So just in case everyone continues hell-bent for leather to put candles on birthday cakes in spite of the wonderful suggestion in my last post and global warming continues unabated, hastening the end (a scant 500 million years hence) or not (the end could happen sooner, when we least expect it, perhaps on a sunny afternoon next October, for example), I urge you to read what some nice scientists at Columbia University have published, a learned treatise on what we will need to do to survive doomsday. The article is brought to us courtesy of an internet news service in Australia, wouldn't you know, even though doomsday is by definition, as I mentioned in the title of this post, something no one will survive.
The comments after the article are interesting too, but I would really love to hear my readers' reactions.
It occurs to me that by the time our race is that old, perhaps we ("we" forsooth) having grown weary of the world like Tolkien's elves, will be ready, even eager, happily anticipating -- mama in her kerchief and I in my cap, as it were -- lying down for the longest of all winter naps, but that, I suppose, is beside the point.
What concerns me more than any of that is the fact that my writing and thought processes are becoming more and more like Billy Ray Barnwell's (q.v.) every day.
The arrogance of scientists can sometimes be breathtaking. One day this planet will reach its endgame and there is nothing our descendants will be able to do about it. Given the size of the cosmos, Earth is not even a speck of dust. All things must pass.
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