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“The Earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer mind their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.”
– Assyrian Stone Tablet, c.2800BC

The Y2K Bug infused the media with warnings of impending doom for the new millennium. Before that there was Nostrodamus’ prediction of catastrophe in July of 1999. Before that two Astronomers predicted the 1982 planetary alignment would cause catastrophic earthquakes and solar flares. Pat Robertson also predicted that the world would end in the fall of that same year.

The list goes on and on. As a civilization, we are fascinated by end times predictions. There is something fantastically romantic about the idea of a post-apocalyptic environment, whether you are one of the “chosen,” who will be whisked away into the arms of some deity, or one of the survivalists, left to rebuild the world your way. Romanticizing the end times is very popular indulgence, as we find in the success of books like the “Left Behind” series, Stephen King’s “The Stand,” and films like “Independence Day,” the “Mad Max” films, “The Terminator,” and “The Matrix.”

I must confess that I have indulged in post-apocalypse fantasizing. In the real world where the only two remaining frontiers, the ocean and space, require incredible monetary investments for only the most elite to explore, the best route to adventure is for the “frontier” to take the Earth back. Let civilization crumble under a super-virus or nuclear holocaust, freeing up space for the survivors to pursue survival. I find the idea of running around a desolate landscape with a shotgun, blowing away mutants, like Mad Max in “Thunderdome,” very appealing.

But then reality comes down oppressively. Try going just one day without eating. Try sleeping outside in the middle of February. Try starting a fire with two sticks of wood. Try figuring out what your chances are of surviving any apocalypse scenario that would wipe out most human life. What makes us think we’ll be in that small-percentage of survivors? What quality of life then, if our teeth and hair are falling out and we are covered in sores from radiation poisoning? Why is that little bit of realism lacking in the epic battles between humans and robots in the “Terminator” and “Matrix” movies?

What about the Abraham religions? Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all look forward to that great day prophesied in their various books, when the Messiah will return and carry them away to heaven, while life is turned into absolute misery for everyone left behind as the Antichrist reigns.

Of course, the problem with this belief in a religion’s exceptionalism completely ignores the exceptionalism of all other religions. While there are some more liberalized versions of the Abraham Religions, most hold their distinct interpretation of the scripture as the only path to salvation. Many versions of Christianity believe that only a miniscule percentage of Jews will make it into heaven and no Muslims. Religious leaders, such as Pat Robertson, have preached that only a few versions of Christianity will qualify for salvation. With hundreds of religious sects claiming a monopoly on the one road to salvation, the chances of actually being saved when the apocalypse happens are quickly reduced to less than one percent.

Then there are all of the end-times predictions, where religious leaders draw interpretations of modern events into exhaustive metaphors to match the predictions of scriptures and thus fulfill the prophecies. Other religious leaders take a less cerebrally-taxing route and relay the signals they believe to recieve from the almighty directly. Interestingly enough, the Old Testament provides a pretty good methodology for determining if a “Prophet” is truly hearing the word of God:

“…when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word which the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously, you need not be afraid of him.”
Deuteronomy 18:22

Pretty simple huh? If what they say doesn’t come true, then they are not speaking the word of God. How empirical.

The Bible also tells us what to do with people who lie in the name of God:

“But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name which I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.”
Deuteronomy 18:20

This seems pretty harsh, and I’m certainly not going to advocate the execution of people who may simply be mistaken, but there are severely detrimental consequences to False Prophecy. In situations such as Jonestown, hundreds of Jim Jone’s followers were either murdered or committed suicide as a result of one man’s claim of hearing the word of God.

There are even worse ramifications as well. When a religion’s followers believe the end times are fast approaching, they percieve the Earth as merely a rest stop on the way to paradise. It becomes a condemned house, where responsibility to the community and stewardship of the property are no longer of consequence. Instead we can do with it as we like, wreck the place, destroy the environment, because the apocalypse lies just around the next bend and there will be no more future generations to curse our irresponsibility.

In his play “Waiting for Godot”, Samuel Beckett presents two characters waiting for someone who never comes. It is a tragic tale of false hope that lasts eternally. Waiting for the end of the world is like that, wasting the time we have here while yearning on a fantasy is a terrible tragedy. It is irresponsible to the present and forsakes our roles as stewards of this planet, preserving it for our offspring.

The world, our Earth, will end one day. Astronomers predict Asteroid 1950DA may collide with our planet on March 16^th, 2880. If this does not manifest, then the Earth’s water and atmosphere will be evaporated off the planet five billion years from now, when our sun expands into a red giant.

The problem with realistic predictions of the end times such as these is that they aren’t particularly romantic. No savior is predicted to come down from the heavens to whisk away its fortunate chosen. No apocalyptic wasteland will be left for survivalists to run around in fantasized superiority. There simply won’t be anything left of our little world, and if we don’t get our act together we’ll go down with it.

There are also the more uncertain methods of destruction, uncertain because we have the power to control them. Green House Gases could render the planet uninhabitable to human life. Pollution could poison us out of the biosphere. In the second half of the 20^th century we developed the power to kill the entire human race in a flash with the proliferation of nuclear arms.

Why not romanticize stewardship of the Earth? The shear effort of intelligence, foresight, honorability and integrity required to keep this planet and our civilization safe are Herculean. Why not romanticize that sort of heroism instead of wishing for some horrible catastrophe to make things even more difficult?

Want to see what survivalism is like? See the film Quest for Fire, about ancient cavemen seeking a spark to bring home for their tribe. It is what life without all our modern conveniences would really be like. It is a world of parasites, open sores, bad smells, matted hair, grunting and nibbling on leaves and grubs.

That is what life without civilization is like.

Further Reading:

Is Christianity anti-Environmental?

The first computer my family owned was the Timex/Sinclair 1000. It had 2K of RAM, 4K of ROM, and a tape-player drive. I played chess with it a few times. I would make my move, press “play” on the tape drive, and come back in an hour to see what the computer had done. The Sinclair ended up in the attic very quickly.

Then came the Atari 2600 and “Space Invaders”, “Asteroids”, and “Circus Circus”. These were games that had no ending. You simply kept playing to beat your previous best score. The graphics for these games consisted of big blocks sort of in the shape of stick figures and things, there was rarely more than two colors displayed on the screen.

The Apple IIe was the next thing my father brought home. It had arrow keys and a “cursor”. I wrote my first program on this computer:

10 PRINT “Ryan is Cool.”


20 GOTO 10

I later wrote a simple roleplaying game adventure that was text-based.

I created a little world for a single character (X) to wander around.

These were the days of text-based adventure games like Infocom's "Zork" and "Leather Goddesses of Phobos".

Then I got my own Commodore 64/128. The Apple was a much faster computer, but the Commodore had better graphics. It was also cheaper to buy accessories for the Commodore, like booster cartridges, joysticks, and modems. With my 300 baud modem, I was turned onto the world of Bulletin Board Systems and Computer Piracy. : )

The Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) were the precursor to the internet. System's Operators (Sysops) would setup a host computer that would answer the phone when computers would call. Their computer would then log you into their BBS and you would have a limited amount of time to either post messages, chat with the sysop, play games, or trade files.

Trading files took up most of my time online. Bytes of data were used as currency to deal with different sysops. You uploaded a file to a BBS and received credits for each byte of data. You could then spend those credits downloading files from their computer. I amassed a huge game collection for my Commodore this way.

I began renting games from a local gameshop and cracking them to trade to the local BBSes. My biggest claim to fame was cracking EAO's "Mule" using a sector editor I found in the software "Happy Hacker 2.0". Not a spectacular feat, but I received props from the notorious "Legion of Doom" for it. Of course, back then they gave props to anyone and everyone.

The Commodore BBSes faded away and were slowly replaced by IBM systems. Lacking the funds to upgrade my system, I dropped out of computers aside from playing with the IBM's at my highschool until I got to college. In college, I reentered the BBS scene, but things were changing. The BBSes were teaming up to create a network of computers across country. Suddenly I was exchanging messages with users in California. It was interesting at first, but quickly became overwhelming. My posts were lost in stacks of hundreds. The personal nature of the BBSes was being lost, but this was only the beginning.

The final death toll for the BBSes was the Internet. Suddenly we had the entire world at our fingertips. These were the early days of the internet, when sites did not have images and Yahoo was simply a list of links. It was about to go mainstream as the entire world prepared to go online and geeks like myself have struggled to stay on top of its ever-changing playing field ever since.

Thursday September 18, 2003

10:30 AM – Doug calls to tell me I should move my car to the ODU parking lot. I debate this with my wife. ODU is a 15 minute walk away, I complain, and I might lose my hat.

10:45 AM – Mom calls me to tell me that the police have asked anyone not evacuating please write their name on their arm in permanent marker to make identifying their body easier.

11:00 AM – A large tree branch blocks our road. I run out to move it. Once finished, another falls behind me. I shrug and run back inside followed by the laughter of my neighbors.

11:45 AM – Power goes out right in the middle of watching “Soylent Green.” I discover my nextdoor neighbor’s tree has snapped at the base, damaging the side of their house and cutting the power line. Neighbor 3 houses down has a tree dropping branches onto his powerlines as well.

12:15 PM – Hear on the radio that a century old pier is gone. Not falling apart, or in shambles, it’s just not there anymore.

12:40 PM – I have noticed the cats no longer want to go outside. The frathouse across the street empties of all its members carrying innertubes, boogey boards, and beer toward the bay a few blocks down the street. Their names are “Brad,” “Josh,” “Derek”…

2:00 PM – I bravely venture outside for pictures of destruction, and quickly turn around and come back inside before getting two doors down the street.

3:45 PM – I cautiously venture out to remove the trees blocking my neighbor’s gate and door.

5:30 PM – I once again venture outside for pictures:

• I heard what I thought was a thunderclap, but was actually a tree breaking in half nearby, crashing to the street.
• The bay has swollen about 8 feet. All of the privately owned piers are submerged.
• Water was fountaining out of the sewer grates.
• Several Hurricane Parties were in progress. Beer’s were raised at me in salute.
• My neighbor saw me leave and decided to follow.
• Everywhere there are uprooted trees, downed powerlines, and a thick layer of debris plastering the street. I can smell natural gas in various places where uprooted trees pulled up and snapped the line.

6:15 PM – The tree smashed into my neighbor’s house has wedged itself down several feet deeper into the wood. Luckily, he was one of the few to evacuate.

7:00 PM – Mom calls to inform me the 14^th street pier has collapsed. It was the location of several nightclubs.

8:45 PM – Went out into the dark to look around. Didn’t get very far.

9:00 PM – Radio announces that Isabelle has passed, leaving the entire Tidewater area without electricity.

10:00 PM – Fireworks heard out in the dark in celebration.

Friday Sept 19th

7:00 AM – Survey of the damage finds a smashed Ford Explorer, on Argall Street has 10 uprooted trees. The smell of natural gas is everywhere. The gas company cannot reach some line breaks due to downed trees.

10:00 AM – Neighbors return from inland Chesapeake, where they say the Natural Gas plant is on fire and lit up the sky all night.

Saturday Sept 20th – Driving around Norfolk is like running as a rat through a maze. Highwater, downed trees, and construction crews abound.

Sunday Sept 21st – People are starting to get irratable, the lack of electricity is tiresome.

Friday Sept 26th – Electricity is restored. Life returns to normal. Property taxes will skyrocket. Public disposal fees will leap. Landscappers will be booked for the next year… but otherwise life returns to normal.

During.	After.
“Chance Favors the Prepared Mind.”	Proof of Foolishness.
Smash.	Argall Street.
More Argall Street.	Even More Argall Street.
Elsewhere.	There are easier ways to jack up a car.