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Unpopular Ideas

Ramblings and Digressions from out of left field, and beyond....

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Location: Piedmont of Virginia, United States

All human history, and just about everything else as well, consists of a never-ending struggle against ignorance.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

The Doomsday Bomb and the Gorilla Effect

According to this article, top scientists have advanced the hands of the Doomsday Clock by two minutes, from seven to five till. --Till midnight that is, the moment when humans will stumble into ending their civilization but I assume not the planet itself.

This is intended to be a scary prediction, prompting people to take measures to head off such an imminent end, but as always we can expect it to have no such effect.

Most of the few humans who will even hear about it will assume that the dummies brandishing the atomic bombs do so only in observance of the Gorilla Effect -- exaggerated roars and chest beating intended to ward off hostile entities without actually resorting to delivering real blows.

And all the rest of the world's fauna and flora will not hear about it, and, if they could, they would probably applaud the likelihood, because so much of what passes for civilization comes at their expense. They've seen it all before, with heavenly bodies hitting the Earth with the force of thousands of H-bombs all at once, and they've even seen global warming and global cooling at the most extreme, and as always, they would be content to take their chances.

After all, their clocks run for many thousands and even millions of years -- a little longer than any that we're likely to devise or see.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Interesting take on my future. It reads a little like Revelation of John, from my Bible. Thanks, I really enjoyed your perspective, scary as it is.

5:09 PM  

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