I recently read a New York Times article about a new particle accelerator in Switzerland. Articles in the Science section don’t normally fill me with a sense of foreboding and doom, but this one succeeded where others failed. With the accelerator, scientists hope to recreate the “Big Bang” on a small scale in order to explain the origins of the universe. It seemed alright until I got to the paragraph which said that two men “think the giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth—and maybe the universe.”
When I first read about the impending apocalypse, I told as many friends as I could. What shocked me was that, other than a distinct minority—hypochondriacs, like myself—my friends were not very concerned. Granted, I’m the person who, when I have a headache, immediately thinks I have a brain tumor, but this strikes me as rather sinister. Imagine everything, from Healy to my high school to my home, snuffed out like a candle in an instant. I feel like people should be making a bigger deal out of this.
But then I realized that there is very rarely a time that there is not a threat to our existence to keep us on our toes. Every couple of months, it seems, my local news reports that an asteroid even bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs is hovering in outer space and could possibly, maybe hit the Earth and cause the instant extinction of mankind. Under the auspices of the New York City Board of Education, students still to this day perform shelter drills in preparation for a nuclear attack. At the turn of the century people worried that the Y2K bug would lead to nuclear missiles being set off. This led to my family stockpiling water and canned goods. Just in case, of course.
Today, it’s impossible to ignore all the talk of a “clash of civilizations” that gets thrown around when talking about the war on terror. And fear-mongering about the apocalypse is no longer even a partisan issue. Look no further than Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, which, with the help of colorful charts and graphs, certainly succeeds in making it look like global warming is going to be the end us all.
I have no idea whether rampant fatalism is new or unique to Western society, though I’m sure that men on the street corners pleading for people to repent before the imminent apocalypse are present all over the world and have been throughout history.
Fatalism is even infiltrating pop culture: in an episode of Dead Like Me, the main character, George, collects the souls of those about to die, saying that, “Death is kind of like sex in high school. If you knew how many times you missed having it, you’d be paralyzed.”
I am trying to remain calm, to not think that these could be the final months of my life—because, although we all like to think that we live everyday as if it is our last, that’s quite an exhausting way to go through life. If I’m living life to the fullest, where do the Saved by the Bell reruns fit in? And what about those countless hours spent on Facebook?
I think most people like to think that when the end comes it’ll be dramatic, that they’ll be Jack and Rose, holding hands as the Titanic plunges into the cold dark abyss. But in all likelihood, even if I were to find out when the particle accelerator is being started up, I’ll probably just be watching Saved by the Bell on my living room couch after a hard day at work.
