Good topic we have had this week. The end of the world, neither more nor less. We started well, or badly, depending on the point of view. Seven days ago we held general elections here in Spain and many of us thought that the world was going to end with the coming to power, for the first time since Franco, of the extreme right.
But not. The Vox party was flying in the polls, but at the moment of truth it suffered an episode of electrical dysfunction (OK, I confess, a phrase stolen from an American political blog), lost 19 seats in Congress and was unable to form part of a government with the People’s Party. Avoided hell, Spain is now in purgatory, awaiting a Frankenstein coalition government or a repeat election.
The day after the vote, Monday, I felt a spiritual emptiness. I found that I was missing the suspense of the final battle between good and evil. Hungry for the drug Armageddon, I turned to fantasy, to a movie I watched at home called X-Men: Dark Phoenix. Complicated, the plot. From what I understood, it was about a group of good superhero mutants fighting to the death against a group of bad superhero mutants. The bad guys were aliens whose planet had been scorched by an extreme case of global warming. His plan was, I believe, to exterminate the human species and colonize the Earth.
Once again the good guys won. Once again the world was saved. But I didn’t have to wait long for the tasty feeling of impending apocalypse to come back. Two news items on Wednesday brought me back to alertness.
As if the story of the X-Men had come true (no mutants, for now), I was informed that, on the one hand, we have been receiving extraterrestrial visits for several decades and that, on the other, our planet has entered into an era of “global boiling”.
Suddenly, the threat from Vox doesn’t seem so dire. As I read here in La Vanguardia, “David Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer, from which he retired in 2023, confessed under oath that the US Executive has been keeping extraterrestrial vehicles since the 1930s –one in the form of a bell that Mussolini recovered– and even ‘non-human biological remains’, which presumably belonged to the pilots of those ships”. The Pentagon denied it all, sure, but that was to be expected.
The same day we learned that a service of the European Commission called Copernicus warned of the dangers inherent in the heat wave and the fires that have been plaguing much of the northern hemisphere during the month of July. Climate change is advancing with giant steps, which will lead us, according to Copernicus, to “uncharted territory”.
We are not just talking about Europe. The United States and China are also burning. The southern hemisphere: give it a few months and you’ll see. As the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, said after learning about the Copernican report: “Unless there is a mini ice age in the next few days, July 2023 will break records in all areas. The only surprise is the speed of change. Climate change is here. It’s frightening. And it’s just the beginning. The era of global warming is over. The era of global boiling has arrived.
If we add to all this, one, the fears that artificial intelligence will lead to the extinction of humanity and, two, that Vladimir Putin does not stop threatening to start a nuclear war, what a panorama.
Fortunately, two of the world’s richest rich are already taking injunctions, à la alien X-Men. The tycoon Elon Musk, who coincidentally just changed the name of his Twitter platform to X, has said that he intends to transfer a million human beings to Mars before the year 2050 using a thousand rockets that one of his companies proposes to build. Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, has told us of his vision of placing millions upon millions of people in space modules that will orbit the Earth for, in his words, centuries to come. Bezos, as is well known, is putting his fortune at the disposal of scientists who work day and night so that his master can enjoy eternal life. And the others, if we’re lucky, too.
Well luck, I don’t know. Depends. Another option, useful in the event that the Russians unleash nuclear war, was the one anticipated by another film, Dr Strangelove or Red Telephone? We fly to Moscow. The idea would be to move to an underground habitat and live like miners. The problem would be that the option would be open only to a select group of human beings and that, according to the proposal of the scientist Strangelove, there would have to be one man for every ten women, since the imperative would be to reproduce the species to the maximum in preparation for the happy day in which life could be recovered on the planetary surface.
We would have the same selection dilemma, and perhaps the same problem of gender discrimination, if the space dreams of Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk were to come true. Not all will be chosen. Most will cook alive. It will be for this, because somewhere in our cerebral cortex we know that the end of the world is coming, that we are living in a time that recalls the last years of the Roman Empire in its frivolity, idiocy and cruelty. Instead of the emperors Nero and Caligula, we have Trump and Putin. Trump, a climate change denier, plays the lyre a la Nero while the world burns. Putin, more sadistic than Caligula, pours oil on the fire and condemns half of Africa to starvation.
The fabulous thing is that hundreds of millions applaud or, at the very least, defend the two most dangerous arsonists on Earth, mainly through the hellish Babel of social media. The others look the other way, with their lyres, or entertain themselves debating whether to alter the texts of the classics so as not to offend the fragile youth, wondering if a woman is a woman or something else, and such. Meanwhile, extinction in sight by boiling, robotic intelligence or nuclear war. As for the aliens, if they passed through here, surely after taking a look at us they continued traveling at full speed.
Happy summer.