I love that we're getting close to 2012, when the Mayan calender is supposedly going to run out of dates. I've always enjoyed reading about prophets like Nostradamus and watching shows where psuedo-scientists scramble to fit circumstantial evidence into the vague texts to make it seem as though the future were lain out in front of us all. There's something romantic about the idea that the future can be known (and when it comes down to it, who wouldn't want to know how it all ends up?), and that it is vocalized by a fringe minority with the power of second-sight.

As humans we all love a good story, and the greatest story ever told has been the story of humanity's rise to prominence on this little blue planet. As such, I think every person wants to know how it's going to end. I'd even go as far as to say that everyone secretly wishes that they can be there to witness it (since really it would mark the culmination of human society, and who wouldn't want to be around for that, right?). It's why War of the Worlds is broadcast every year on Halloween. It's why apocalyptic fiction (particularly zombie fiction) is so popular (McCarthy's upcoming film adaptation of his wonderfully melancholy book The Road). How many end of the world movies have been made (The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds, Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow)? How many religions include end of the world scenarios?

With the increased awareness of the perils of climate change and over-consumption and more and more people claiming that these are, indeed, the end times, I think this persistent cultural meme is only in its beginning stages and that it's going to be reflected more and more in movies and literature coming out of this new generation of kids. The horror genre is particularly good and putting its finger on the pulse of what is terrifying humanity the most - look at the progression of themes in horror movies for the past century: the golden age of horror movies (pre-50's) portrayed monsters with ugly exteriors but beautiful souls (the monster era), the 50s-60's saw the rise of the space era, and subsequent rise in popularity of movies involving brutal space invaders, the 60's saw an increase in terror in regards to atomic power, and the 70's saw the rise of the slasher flick (promiscuous teenagers punished for their youthful indiscresions). Now we've entered an era of global disaster horror (and torture horror, which really is just a cheesy, half-hearted off-shoot of the slasher flicks from these film-maker's childhoods).

With all of this in mind, there's a really thoughtful piece on the NewScientist website about a post-human earth and how we seem to have entered into a new geological epoch that could spell the end of the world as we know it.

From the article:

The Anthropocene has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest - and the last. It is not hard to imagine the epoch ending just a few hundred years after it started, in an orgy of global warming and overconsumption.

Let's suppose that happens. Humanity's ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. "A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people," says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.

Whether our species would survive is hard to predict, but what of the fate of the Earth itself? It is often said that when we talk about "saving the planet" we are really talking about saving ourselves: the planet will be just fine without us. But would it? Or would an end-Anthropocene cataclysm damage it so badly that it becomes a sterile wasteland?

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Read the full article here.

What do you think? How do you think the world will end (and of course, any and all Doctor Who references are welcome)?

It's no secret that the oceans are in bad shape. It's also no secret that next to nothing is done about it. We're over-fishing. We're using them as toxic waste dumps. There's an island of trash in the northern Pacific that is estimated to be twice the size of Texas. Maybe if these problems get a little too close for comfort, people will start paying more attention...

From an Independent article:

"All over the world, from the Bay of Bengal to Lake Victoria to the shores of South America, I have heard fishermen say their catches are shrinking, in size and in number. Industrial-scale fishing only began in the 1950s. By the standards of the news cycle, this is slow – but by the standards of the planet or of settled fishing communities, this is a click of the fingers. The effects of the new industrial fishing are uniform. Professor Ransom Myers found that whenever the vast industrial trawlers are sent in, it takes just 15 years to reduce the fish population to a 10% shadow of its former self.

This process of trawlering is an oceanic weapon of mass destruction, ripping up everything in its path. Charles Clover, who wrote the book on which the documentary is based, has a good analogy for it. Imagine a band of hunters stringing a mile of net between two massive all-terrain vehicles and dragging it at speed across the plains of Africa. Imagine it scooping up everything in its way: lions and cheetahs and hippos and wild dogs. The net has a massive metal roller attached to its leading edge, smashing down every tree that gets in its way. And in the end, when the hunters open up the net, they pick out the choicest creatures and dump the squashed remains in the sun as carrion for the vultures.

But we need fish. Our brains don't form properly without their fatty Omega-3 acids. So why do our governments allow this process of destruction to continue? Why do they actively encourage it, with $14bn of subsidies for fishermen to keep on trawling every year?

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Read the full article here.