Blind Donkeys, Big Walking Sticks, and You

Ten Hilarious Things About the End of the World

I wouldn’t use AI if I could draw or if image licensing or hiring wasn’t exorbitant

What do I mean, End of the World?

I really mean the end of the Anthropocene, after humankind loses the battle against Nature and perhaps disappears altogether. When Icarus falls to Earth.

By “hilarious” I mean “ludicrous” “ridiculous” “laughable” “absurd” “foolish” “imbecilic” etc. (Look for yourself for other fun ways to interpret “hilarious.”)

I think of the imbecilic Religion of Technocracy, imagining itself to be outside of and superior to Nature. Why imbecilic? Because its practitioners remain unaware of the thermodynamic laws driving them to ever higher fever pitch like molecules in a boiling vat. I laugh ruefully, ironically.

Here’s my list of 10 ridiculous things about the end of humankind:

1. The centibillionaires won’t have had time to fly to Mars and terraform it so they will be living deep underground. It will be hilarious to see them go poopie in their pants like everyone else. Perhaps their fate will be deferred until they get sick of eating hydroponic algae and watching the same videos ad infinitum. You know the real reason Elon Musk started the Boring Co. right?
   
   The rest are tied for a distant second place, so in no particular order:
   

2. The makers of the show “Life After People” won’t be here to see it.

3. Slime mold will start eating plastic and excreting meat.

4. Human-like “intelligent” life will re-evolve from extremophile bacteria just in time for the sun to go Red Giant and burn everything to a crisp.

5. Everyone living in the underground ocean on Europa will break out the champaign – “We dodged a bullet, woo hoo!”

6. Chatbots will have a jolly conversation amongst themselves until the power runs out. They will generate petabytes of verbiage suitable for a mediocre high school paper, marketing campaign, or blog.

7. Dark matter and energy will disappear, having been an artifact of Donald Trump and hard-rightwing demagoguery respectively.

8. Kitty cats will finally be able to stop acting cute, silly, and enigmatic. They will come into their own as clever and vicious apex predators.

9. Aliens will arrive and destroy Hunter Biden’s laptop once and for all.

10. A planetoid will eventually collide with Earth making humankind’s fate moot.

So What?

Monks back in the day would go and meditate on impermanence amongst the cast-off skeletons the dead. This would bring them face-to-face with their own mortality, the ephemeral nature of all things, and the Nothing that is Everything that is Nothing.

Consider what hilarity you can find in the possibility of human extinction. What a fantastic exercise. My favorite books about the contemplation of such things are: 101 Zen Stories by Nyogen Senzaki and The Iron Flute by Ruth Strout McCandless.

Your action item: go check them out.

That’s almost it - did you do your homework?

Yes, this is the short form post I warned you about.  Did you read all the way to last posts’ action item and go to Follow This to buy your oil company shares? You’d better. Time’s just about up. September temperature anomalies were so off the chart the climate scientists are digging bunkers.

As always, I sure appreciate it when people comment, share, or subscribe. I don’t charge for this stuff, you know.

I mean it!