sheepoverboard.com

No-one noticed the end of the world yesterday

Doom-saying newsprint headlines dematerialised while pessimistic leads went oddly volatile from news caches.

Events faded from human memory horizons - indeed, too, from Gaia’s.

All creatures paused an atomic heartbeat in vague unease, then, as if startled from a dream, resumed in tedium their virtual toil.

The surreal dreamscape of an unreal world persists - to allow this transient report - till dreams ascend, end, presents desist, and awareness leaches to void.

At 9.28am GMT, September 10, 2008, in a former reality - as two streams of protesting protons tore, deflected 27Km circular by the most powerful of supercooled magnets - an oscilloscopic double-trace brought unalloyed exultation to the virtual faces of dozens of science doyens pressed into an evanescent control centre.

Euphoria, as do wave-fronts, spread, echoing elation to the ghost-like countenances of thousands of former beings on a non-existent globe, centre of a distorting blane merely 8 minutes from an unconcerned star named Sol.

Forgotten in this throng of self-congratulation a prophetic exchange 25 years earlier between scientists from NYC’s Columbia University:

Dr. Egon Spengler: There’s something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That’s bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.

The blackhole tree tightly refutes risk from any renegade, matter-munching, mini black holes (pacman holes).

Should one not instantly evaporate, the algorithm asserts, or shoot from Earth’s proximity like its wild high-energy cousins, a duration much greater than the Universe’s age must transpire before it might expropriate the earthly mass from beneath our unwitting feet.

In unison, scientific intelligentsia piffled suggestions that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider risked human existence, as did predecessors that the first atomic detonation might ignite planetary atmosphere, or strangelets might transmute this earthly realm into another.

This eminent consensus ultimately rested on indisputable proofs supplied by a working universe, that such events go on endlessly without cataclysm on and within Earth, the moon, the sun, red giants, white dwarfs - and of course, in, on and around relatively static and indisputably real and rather larger black holes.

Other, however, than on Earth would unlikely be found teams of human engineers, directed by postulating boffins, misdirecting the forces of nature … as they had ever since opposing thumbs dammed rivers, burned forests, combusted fossil fuels, or harnessed horses, if not nuclei.

Nowhere else in the universe had bridges, dams and burning World Trade Centres collapsed, or cryogenic inner-triplet focusing-quadrapole magnet supports broken during pressure testing in oversight of "very simple balance of forces" despite four engineering reviews.

Not to mention, so I do, had (from engineering oversight) planes, trains, cranes or cars collided or crashed on a scale elsewhere unseen, except  upon this brownish little bluish planet.

Nature’s impersonal perverseness might smite civilizations or cruelly terminate lineages of creatures, yet only humans could both ensure and accelerate such chaos.

Nature supplied the raw ingredients for TNT yet man brought these together to blow himself up. Nature danced more protons within the smallest sun than humankind could ever imagine - yet only this arrogant ape chose to concentrate them in pipes to leap in glee at the collisions.

A naked ape that chose to spend 6 billion Euros over 2 decades on a project to selfishly preoccupy the most valuable intellects on Earth - while nations cried in misery and the planet wilted from environmental assault.

It chose to ignore a trillion dollars thrown at a war to nowhere in Iraq.

It plundered neighbors and their lands while breeding a human plague - staggering blind stupidity from which we shall never recover.

Whether it was yesterday, September 10, 2008, or some time further into the future, that we chanced in flukish fumbling a billionth-billionth possibility and managed to demolish it - or dully, slowly cook it - I will never know.

Dreams fade in memories volatile and something went wrong, that’s all I know.

How could we not have noticed?