We had a good topic this week. The end of the world, no less.
But no. The Vox party was flying in the polls, but when the moment of truth came it suffered an episode of electoral dysfunction (OK, I admit it, a phrase stolen from an American political blog), lost 19 seats in Congress and could not to be part of a government with the Popular Party. Having 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 void. I found myself missing the suspense of the final battle between good and evil. Hungry for the Armageddon drug, I turned to fantasy, to a movie I watched at home called X-Men: Dark Phoenix. Complicated, the plot. As I understood it, it was about a group of good mutant superheroes fighting to the death against a group of evil mutant superheroes. The villains were aliens whose planet had been burned by an extreme case of global warming. His plan consisted, I think, of exterminating the human species and colonizing the Earth.
Once again the good guys won. Once again the world was saved. But I didn’t have to wait long to recover the delicious sense of impending apocalypse. On Wednesday, two pieces of news brought me back to my state of alertness.
As if the X-Men story 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 on the other hand, the our planet has entered an era of “global boiling”.
Suddenly, the threat from Vox doesn’t seem so serious. As I read here in La Vanguardia, “David Grusch, former intelligence officer of the Air Force, from which he retired in 2023, confessed under oath that the Executive of the United States has been keeping extraterrestrial vehicles since the decade from the thirties – one in the shape of a bell that Mussolini recovered – and even ‘non-human biological remains’, which allegedly belonged to the pilots of those ships”. The Pentagon denied everything, of course, but that was to be expected.
On the same day we learn that a service of the European Commission called Copernicus warned of the dangers inherent in the heat wave and the fires that have been punishing much of the northern hemisphere during this month of July. Climate change is advancing by leaps and bounds, which will lead us, according to Copernicus, to “unknown 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 of 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 terrifying. 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 keeps threatening to start a nuclear war, what a panorama.
Fortunately, two of the world’s richest men are already taking precautionary measures, X-Men style. Tycoon Elon Musk, who coincidentally just changed the name of his Twitter platform to X, has said that he aims to move one million human beings to Mars before the year 2050 using a thousand rockets that one of his companies is proposing to build Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, has told us his vision of placing millions upon millions of people in space modules that will orbit the Earth, according to his phrase, for 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. It depends. Another option, useful in the event that the Russians unleash nuclear war, was the one anticipated by another film, Doctor Strangelove. 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 should be one man for every ten women, since the imperative would be to reproduce the species to the max in preparation for the happy day when life could be restored to the planetary surface.
We would have the same selection dilemma, and perhaps the same problem of sexist discrimination, if the space dreams of Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk were to come true. Not all will be chosen. Most will be cooked alive. It must be because of this, because somewhere in our cerebral cortex we know that the end of the world is coming, that we are living in an era that recalls the last years of the Roman Empire in its frivolity, idiocy and cruelty. Instead of emperors Nero and Caligula, we have Trump and Putin. Trump, a climate change denier, plays the lyre like Nero while the world burns. Putin, more sadistic than Caligula, throws oil on the fire and condemns half of Africa to starvation.
What’s fabulous is that hundreds of millions applaud or at least defend the two most dangerous arsonists on Earth, mostly through the infernal Babel of social media. The others look away, with their lyres, or amuse themselves debating whether the texts of the classics should be altered so as not to offend the fragile young man, wondering whether a woman is a woman or something else, and so on. As for the aliens, one thing is beyond doubt. If they passed by, they kept on traveling at full speed.
Good summer.