Original printed byline: Hawkeye Z. Hoerr
Historical Summer 2010 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
When the history of the human race is ultimately written, when some sage anthropologist peers through our ruins and analyzes our artifacts, there will be a rich discussion about what caused the end of our species.
This is only natural. Just as we worked to discover why dinosaurs became extinct, some day the travelers from a distant planet will descend here and try to determine why humans are no more. Their task will be easier than ours.
We can speculate about the meteor that crashed into North America 65 million years ago.
A rock that big would cause lots of nasty repercussions, including blocking out most of the sunlight for years and years.
With no vegetation – remember, this is preMcDonald’s – even the heartiest of brontosaurus would perish.
But again, that’s just speculation. For all we know, something else befell the saurs.
They weren’t considerate enough to leave a written record, so your guess is as good as mine.
When the last descendents of Adam and Eve kick the bucket, however, there will be lots of evidence as to what happened.
After all, there are really only two scenarios for the end of the human species: sooner and later.
The end coming sooner will be easy to reconstruct.
Most likely, there’s a nuclear holocaust. Nation A attacks Nation B. Nation B retaliates. Nation C joins the fray, and attacks Nation A (or B). At this point, the peace-monger nation, the U.S. of A., gets in the action, and threatens Nation B, or was it C? Radioactive debris will be raining for years, so Nation B or C decides to be pre-emptive and attack the USA.
They send missiles at us, and we smugly activate our anti-missile defense. Alas, it turns out we never quite refined the anti-missile big-D, so it doesn’t work. Oops. Realizing that, we retaliate ten-fold and blanket both country B and C with a-bombs. And now the fun begins. You see, it turns out that more countries had nuclear armaments than we suspected! Dick Cheney was right after all, bless his black heart; he just had the names of the countries wrong. Anyway, countries E, F, and G also begin to fire their a-bombs. And guess what: Nations H, I, and J also had WMD and they decide to pre-empt everyone else. Hey, there’s even an h-bomb or two thrown into the fray.
From the moon it looks like the whole world is celebrating the fourth of July.
From Earth, this is not a pretty picture.
After three days of back and forth, 43 nuclear bombs, 11 poison gas bombs, and three germ bombs have erupted.
The world is glowing. Water and food sources are polluted for, oh, the next thirty or forty years, most air isn’t breathable, and the sky is blackened from the smoke. What Carl Sagan called a “nuclear winter” sets in as life begins to disappear.
But in this scenario the evidence is everywhere. Burnedout buildings and over-packed fall-out shelters tell the tale, as do artifacts of newspapers and blogs bouncing around forever in cyberspace.
The other sooner is an asteroid bursting upon the scene and creating similar, maybe worse, havoc than all these bombs minus the radioactivity.
If that rock is big enough – and sooner or later it will be – we’re all goners. Even then, though, we’d have a week or two of warning, and the news media would be abuzz.
The alien anthropologists will have an easy day of it when it’s sooner. Later, though, is more problematic – and more likely.
In this scenario it’s not some sudden disaster that does us in; rather, it’s a long-term snuffing. What will happen, for example, when even more and more people live on a diet of glazed donuts and Cheetochips? Not unlike the asteroid, that’s inevitable (it’s already happening).
As technology and transportation improve, even the poor of the third world will have ready access to junk food. They’ll ply themselves with calories, gaining weight, hardening arteries, and lowering the life span. At some point we’ll all become too fat to get into our cars and go shopping. Once the cans of tuna fish from the closet are depleted, we’re all goners.
The other later is just as likely but will take longer: death by cable television. We’ve already seen signs of this now.
There are, what, 80, 180, 280 cable channels? That means that each person can choose to watch ‘zactly what she or he wants for hours and days, maybe weeks.
There is, after all, a channel of Oprah-only. There’s a channel of sports, and a channel for prospective home-buyers. There’s a channel for political junkies and a channel for animal lovers. There’s a golf channel and a world wrestling channel. There’s a Catholic channel, a Jewish channel, a Mormon channel, a Muslim channel, and a Chocolate channel; all the major religions are covered. Over time, watching these channels lower the IQ. Hours upon hours upon hours make Jack and Jill dull and fat (Cheetos go well with any major religion).
As technology evolves, screens become bigger and the viewer actually enters the action. You can swordfight with Zorro, eavesdrop on Ellen, ask questions on “Meet the Press,” and swing with Albert Pujols.
I won’t even mention the possibilities with Charlie’s Angels.
This means that the number of hours spent watching TV increases exponentially. Actual sporting events are rarely attended; everyone is watching on and participating in them on TV. No one goes to restaurants because you can eat from the Cooking Channel. Everyone works from home while, oh yeah, they watch TV. School is all done through the tube. Eventually eyeballs begin to become rectangular. Later, rather than sooner, we all are tethered to our TVs, the channel-changer becoming an extremity, and we devolve into potatoes on couches. Life becomes a re-run. Later will puzzle the alien anthropologists a bit. They’ll have a hard time determining how this happened. “Was there no common sense?” they’ll ask, “Was the species that stupid?” they’ll wonder. And then, as they begin to debate, their attention will turn to an episode of Seinfeld followed by Friends. And oh look, here’s an unopened case of Cheetos. Decades later the alien home base on Planet Urumba will wonder what happened to the research crew that went to investigate planet 3208667bq24.
The last transmission was of a boy and collie dog tracking guys in masks, and they’ve never been heard from again.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, Summer 2010.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times2010_06.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
