Ever since the beginning of human civilization we have worried. The looming question is this: what naturally follows a beginning? And the scary answer to that question seems to be: the end, be it “happily ever after” or otherwise. And so, after years of complacent civilization we have begun to ask the question: how does it all end?
This apocalyptic attitude shows itself in the movies, books and political musings of our times. There is rarely a bookshelf without a story about the end of civilization or the universe in general — subjects for which humorist authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett are renowned. On TV we have apocalypses, including like a zombie outbreak in “The Walking Dead,” History Channel’s interpretation of an empty Earth in “Life After People” and the electrical apocalypse in the NBC TV show “Revolution.” Additionally, new apocalyptic movies come out every year, one way to go after the other, most recently “World War Z,” “Pacific Rim,” “Elysium” and the comedies “This is the End” and “World’s End.”
There is a great deal of apocalyptic media out there, but it even shows up in the news regularly as we are warned perpetually of different political disasters by conservative discontents. You all will remember how just less than nine months ago the world was for the umpteenth time prophesied to come to an end. Dec. 21, 2012 was supposed to be the end of the world, but if you ask me, the afterlife seems pretty normal. I kind of like our new post-apocalyptic world.
Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson describes in his popular science book “Death by Black Hole” the potential hazards of living on our planet adrift in the vast and disorderly universe. He warns of the eventual danger of the heat death of the universe, when after hundreds of billions of years everything freezes and gets expanded beyond usefulness; this fate is impending and unavoidable. According to Tyson, “The long-term fate of the cosmos cannot be postponed or avoided. No matter where you hide, you will be part of a universe that inexorably marches toward a peculiar oblivion … the collective gravity of everything in the universe is insufficient to halt and reverse the cosmic expansion.”
But is there really all that much to fear on an actual human scale? According to Michael Grunwald of “Time Magazine,” America’s apocalyptic fears are over hyped in popular culture and politics. Grunwald says that although it may have been close, the apocalypse is now at a safe distance from us, “We are now in the fourth year of a slow but steady recovery. The economy is adding about 200,000 jobs a month and has added 6.8 million private-sector jobs since the end of the Great Recession. The stock market is at an all-time high and has almost doubled since Obama took office. The housing market is rebounding. It’s true that 7.5 percent unemployment is way too high, but it’s better than the double-digit unemployment we had in the wake of the financial meltdown, when the apocalypse really was nigh. The government has even turned a profit on the reviled Wall Street bailouts that ended the meltdown.”
There really is not that much to fear. We may be able to kill ourselves off with nuclear weapons, but as the Cold War turned out alright in the end, we should hold a little more faith in our human ability to refrain from total annihilation. What we should be more worried about is accidentally tipping our ecosphere beyond its equilibrium point or introducing some disastrous disease that accomplishes what the bubonic plague could not.
In regards to mankind-driven global climate change, we should act fast, not because we have already caused irreversible damage, but because if we keep at our current pace, we will eventually unbalance the ecosphere. Richard A. Muller describes in his book “Physics for Future Presidents” the problem facing our planet at this time as a booming developing world catching up and dwarfing the already developed nations in their climate impact.” Muller says, “Ultimately, the real issue is the developing world. Freezing carbon dioxide emissions in the United States — even cutting back below 1990 levels — delays the effects of carbon dioxide by only a few years. The booming economies of China and India will quickly fill in for the United States.”
We should certainly be careful with our planet and our species’ life. There are so many ways for the apocalypse to come that it almost seems foolish to have a plan to try to avoid it, but at least we can look on the bright side and see that there is a silver lining to this cultural phenomenon: we are all just over-exaggerating our dissatisfaction with the present. We have grown up in such a time of marvelous technological advancement and scientific progress that we expected more. We expected to be well beyond our current state and into a realm of artificially long life, safely tucked away from danger. And so the harsh realization that we are still vulnerable to the whims of nature and of men prevails. We respond with apocalyptic fears across the board of human experience, whether the response is rational or not.
