Upon a thickly overcast November day [in 2008] I was walking down Gravelly Lane towards Birmingham, when I was stopped dead in my tracks with terror by a blinding light instantly transforming the scene around me from ambient city greys to stark saturated bright whites and crisp black shadows. The light was in fact nothing to fear at all, it was just the Sun appearing abruptly though a solitary opening in the dark grey blanket of cloud whisking by. What I feared in that mistaken, but seemingly real, moment was the end: a blinding bright light being the first onslaught to be experienced from the detonation of a nuclear warhead. My fear harked back to the latter days of the Cold War. In those latter days the West and the USSR were very unlikely to have purposefully started an actual hot war through political aggression, but the chance of an accidental launch of nuclear missiles was an ever present danger, and as soon as some were launched by one side, the other side would have launched all theirs and in turn the rest of the missiles would be launched. And so many were the missiles and so powerful were their multiple warheads that much of Earth's surface would have been incinerated and the remainder irradiated: the whole human race would be dead or dying. A few would have survived deep in bunkers for a few years before starving to death, but sooner or later we would all be dead. Ashes to ashes, dust to ashes, everything to ashes. But now any nuke detonated in a city would probably be the only one, or one of a few, perpetrated by terrorists or a lone paranoid state.... fatal, brutal or terrifying to anyone within 50 miles, but not the end of the world (only from a personal point of view).
So on that winter's day I had not feared that the end of the whole human race had come, all billions upon billions of us, but I'd just feared the end of me and hundreds of thousands of others in the area. However during the latter part of the Cold War during the late 70's and early 80's, during my teenage years, I had on at least a few occasions thought the end of the whole human race had come when a few times a year the early warning siren for my neighbourhood (Little Boldmere, Sutton Coldfield) would go-off, whether due to a fault or darkly mischievous kids setting it off somehow, I'm not sure. The siren didn't just go-off for a few seconds during the day like when it was being tested, I coped with that OK, but it would start-up during the night and wail-on for minutes...fearing the worst I would usually bury my eyes in the pillow and draw-over the bed cloths facing the opposite direction from my window and Birmingham City centre so at least I would not be blinded by the nuke's initial bright flash... my thinking was to save my eye sight so that if I was not killed out-right and, for example, left with terrible burns I would at least be able to find some kind of knife or something to kill myself with and end the misery. But of course, on each occasion that bright flash never came, so after waiting what I hoped was at least the infamous four minutes of the wailing siren, I would start to hope that the situation was another false alarm and I usually switched-on the radio beside my bed: if people on it were talking normally about normal things I would start to relax, sit-up and open my eyes and eventually, after my thoughts were collected, I'd go back to sleep. Except for one night that is...because some time during those years there was an annoying fashion with historical documentary makers, the fashion was for news reporters to present a programme as if they were experiencing the events unfolding in the present tense, with drama, stress and urgency in their voice where appropriate. So probably the darkest of these false early-warning alarms for me was the one when I switched on the radio beside my bed and it just so happened such a documentary was being broadcast, I can't remember what it was about but it may have been about the korean War because the first words I heard upon switching on the radio was an alarmed voice saying something along the lines of: "I'm watching the columns of Communist tanks streaming across the border...". I can laugh about it ..... now.
So I can say from personal experience that the feeling of 'knowing' that the end of the whole human race is imminent is far far worse than the feeling that it is just the end for me and everyone in my locality. Even though I die in both scenarios the feeling that it's the end for all humans is filled with such cold darkness and hopelessness: sadness that the endeavours of every person over every generation has, in the end, been for nothing, nothing at all. Some people say the demise of the human race would be a good thing, but these people are just plain wrong. They say the planet would be better-off without us, where as in fact if The Earth could express an opinion it would be well pissed-off if we were to die-out now... well pissed-off that just as it had managed to nurture an intelligent self-aware species, all it's efforts turned-out to be for nothing. Think of all those many more millions of years than us the dinosaurs were knocking about, and not one poet or mathematition amongst them... comparatively the Earth is onto a winner with us. And soon (soon in the Earth's terms) we'll travel extraterestrially and spread its life among the stars... it won't just be Mother Earth then but Grandmother Earth. I think she has been waiting long enough to become a grandmother, so I think we ought to get on with it. After-all we won't just be taking ourslelves, we'll be taking the Earth's other fauna and flora with us. And it may not just be a tradgedy for the Earth if we were snuffed-out: perhaps we are the only chance the universe has of a consciousness and an intelligent voice. The universe is so vast that really there ought to be countless other intelligent species out there...in theory... but so far all is quiet at SETI, quiet as the grave. So perhaps we are it: the voice of the universe. We've done a lot of bad things us humans but there is hope, we are gradually improving as we get more intelligent. There are still massacres perpertrated by us and famines that we allow to happen, but we try harder than we have in the past to try and halt these things. The only point I'm trying to make is we're improving. Perhaps it's more obvious in a country like mine, the UK, where corporal punishment then capital punishment was abolished, and all sorts of anti-discrimination laws have been passed, and laws for freedom of information. And sooner or later the old expression "All's in fair in love and war" will have to be changed to: "All's fair in love", because the USA, UK, France etc, are ever more careful to keep civilian casualties to a bare minimum when engaging in military action, and pertetrators of war crimes are more likely to be prosecuted. Sure you say, but if we were a really decent species we would not have wars at all...but the fact that you and many others say that is hope in itself. And there are lots of us trying to protect the environment, just not nearly enough yet, and there have been small successes and indications that there's hope that we'll come to our senses: like we managed to restrict the release of CFCs enough to safegard the ozone layer, for now at least.
You see I like us humans, and I hope we make it far into the future and continue to improve. I see us like a child who is slowly starting to realize his or her responsibilities as they grow: they have had their carefree years and are begining that transition of starting to put their own toys back in their toybox at the end of each day, but they are still some way off from washing the dishes.
Call me soft, call me a romantic fool, but when I die, if I have a grave stone, I would like the epitaph to read: "I love you all".
[This document: I Like Us Humans V1.11, posted:13th August 2012 original posted:15th June 2012. (c) J Prestidge 2012]