Time's up! A short Essay on Doomsday

Time's up!
By: Ryan Beodeker

So humanity? Out making plans for tomorrow? Or rather, are you making plans for tomorrow by not making plans for tomorrow?




In any case, the dread date has arrived; December 21st, 2012. I'm a firm believer that just like any other regular winter solstice, December 21st, will be the shortest day of the year for the Northern Hemisphere as it has been for many, many, many years. Though just to cover all my bases and if that slim/impossible/improbable end of the world (What the hell does end of the world even mean? The end of human society? The planet Earth explodes or something? The end of the world is just too damn vague man! I REQUIRE MORE INFORMATION!)  does actually occur tomorrow, I'll have at least had a brief moment before our demise to share some thoughts on our time together.

So for starters, Earth, how goes it? Feeling good with all that life teeming on your surface? You're like what...almost five billion years old? Oh, I'm sorry! Four and a half! You're getting to be a middle aged planet! Must feel good. But let's digress from your alleged age, Earth, and let's talk about those things that showed up around 3.8 billion years ago or so. That's right we're going to talk about.....LIFE.

Things we're pretty cool all that time ago before life. Earth, you were just chilling, rotating and revolving and doing that stuff planets do (Sucks to be Pluto!).  But then all that life jazz showed up (Not going into how. Earth and I, would rather not deal with that.) and started ruining everything! Though I gotta say, Earth, you've done a premo job at killing off those living things. Why the man in the white coat with all those test tube things told me that you've managed to kill off 99% of all that life stuff.

Though seeing as this wasn't suppose to be a history lesson on the planet and more or less a rant (Beodeker powers activate! Form of an annoying generic doomsday post!), I'll skip the next, oh say, 3.8 billion years and move right onto human civilization! Since that wacky time when we former primates decided that partying alone in the woods just wasn't enough to make us happy and decided that giving people power was a good plan, we've had some problems. Hunger, famine, plague, plague again, religion, war, religious war, war of religions, war against the religion against religion, draught, some more war, and just a few others to keep this list short and succinct. Now of course the bad doesn't come without some inklings of good. We carbon based lifeforms have managed to finagle some pretty cool shit together. Like those pyramids, and you know, culture and stuff? We've got pretty music to listen to while people starve; the necessary things. Ipods and new cars for Saturnalia; all that stuff that we can't live without? Haven't cured cancer yet, but sure enough if your penis doesn't work we've got over 9000 different pills to fix that! We've accomplished such great feats! Like that time we didn't let people (consenting adults) get married because they love people (consenting adults) we say they're not allowed to love. We've done such wonderful things that we shouldn't be sad about the world ending tomorrow! We should be happy that all of our hard work at fixing this planet up nice for ourselves culminated in this one big cathartic moment happening somewhere in Act II.

To begin to wrap things up, I'd like to say that I truly hope the world doesn't end tomorrow. If the world ends tomorrow after 4 billion years, it'd be one sad short moment; the inherent sadness not from the loss of life, but from the loss of opportunity. People like to say we've come so far; the sentiment is quaint and it always brings a smile to the disenfranchised face. Though the truth is that we haven't come far, we have barely even taken our first steps. When you think about all that goes on in the world, the sadness on a global scale that is not seen nor known by anyone who reads this tidbit of writing on the internet, how can anyone, after all that, think we've made leaps and bounds for the betterment humanity. Slavery, genocide, world hunger, disease, famine, inequality, and hatred all still roam freely through our pallets. We still have so much work to do. So in closing I'd like to propose a question and then my ranting is done: If the world did end tomorrow, would you be content with humanity being remembered just by all that we've done so far?