An Optimistic Future Up Ahead

David Nix: The probability of widespread annihilation kept going up. The only way to stop was to show it. To scare people straight. What reasonable human being would be galvanize by the potential destruction of everything they've ever known or loved. To save civilization, I would show its collapse. But how do you think this vision was received? How do you think people responded to the prospect of imminent doom?

They gobbled it up in a chocolate eclair. They didn't fear their demise, they repackaged it. It can be enjoyed as video games, tv shows, books, movies, the entire world, whole-heartedly embraced the apocalypse. But sprinted towards with gleeful abandon. Meanwhile your earth was crumbling all around you. Civil ten years epidemics of obesity and starvation, explain that one?

Bees and butterflies start to disappear, the glaciers melt, the algae glooms, all around you, the calamine canaries are dead and you won't take the hint. In every moment there is a possibility of a better future, but you people won't believe it. And because you won't believe it, you won't do what is necessary to make it a reality.

So you dwell on this whole terrible future, you resign yourselves to it. One reason because that future doesn't ask anything of you today. So yes you saw the iceberg, you were on the Titanic, but you all just steered for it full steam ahead. Why? Because you want to sink. You gave up. It's not the monitor's fault, that's yours.