Reasons Not To Kill Yourself Today, No. 20: There’s Life Out There! Maybe!
You precious creatures, you long-suffering not-yet-suicidal readers, you darling darlings darlings darlings, GUESS WHAT I have been doing for the last two days? You know this, don’t you? Because you know me? Do you know me? Do you care? NOT IMPORTANT, ACTUALLY, because they — the scientists, the pioneers, the government, whatever, the ever-present omnipotent they — have found ANOTHER INHABITABLE PLANET. Another Earth. Earth 2.0.
I’m going to stop all-capsing and have a cigarette. In the meantime, ask yourselves if there could possibly be any better news for our own suck-stricken world.
…
What did you come up with? Time machines? Don’t kid a kidder. To paraphrase everybody’s favorite novelist (j/k) Dickens, this is the worst time that’s ever been. It’s also the best time. Unless you’re a straight white guy, in which case, the Golden Era was all yours. Enjoy Newt Gingrich’s attempts to return you to it, Amerika! Everybody else, like minorities, LGBTQSTT??T?!(*#%s peeps, and women who want to be in charge? It might not be getting better fast enough, but none of us want to go back. You can step off the nostalgia pedal now thanks.
World peace? Well, if you had a time machine and it dropped you off at 1966, when world peace was still something you could even sing about with a straight face, then I guess. But I just told you what’s up with time machines, so no.
The global ratification of Kyoto? * crickets *
Human cloning? Aww but honey, there’s a fairly fatal problem with that. It’s the human part.
You’re out of time. We’re all out of time, feels like. You don’t have to be as crazy or ex-religious as me, I don’t think, to believe the world is coming to a very Hobbesian end. And so it’s with near-relief and a flicker of the most heartbreaking feeling – hope — that we collectively fire up the rusty old machine we called imagination and start reading between the lines of Earth 2.0!!! news. It’s 2.4 times bigger than ours (population crisis = solved) with a slightly smaller sun (global warming? Never heard of it, kid) and appears to be coloured a deep, luminous mint (so on-trend). Most importantly, it’s in the “Goldilocks zone,” the adorbzable name for the orbital band in which temperatures can sustain liquid water and—DUN DUN DUN—life itself. Pack your bags, quit all your jobs, and get Richard Branson on Line 1, cos we’re gonna blow this melting popsicle stand faster than you can say “are liquids allowed on rocket ships?”
Right? Right?
No. Not quite. In fact what would happen is that, yes, Richard Branson would go to this other Earth, this glowing realization of all our stress-related dreams, this place where there are no tsunamis and no Jehovah’s Witnesses and you never see anybody you went to high school with. He would take Madonna with him, I’m sure. He would take Kate Moss. He would take Bills Clinton and Gates and Liliane Bettancourt and the Waltons and the Al Nahyans and if there are any Rockefellers left, he’d take the Rockefellers, and oh yeah, Jay-Z. And Gwyneth. And soon the rest of the 1% would follow, taking their Hermes luggage and their empires with them, and what would we be left with? Occupy Planet Earth, fighting over drum-circle rights and braiding each other’s hair. But. You know. I think I’d hang around.