By Scott Buckner
Take a sick day and lay in bed with some temporary but nonetheless uncomfortable physical malady until afternoon and it becomes clear that satellite TV during the day has the same miserable choices of any other form of TV reception at night. Since I was miserable enough, I tuned in to The Last Days on Earth on The History Channel to see how much more miserable I might have been Wednesday if we were in the middle of global annihilation.
This program (the DVD on sale in March at the A&E store contains “stunning graphics and representations depict[ing] every doomsday scenario in precise, excruciating detail“) showed seven very real ways that either nature or man itself can conspire to doom the whole camping trip. Whoa. Forget the chicken soup, I thought. What I’d be needing is a bigger umbrella.
Some time ago, I’d read something similar to Last Days in “How To Destroy the Earth at Things Of Interest,” a Website belonging to a fellow named Sam Hughes. Hughes maintains, quite correctly, that destroying the Earth is actually much harder to accomplish than you have been led to believe:
“You’ve seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You’ve heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world. Fools. The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.”
Similarly, Last Days does give us some of the same scenarios Hughes alluded to, like bioterrorism, nuclear war, global plague and global warming. Those things will, comparatively speaking anyway, just make us really uncomfortable. But we’ve lived with those things before, and we’ve proven that even nuclear incineration can’t keep a good human race down once it digs out and becomes intent on screwing every automaker in Detroit out of business. No, for maximum impact and presentation like a can of Black Flag on a truly Vengeful God-sized scale, you can’t beat the true Last Days ass-kickers like eruption of a supervolcano, impact with an Earth-killing asteroid, or Earth getting sucked into a black hole.
Last Days reminds us that these three are entirely within the realm of possibility and probability, albeit staggeringly tiny. Yet, if tourists believed odds like that didn’t have even the remotest chance of coming true, Las Vegas wouldn’t know what to do with itself.
Of that trio, a supervolcano seems poised to raise its head first. The problem with supervolcanos though, since there’s always problems associated with any kind of science, is 1) they’re so massive it’s hard to spot them, meaning they could be anywhere, and 2) they’re underground. Since nobody in recorded history has ever seen one light up, nobody knows what the sky show’s going to be like, but science is sure that mankind will be in for a major inconvenience once everyone gets done ooh’ing and ahh’ing and puts the lawn chairs back in the garage. However, there’s something else geologists are absolutely and positively sure about: there’s a supervolcano stewing right now beneath Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. This giant sea of molten magma has been biding its time 25 miles beneath the Earth’s crust for more than 600,000 years, just waiting for any opportunity to find a weak spot to escape. So basically, it’s just a matter of waiting for the United States Congress to start poking around with an oil drill.
Once it throws up about a dozen massive magma Old Faithfuls and the dome covering the whole works collapses and lets the real trouble out of the bag, we’ll have one national park and four fewer states to worry about designing new 25-cent pieces for. Sorta nearby, South Dakota will end up under eight feet of ash, every internal combustion engine will be rendered uselessly clogged, and every living being will be suffocated by clouds of sulphuric gas mixing with the ash so everyone’s lungs fill up with a sort of acidic cement. Things aren’t going to be too awful peachy for the rest of the country and the globe, either: temperatures everywhere will drop into a permanent deep winter, we’ll have total darkness for a few years, all vegetation will die within a few months, and all animal life a few months after that. And finally, all that sulfuric acid floating about will turn the oceans into what amounts to seas of battery acid, settling once and for all the debate over what to do with the Titanic and the USS Arizona.
Of course, the sun will come out eventually, the pH of the atmosphere and the oceans will neutralize after a few several thousand years, and the single-celled beings will crawl once again from the primordial soup. Which means evolution will have us back sucking up Starbucks lattes behind the wheels of our SUVs before we know it.
Since a supervolcano means a slow, hideous death and my survivalist skills are no more advanced than those of the mentally retarded, I’m counting on an asteroid impact or the earth getting sucked up into a black hole. Of the two, odds are with asteroid because, on April 13, 2029, we’ll come as close as ever since our dinosaur days. That’s when a 1,000-foot-wide asteroid known as 2004 MN4 will come close enough to slip between the Earth and some space satellites hovering overhead in geosynchronous orbit. This should make for some stellar viewing on TV since it’ll undoubtedly be carried live from space, and off TV because it’ll be visible with the naked eye in some places on the globe. 2004 MN4 will return again exactly seven years later, but nobody knows what’ll happen because the earth’s gravity will have affected its orbit in all sorts of unpredictable ways the first time around. So we’ll just have to stay tuned for the big crapshoot.
Should the globe get the biggest case of ‘roids the world will ever have the displeasure of knowing, forget what you may have seen in Armegeddon and Deep Impact. Especially the part in Deep Impact where everyone stands around watching what essentially amounts to Central Park streaking through the daytime sky in a light show better than anything Emerson, Lake and Palmer ever dreamt up. Traveling at however far anyone on the metric system can get in 15 kilometers per second, the ‘roid will be moving so fast when it plows into earth’s atmosphere that you won’t see it or hear it. If you’re fortunate enough to have box seats within 1,000 miles of ground zero when it does hit land or sea, you and everything you bought from Ikea will spontaneously combust into thin air in less than a heartbeat. This will leave everyone else the indignity of wandering endlessly about, pissing and moaning over being dropped by State Farm after the worldwide mass meteor shower or the miles-high tsunamis incinerates or drowns everything.
However, not all of Last Days was doom and gloom. The program does raise the suggestion of human life going on after a killer asteroid, albeit for a limited time. While things wouldn’t be a picnic what with the extinction of all plant life leading to inevitable global starvation, it certainly might be survivable – and perhaps even lead us back to a manner of communal living and survival that would be a wet dream of immeasurable proportion to anyone with a subscription to The Whole Earth Catalog. Ironically, that salvation will probably come courtesy of some enterprising pothead with a few leftover seeds who manages to jerryrig a campfire to run a grow light. True, subsisting on cannabis salad and making your own hemp clothing might not be the tastiest of ways to try to survive Armegeddon, but it would probably be one of the more amusing.
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I rarely get to see Tuesday prime time TV, so imagine my surprise Tuesday night seeing America’s Funniest Videos still on the air, and still for a whole unfunny hour. I find it incredible that ABC has the magical power to shit money, but it can’t manage to invent a time slot to kill this show.
Coming up next on AFV: Lazarus catches one in the sack from the Lord while emerging from the cave.
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For more What I Watched Last Night.
Posted on January 25, 2007