The End is Near!

A variety of things (reading online, playing Nuclear Proliferation yesterday) have made me once again wonder why so many people take such pleasure in predicting the end of the world/civilization/universe/etc.

What really gets me is that, in the end, the only way they can be vindicated would also involve having no one around to acknowledge that they had been right.

Perhaps it comes down to the long view I take, and that despite my surface pressimism, I'm not a pessimist at heart.

If the world does end, if the human race never gets beyond the heliopause of this one star, what was the point? Our sun will eventually go nova, leaving no trace of our existance but some fading radio-frequency radiation.

I see human history as a march forward. There have been setbacks along the way, but sometimes they've turned out to merely be the pause you take to prepare yourself for a jump forward. Think about it sometime - look at human history from a distance.

The curse of Babel didn't stop us. The Black Death didn't stop us. World War II didn't stop us. We've lived under the threat of NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical, for those of you who didn't know) warfare that could all but wipe out the human race for half a century... yet we're still here.

People delight in claiming that nuclear weapons are unsafe... but there's never been an accidental detonation. People delight in claiming that a supervirus is coming that will wipe out humanity... but we're still here. People delight in telling me that global warming will destory the Earth... but its been hotter than the worst-case predictions call for it to get, and these models are the same ones that can't tell me whether it will rain tomorrow with more than 70% accuracy.

So perhaps I'm just a skeptic. I see human history as a river, flowing onward. You can damn a river, you can put up walls to try to channel it, but in the end it will escape your control. The Earth, the solar system, the universe is a lot bigger, and our effect on it a lot smaller, than we think, yet our own momentum, by our scale, is very large indeed compared to the things most people are afraid of. I think that we'll continue to react, adapt, and overcome for as long as we think we can, and perhaps a little longer.