Apocalypse When?

2005-01-15 - 4:55 p.m.

So, today has been a day of watching television shows about the end of the world, or at least our society, first on TVO where a few speakers talked about society and politics and the inevitable end of our oil-dependant society, and later on Space, where a show talked about meteors, the chances of one hitting us, and what we can do about it. Apparently, so far the scariest object in our solar system isn't due until the year 2880 or so, and we're due for a peak and then drop off in oil production in a year or so. Also, Canada can expect to see its mean temperature rise due to global warming by 6-8 degrees celcius in the next 70 years, assuming that CO2 levels continue to rise at the rate they have been. The bad news is that CO2 levels are likely to rise 2 or 3 times more than they have been, but no one's done a reliable study to see what effect that would have.

In addition, because of new and urgent social stresses, like global warming and our eventual loss of oil as a resource, mean that society becomes less stable, fundamentalism will rise, and weapons of increasing power and destructiveness will become more and more available to people with less means than ever before. Did you know, for instance, that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was actually never tested? It was different than the Nagasaki bomb, which had been tested quite extensively. They didn't test the Hiroshima bomb, because the science was so simple that there was no doubt it would work. I guess a high school kid could make it, if he had access to the uranium (or whatever rock they used). He'd probably die of radiation poisoning before he could turn in that science experiment, because kids have no sense of their own mortality and he'd probably not even bother with a lead vest.

None of this is really new, and not very connected (except that I'm wondering: we're assuming that in 800 years we'll probably have the ability to stop that meteor. What happens if we royally screw ourselves over and when that meteor comes we either have too few resources or have fallen into some scientific dark age so that we aren't able to?), but one of the TVO guys said that the important thing was to make sure that we have a society that's resilient. Right now, he said, we have a very brittle structure in the West. He pointed to the power blackout of '03 (aught three, for the prospectors among us) and how little prepared many of us - especially in the big cities - were unprepared. I know that personally, Pookie and I had no food and our money was trapped in the ATMs (either that or we were poor...I can't remember). We didn't even have a candle, let alone a battery-powered radio (or a battery-powered anything). There were people trapped in 40 storey buildings with no A/C and windows that didn't open. The TVO guy mentioned how if the blackout had gone on for another day or two, we would have had a catastrophe on our hands.

His advice, and I think it's good advice, is for people to start thinking about how they can make themselves more resilient, as a society, as a city, as a neighbourhood, and as individuals, and what he said resonated with me. There's little anyone can do at this point, I think, to help with the oil or the global warming. That's not an excuse to stop trying, and miracles have saved us before, but at this point we're looking at either one or several major problems cropping up and we might all be better off thinking about what we would do. Where would you meet your family if there was some emergency? How would you eat? Can you take care of yourself if you or someone nearby is injured?

I'm thinking that it might be a good time for the world to start doing "Fire safety" classes, like in elementary school where they teach you to make a family plan, where everyone knows to crawl along the floor if there's smoke, to have a fire extinguisher nearby, to call the fire department from a neighbour's house and to meet by the big tree on the corner. Because the global warming, the oil running out, and the meteor hitting, aren't necessarily "ifs" anymore. It's sort of a case of "which will happen first?"

Of course, all of this thinking about disaster preparedness is kind of silly when I still haven't found myself a job.

Cheers,

The Magus

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