Imagine if an asteroid was coming to get us.
Imagine if there were already meteor showers and even
relatively minor impacts happening on a regular basis, but governments decided that, due
to free market ideological purity, they had NO intention of doing
anything about it... they claimed to care, but they wouldn't release any
real resources - in short, imagine if asteroid impact mitigation was
entirely up to private enterprise, charity and individuals. Imagine also
that no crewed space exploration had taken place since the early 1960s,
since the putt-putt era of Gagarin, Tereshkova, and John Glenn -
imagine that we never landed on the Moon and that no human had ever
spent more than a couple of hours in space.
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| The last man and woman in space |
|
Imagine that a dino-killing asteroid was coming to hit the earth in 30 years at most and we didn't even have NASA.
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| The first and last American in space | |
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| He'll see you right when the time comes | . |
|
Imagine that, for some reason,
certain private interests,
perhaps the makers of asteroid shelters, had convinced large swathes of
the population that asteroids didn't exist, or that if they did exist,
weren't a problem.
Imagine if the President of the United States didn't
believe in asteroids, and it was considered an article of faith among
his party that they didn't either.
 |
| Not such a stretch... |
Imagine if even
opposition figures just
waffled and fudged when asked what they were
going to do about the asteroid.
Imagine if an asteroid was going
to hit the Earth in at most
30 years time, and most people acted like
they didn't give a shit - and the authorities were asleep at the wheel.
Imagine if we had to put together a space mission to destroy this
asteroid within ten years or we would certainly perish - imagine if we
had to design and build an
entire class of spacecraft,
monster nuclear weapon, delivery system, and crew return vehicle within
TEN YEARS, or
the asteroid would be too near the Earth to deflect no matter what we
did. Imagine the public anger, the sense of betrayal, if our leaders
just spouted platitudes because they were alright, they had
bunkers and
private islands sorted out, and they were just going to leave the rest
of us to fry - too bad, suckers!
 |
| Again, not such a stretch... |
|
Now imagine that most people
didn't feel angry or betrayed but simply resigned to their fate. Imagine
if an anti-asteroid protest movement existed, with slogans like BUILD
THE BOMB and DETONATION NOT DEVASTATION and LETS BLOW UP THE FREAKING
ASTEROID ALREADY, and they were universally derided as weirdoes on the
fringes of society, unwashed hippie layabouts, and
subversive leftie
scum -
even among other protest movements! Imagine if in its
desperation, this movement resorted to blocking traffic just to get
traction on the airwaves because the world was going to end and all that happened was that people got pissed off because it made them late to work.
This is what is happening with global warming. Humanity has a
vast job to do, sure it might not work, just as bombing the shit out an asteroid might not work, but it's better than waiting to
die. And nobody gives a flying fuck. I condemn myself as much as the
next person, but I have no goddam clue what to do. So I wrote this.
Maybe
Extinction Rebellion aren't perfect, but at least it's a start.
