many close encounters with other stars and gravitationally significant objects liable to interfere with the orbital mechanics of the solar system, even to the point of slingshotting planets out of solar orbit altogether. Then again, it’s also likely the Sun will pick up new satellites in that time, so there’s a reasonable chance that it will have something to nibble on as it swells.

* Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints, translated by Ilinka Zarifopol-Johnston (University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 23.

* ‘Falsification’ is the philosopher Karl Popper’s de facto definition of science. A biological scientist might advance the rule ‘all swans are white’; if we spot a black swan, then we have falsified that universal. The important thing to note is that falsification is not the same thing as an absolute refutation. When faced with data that falsifies a theory, a scientist usually modifies it (‘most swans are white’).

* Indeed, modern scientists note that the cosmic expansion actually appears to be speeding up. They don’t know why, and explain the increase in expansion with reference to something they call ‘dark energy’.

* Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (1791), 4.2.378–83.

* Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), p. 341.

* Perhaps you think it is a charming and funny romantic comedy? You are wrong. I cannot deny that Bill Murray’s deadpan performance generates many laughs from a well-written script, but if you think about it properly it is the most horrifying movie ever made. How long must he have been trapped there to learn jazz piano, ice sculpture and French? This was no two-week glitch, but one that went on for years, decades – or longer: director Harold Ramis, a Buddhist, said at the time of the film’s release that Buddhism teaches that it takes 10,000 years for a soul to evolve to its next level, and that he assumed that was how long Phil is trapped in his loop. I couldn’t last that long, reliving that day, over and over; I’d go mad. At what point do you think your sanity would snap? At what point might you give up on ethics and morality when you realised your actions have no consequences? You might think that you could assert joy in every second of your relived existence in such circumstances, but that groundhog isn’t going to snare me in its Nietzschean nightmare.

THE WORLD ON FIRE: CLIMATE ARMAGEDDON

In Roland Emmerich’s environmental disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow (2004), the charismatic climate scientist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) realises that a massive and catastrophic climate shift is about to strike the world. The authorities refuse to heed his warnings, but he’s proven right when a colossal storm system batters the whole of the northern hemisphere, sucking frozen air into more temperate zones and instantly freezing the whole world: a huge hailstorm smashes Tokyo to rubble, tornadoes rip Los Angeles to pieces and the British Royal Family die when the sudden drop in temperature causes the helicopters transporting them to Balmoral to freeze in mid-air and crash. Jack treks across the newly frozen wasteland to find his son, stuck in an ice-locked New York. The going, we might say, is Ragnaröcky.

It’s an entertaining movie, but daft: the temperature, one character declares, is ‘dropping 10 degrees a minute!’ which would, if true, get us to absolute zero in less than half an hour. One scene that has particularly stayed with me sees Jack’s son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) literally pursued by the drop in temperature – he and his friends run as the floor freezes behind them as if it is chasing after them, reaching the safety of a room and shutting the door just in time. But it’s mean-spirited to sneer – the film is not a documentary, and the vivid special effects are good at conveying the immediacy of its topic.

Climate change is a real and present danger. If you don’t believe that then I don’t know what to tell you. The scientific consensus on this fact is irrefutable, short of there being a massive international conspiracy by scientists to fool the world. But the idea that a legion of geeks is slowly accumulating forged data and publishing it in obscure academic journals in order to reduce the profits of gigantic petrochemical corporations seems a little far-fetched.

We can be honest: the climate is warming and we are mostly responsible. Some people might point to the natural fluctuations of our climate over time, but the rapid global changes we are seeing at the moment are unprecedented and not comparable with anything that has happened before. Its effects will bring extreme weather events, rising sea levels and increasing temperatures, rendering parts of the world uninhabitable. This statement is