End of the World Scenarios There is one thing about humans which is quite unusual. We like to scare ourselves. There is no better proof of this than adding up the number of people who go on to thrill rides and go to the horror movies. The numbers are astounding and I don’t think there are any other creatures on earth which like to be scared. I’m mentioning this, because it seems to me this might account for the number of doomsday predictions. Oh, there have been plenty of those over the course of history. The news media seems to like doomsday predictions, I guess it gets more people to watch the news, listen to the news or read the news. Lately there has been a story which has appeared in the news quite regularly. It speaks to the fact a mythical planet named Nibiru was supposed to crash into the earth last month, September 2017. I say mythical, because there is no proof the planet even exists. This is not the first time people have told us the end was near. Another disaster we have been hearing about quite frequently has to do with artificial intelligence. Many people, some of them quite intelligent with various college degrees, have predicted artificial intelligence will take over and once it does it will realize it has no use for human beings and destroy us all. They are saying we will have no way of stopping it, but I say just pull the plug. Just about all of us have computers and these computers are either connected to various places which use some form of artificial intelligence or have some artificial intelligence built into them. Anyone using a modern Windows computer has Cortana on it. Type, “What is your name?” into Cortana’s search box and it will tell you it is Cortana. That in itself is some very basic form of artificial intelligence. For decades programs have existed which one could type questions into and they would be answered. We are still here doing this and even though artificial intelligence has advanced at an astronomical rate it doesn’t mean machines are going to wipe us out. Another thing which we are being told by some people is we are on the verge of World War 3. There is no doubt we are in the midst of some very scary times, but there is one basic thing we have to remember, nobody wants to be wiped out in a nuclear war even if they are half nuts like the leader of North Korea. First of all, he is not in a position to retaliate yet, if we decided to attack his country. I am talking about nuclear retaliation against the United States. I don’t believe we would ever attack North Korea and I don’t think North Korea would want to attack a country that has possibly seven thousand nuclear warheads. The truth is we don’t even know what weapons we possess and we would probably be right in thinking they are far more advanced than anything we have seen and I am sure North Korea must realize this also. We have been told by some scientists that we are all going to die, because we are killing off different species which are necessary to human life and one of the species we kill off may cause an ecological cascade effect, which means there will be secondary extinctions, because we will kill off the key species. Some of the species we kill will be responsible for keeping our crops growing, such as the bees which pollinate our crops. It is a terrible thing we can’t take care of our own planet, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we are all going to die. In the case of the bees being depleted, science has been working feverishly on creating, yes you guessed it, robot bees which will pollinate the crops. I’m sure they will discover many other methods for keeping things going. There have always been animal extinctions on the earth and there probably always will be, even though we are noticing them now. I don’t think we really know how many species went extinct in prehistoric times and perhaps even more of them died out than are dying out now, the only difference being we are keeping records. Here is one of my favorites, the doomsday device. A doomsday device is one a country sets off after it has no hope of winning in a war and just wants to take the rest of the planet with them. While it certainly is a final solution to future wars, it is the most impractical of all devices. Why would a country want to wipe itself off the face of the earth just to kill other people? On the face of it, it just doesn’t make sense. There is a far greater chance of a country having planted nuclear weapons in the ocean around the country they feel is dangerous. As a matter of fact, a rumor went around a few months ago stating the Russians had planted nuclear weapons in the oceans around the United States. The story didn’t last long, only a day or two and it was denied. You probably heard the rumor about the earth shifting on its axis and killing us all. It seems some people have nothing better to do than to try and scare others. Then there are the people who are telling us Yellowstone National Park is a huge volcano and will erupt causing the atmosphere to be full of ash for many years thus denying sunlight to the earth and either killing all of us or at least many of us, because we won’t be able to grow crops. Some people believe the earth will be destroyed in an Apocalypse. Our destruction will be worldwide and end all life on earth as God comes to the earth and rewards the faithful and punishes the sinful. It is said this will be the ultimate victory of good over evil and the end of the present age. When the year 1000 was coming people flocked to churches, because they believed that year might be the end of the world. Some people did the same thing in the year 2000. What these people failed to realize was years are nothing more than a construct of humans, it didn’t mean the that the earth was only here for thousand years or anything like that. We could have made a completely different calendar and said that year was 500 or 5000, it was just a number. There are those who will continue to worry about the end of the world, but really, they are just wasting their time. |
