This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot (1925)
Or with overcrowding, poisoning, lack of oxygen, roasting, freezing,
crashing planets, or any of a long list of potential calamities.
To look to the future of our world means to ultimately contemplate
its end. Life is finite, the Earth is finite, the universe is
finite, time is finite, and all of physical creation is finite.
Only my credit card bills go on forever.
So, how will we catch the big one? Will it be through slow
decline? Sudden catastrophe? Will it come from without or
will we bring it one ourselves? Can we stave it off or are we
bound to be cold conked by some asteroid?
Or will we even make it that far? Might we not be the victims of
our own success?
Assuming that our fate is a happy one of going ever onward and upward,
there is still the disturbing question of what the end of unbridled
progress would actually be. Would the end to all human endeavour
be godlike status? (Disturbing, when you consider what happened
to a certain archangel when he tried to usurp Him.) Would man
become a race of lotus eaters; freed from all wants and cares, but
with all the drive of a herd of sheep? Or would all our
accomplishments be lost in an pointless cycle of growth and collapse
until man was snuffed out by inevitable extinction?
Maybe it does end with a whimper after all. |
