Tuesday, July 03, 2018

It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)

See, the problem with the end of the world is scheduling and logistics. For example, say an asteroid was headed for us, ready to ruin the planet worse than Jurassic Park 2 ruined that franchise, we’ve got sufficient technology that we’d probably see it coming with at least a little warning. By comparison, the dinosaurs had it relatively good. They didn’t know anything until it was way too late to go around looting (a triceratops with a baseball bat in search of a new plasma TV can do a lot of damage to a Best Buy).

If we had even a few months notice, you just know there’d be a bunch of assholes who start looting on the first day. Then everybody starts looting and pillaging before all the good stuff is gone and sooner than you realize, there’s no food or plasma TVs left and you’ve still got like a month to go before the end of the planet. What am I supposed to do for that last month? Live off of ramen and listen to podcasts? End of the world and I’m suddenly back in fucking university? Screw that.

There’s a balance you need to strike with rioting at the end of civilization. I mean there’s only so much canned food out there, and don’t kid yourself, you don’t know how to farm. Sure you can maybe setup a small garden, grow a few tomatoes from a packet of seeds, but forced to grow and/or hunt your own food? You’d fucking starve and you know it. And for islands like Hawaii, so heavily dependent on shipping for food and basic goods, disruption of the normal course of business for more than about a week would be pretty fucking devastating. Not as much as thermonuclear winter, but if you’ve ever been in a Walmart watching people hoard toilet paper before a hurricane, you know the chaos of disruptions in shipping. If you go around looting and rioting early into the crisis, soon there’s nothing left and you’ve got months to kill before we all end up dead. But if you plan ahead, you can keep a modest supply of spam and rice and then still burn it all down just before the end of everything. Because it’s always nice to face annihilation with a full belly and a decent cup of coffee.

The sensible thing to do would be to act like everything is normal up until about a week before doomsday and then start looting. If you want to go all berserker, there’s a time and a place. That way if the giant space rock turns out to be an interstellar ship filled with aliens that look like Jessica Alba we still have some water and vegetables left and, if it just turns out to be a normal extinction-level event, then you still have the opportunity to crush in your neighbor’s skull in with a tire iron a few days before everybody else dies. You know what you did Dan. You know what you did.

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