A post I put up recently, re: the possibility that students who use their student loans to finance spring break may be reacting (likely on an unconscious level) to the possibility of extinction, prompted an amazing comment from one reader, Anne:
I absolutely agree. We are enormously technologically competent, and we are fantastic at warm furries. Putting these two competencies together, the very least you’d think we’d be able to do is get extinction right, carried out smoothly with as little pain as possible. We’d have the technology to make dying painless, and all the warm furries to turn it into a mass love-in grieve-in hug-in ‘how I want to tailor my dying’ experience. Instead we are doing it the hard painful way, with starvation, bombs, wars, mass refugee migrations futily seeking somewhere ‘else’, nuclear war,… There’ll be so many bodies dying that the sheer disposal of them in any sort of ‘decent’ way poses global-scale challenges. Then there is strategic withdrawal from the ‘war’ we’ve lost totally. We need to ‘turn off the lights’ as we go – especially all the nuclear power stations on earth. And they take 10 years and heaps of engineering skill and heaps of money to turn off a nuclear power plant safely. If we don’t do this they will melt down as soon as the electricity stations stop functioning (part of the extinction process). It certainly changes priorities. We have mass grieving, mass comforting, and mass choosing how to do this existing existence thing. And we’re still stuck in the ‘everyone has to try to live forever’ paradigm where we make it as hard and expensive as possible to die. Hey folks, we’ve got 7.5billion++ to get through this process in a very short time. This is a logistical and emotional BIG job.
And now, I thank reader Karen for pointing me to this website: arctic-news.blogspot.com
It’s not just Guy McPherson any more. The figure “nine years to extinction” is being mentioned by scientists elsewhere.
Warning of mass extinction of species, including humans, within one decade
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSnrDRU6_2g
