We had an election night comedy alternative to the business as usual coverage. The physicist Brian Cox was wheeled on to shoot the breeze on catastrophe, as we voted for a hung Parliament, leading to all sorts of guff about 'national interest' as the parties jockey for their own under this banner.
Cox came up with 'super volcanoes', pointing to the disaster in Indonesia 74,000 years ago that covered India with ash and reduced the human breeding population to about 1000 couples. Later he mentioned asteroids, pointing to a couple that will travel between us and some of our weather satellites in the next few years. Plague of some kind may also be on the cards. He was dismissive of CERN blackholes swallowing us up. There was much he didn't mention, like WMD terrorism possibilities and economic madness, the latter a point made many times by Jared Diamond (the point being what we are doing now that resembles past ecocides). I have reached a point where I really should just opt out of society because it makes me frustrated, depressed and inclined to the insane. One can find personal peace, yet this always seems at the cost of hunkering down into ignoring what is likely to happen to 'us' and letting oneself be subsumed to trust in evolution and giving up on a wide, consensual society that is interested in being as prepared as it can to shape destiny. Cox was somewhat irreverent, leaving us only with the idea that Bruce Willis will be too old to save us. I'm struck in the British context that we have had our 'new hung Parliament' before and the pundit blather is much the same. This politics is too boring to contemplate, but I wonder if we have any ideas on the broader context of what we know about catastrophe in history and how we might shape ourselves to evade or at least be prepared for its inevitability in the future. The question for me is how we escape our mundane thinking and habits and what we would need to try to move on. I can't properly express this question and am looking for help.
