But Then Munitions Rain and We're The Epicentre

People. Are. Dying!

Perseid Meteor Seen From Space, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, 2011

For the most part I ignore Valentine's Day, though there was that one time I threw darts in lovers' eyes. I had in fact been planning to write something for said date, but at the New Year I decided to pursue a course of action that might not result in it being like every other year. Anyway, I was enjoying my day off work on the 15th by sleeping into the afternoon and being slightly disappointed by the previous day's apparent lack of progress. I eventually got up and refreshed the BBC News page before heading to the shop. I thought it had finally happened. I thought the opening of Rendezvous with Rama had come true sixty four years and 47° longitude early. In hindsight that would probably have been top story rather than the horse-meat scandal. Had the circumstances been different, Chelyabinsk could have been a real turning point. Time, size, mass, angle, speed - particular variations could have seen the city replaced with a crater. The thing about Earth is that it's mostly water, so even passing over a major population area makes it a landmark event. In a world that retroactively edits out the Twin Towers from films released in the quarter of a century before 2001, how often do you think Deep Impact or Armageddon would ever be broadcast again?

Does anyone know how big the one that killed the dinosaurs was?
-MSNBC researcher, Deep Impact

It's an interesting question about the clash of entertainment and reality. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and that of Japan in 2011, you'd think all references to tsunamis would be expunged. The former was quite well documented by amateur footage, but what really concerned me about the latter were the aerial shots from news helicopters that provided something dangerously close to scenes from countless films: a car racing down the road trying to outrun the black wall of water sweeping across the plain. I really do think there's an undercurrent of cultural imperialism there. Plenty of white people did indeed die on Boxing Day just over eight years ago, but the death toll from Asian nationalities of course exceeded that of western tourists. As such it is an Asian disaster, and the CGI waves will continue to bear down on white heroes until such a time as this kind of disaster strikes a Western state, whereupon we will instantly disown the notion that we were ever entertained by these fictional spectacles. I cannot imagine there's a market in certain parts of the Indian Ocean for fictional disasters of the kind many survived (and many didn't). Have you actually noticed how many people die in the background of these scenes?

There are millions of New Yorkers being drowned in The Day After Tomorrow as the main characters scramble off East 41st Street into the library. Though I love it, I know much of that is down to never having to experience it. The same is true of war movies and war games - very few of the millions that died in the Second World War were entertained. While it isn't wrong in itself to indulge in these commercial products, it can infantilise historical events. They all sell a fantasy - that the viewer or player would survive these situations. More accurately, you'd be the one dying off-screen. When events hit home, inevitable on a long enough time scale, it'll force a very sobering reality check. There will be no tax-avoiding blue collar yahoos lassoing an asteroid holding the world to ransom while those pinheads at NASA tell them what can't be done. There's a great tendency to forget we're hurtling around space on a big rock and spinning that roulette wheel every second as we go about our daily business. One day we'll t-bone a bigger boulder and we'll suddenly wonder how we never saw it coming (as the funding for Spaceguard dried up).

I haven't said don't enjoy these things. I haven't said remain forever vigilant. I certainly wasn't thinking about an extinction level event when I wrote the card, nor when I posted the card. For a time I managed to distract myself from existential oblivion from any number of sources by actually taking advantage of existence. Just keep a balanced diet. You wouldn't subsist on popcorn any more that your reality should be formed by Hollywood.

If we fail to anticipate the unforeseen or expect the unexpected in a universe of infinite possibilities, we may find ourselves at the mercy of anyone or anything that cannot be programmed, categorized or easily referenced.

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