Them's Fightin' Words

Who wants to die? What a load of crap! One day you’re you, walking around, hanging out with your buddies, doing whatever it is you do to kill time and the next BAM! You’re worm-food and that crazy, unique, fucking cool person that was you is just gone.

Of course, religion steps in at this point and tells us that there’s some amazing imaginary place that we go to (or some dreadful, torturous, fire-and-brimstone hell-hole where you spend eternity on the worst acid trip EVER) and that’s fine. If that’s what you want to believe, by all means believe it – I would too if I could, but hinging all my hopes on something that may or may not exist after this life is already over seems a little futile.

This is now. I got bills to pay goddamnit, I got a life to live! Heaven, hell, God, Satan those are just words to me. I try to do good and live well and not screw people around – those things are more important to me than what may or may not happen after I die.

I stumbled on this site the other day that takes things to the extreme and poses the question, what would happen if ALL of us died? If there was some cataclysmic event that wiped us all off the face of this planet for good and what I read was pretty amazing.

• After 2 days without pumping, New York’s subways would impassably flood
• After 7 the emergency fuel supply to the diesel generators that circulate cooling water to nuclear reactors would run out
• After 1 year a BILLION annually doomed birds would live when radio and communication tower warning lights ceased blinking and high tension wires grew cold. Animals will begin to return to the sites of nuclear reactors which would all have melted down or burned. Human head and body live will have grown extinct
• After 3 years buildings will start to collapse as their innards expand and contract. With no heated shelter, cockroaches in temperate cities would die after one or two winters
• After 20 years the Panama Canal would have closed, reuniting the Americas. Common garden vegetables will have reverted to unpalatable strains
• After 100 years populations of small predators (weasels, raccoons, foxes, etc.) will diminish due to competition from a human legacy: immensely successful feral housecats (kitteh!)
• After 300 years, New York’s bridges would fall. Dams worldwide will have silted, overflowed and collapsed. Cities built in river deltas will have washed away completely
• After 500 years, forests would stand in the place of most suburbs. Amid the trees aluminium dishwasher parts and stainless steel cookware would lie, their plastic handles splitting, but still solid
• After thousands of years, the only human structures still intact would be underground
• After 35 000 years all the lead deposited during the smokestack era will have finally been cleansed from the soil
• After 100 000 years, CO2 levels will have returned to pre-human levels (could take longer)
• After 250 000 years the levels of plutonium in plutonium bombs would be lost to the Earth’s natural background radiation
• After hundreds of thousands of years microbes will have evolved to biodegrade plastic
• After 7 200 000 years vestiges of Mount Rushmore will still be intact, barring asteroids or violent earthquakes. Toxic manmade substances such as PCB will still be intact, though mostly buried
• After 10 200 000 years, bronze sculptures will still be recognisable!
• After 3 billion years, life, albeit in forms we can’t even imagine, would still thrive on earth
• After 4.5 billion years the half-million tons of depleted Uranium-238 in the US alone would have reached its half life. Earth would begin to warm as the sun expands. Microbial life forms resembling the first life forms on earth would out-last everything
• After 5+ billion years the Earth would burn as the dying sun swells to envelope the inner planets

There is one final point at the end of the timeline, one that has had a profound effect on me ever since I read it because it proves that immortality in a certain form, is possible.

Right at the end, it simply says:

• Forever: Our radio and television broadcasts, fragmented as they may be, will still be travelling outward.

Humans will never fade into complete obscurity. There will always be some trace of us, some proof that this beautiful and fucked up race existed, it’s already out there, reverberating through the ether like a dog without a bone, an actor all alone…

And THAT’S why, more than anything else, I need to get famous

What the hell would space be without your Tiger pal bouncing around up there like a piece of loose shrapnel, freaking out the aliens?

Hold my hand, we’re going to Vegas.

-ST