Shades of gray from my toes to the vault of the Atlantic cathedral, I
stand and wonder. In wonder.
Seventy-five percent of the world is sheathed in water. Of the rest, we
inhabit only 10% or 90% (http://www.curiousmeerkat.co.uk/questions/much-land-earth-inhabited/).
If you exclude our lit civilization, we are invisible of the surface – despite the
myth that the Great Wall of China is visible from space (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/great-wall-from-moon/).
Our newly fire-wise ancestors began worshipping multiple goddesses,
gods, and immaterials and keep at it even today, though with a more refined and
decorous mien. Science became the god of the age, predicting the transformation
of Humanity into a global, biocybernetic civilization of, oddly enough, immaterial
minds (“the element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and
their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and
thought.” [I recently witnessed the disappearance of my father’s mind from his
body…]) linked together into a new, self-worshipping god.
Discarding God, we have transferred our affections to ourselves.
Unfortunately, the evidence is clear that we die – in car accidents, of cancer,
even from previously conquered diseases like measles – we are a sad substitute
for the eternal gods of yore. What could we find that would grant us god-like
powers? We’ve extended our lives a paltry decade or two, we reached for the
stars, stopped at the Moon, then went back to near-space, pretending that two
drifting pieces of junk passed through the heliopause and (it was announced: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/voyager-2-spacecraft-enters-interstellar-space/)
and “into interstellar space” are a great accomplishment of Humanity…
We haven’t conquered world hunger, want, our population, the wasteful
production of power (every form of power production has an ecological impact,
no matter how green. Electric car batteries will be difficult if not impossible
to recycle, windmills, and solar panels need…um…wind and sun…to create power.
We still worry about creating some way to store the power we make. Science
fiction writers assume fusion power while scientists tell us every decade that
practical fusion power is only two decades away (https://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2014/11/forever-20-years-away-will-we-ever-have-working-nuclear-fusion-reactor).
So how do we prove our divinity?
The only way we have so far discovered is that we have changed the
climate of our homeworld to a degree that anthropogenic global warming is the
sole reason we are having unprecedented: cold, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat
waves, droughts, floods, glacial/polar melts, and species extinction.
In fact, there are no other factors that have an effect on Earth but
Humanity. Forget volcanoes, solar activity, El Nino, La Nina, the Polar Vortex,
or our position in space – they don’t matter. Even so, from space, the profound
changes in climate of the third planet of a minor star in an arm of an
unremarkable barred spiral galaxy are without apparent cause, a sort of planetary
spontaneous generation of climate change. Certainly there are sources of CO2,
chlorofluorocarbons, H2SO4, and other odd chemicals that appear from nowhere.
*sigh*
Even the master of future building, Kim Stanley Robinson, flooded Earth
in BLUE MARS with erupting volcanoes beneath Antarctica rather than
anthropogenic global warming. I imagine he used catastrophe purely for dramatic
effect as the extreme, story-driving effects of anthropogenic global
warming are in the future twenty or so years. AGW – I prefer to call it what we
started with rather than whatever the current name change as the philosophy of
AGW remains the same. (It reminds me of the marketing of the fictional pharmaceutical
company in BIG BANG THEORY, that Bernadette Wolowitz-Rostenkowski works for…)
Last point in the rant above: overpopulation, pollution, and AGW seem
to me to miss the point by crying out that we “Save the Earth!” Earth is a
planet which will be around until a massive impact event or it’s consumed by
the expansion of an aging Sol into a red giant. It’s HUMANITY and several other
lifeforms (though only the expansion will eliminate the cockroaches…) will
disappear. It’s likely that anything short of that will leave some kind of life
on Earth.
Please don’t get me wrong: I work to keep my carbon footprint as small
as possible by recycling, buying locally, biking instead of driving, reusing
and thrift-store shopping frequently, and using “environmentally safe” products.
We all need to do what we can. We rescued our pets and if they weren’t, we
neutered or spayed them; we strive with others against world hunger and disease
and local hunger and disease prevention and work against teen pregnancies, and
give to charities targeted at issues that are important to us; and our investment
portfolio is as green as we can make it.
But in witness to the Human penchant for drama, I have only to nod
toward Bollywood and Hollywood, and the latest best-sellers in electrons or on
paper. The number of SF short stories set on post-climatic-apocalyptic Earth
are abundant in electronic and paper magazines (though Rebecca Roanhorse’s TRAIL
OF LIGHTNING has a delightfully different take on the subject, adding an
engrossing immaterial angle.
I’d like to write like that myself and will be poking around at
creating a slightly different world that has a slightly different immaterial
view!
Image: https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Screen-Shot-2016-09-03-at-6.25.03-AM.gif
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