Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Change-monger

Don and I were watching a really interesting Discovery-Channel type thing the other night, about how for the last 10,000 years the planet has been between ice ages. Apparently, everything that humanity has accomplished in that time, we owe to this warming trend. It does sort of explain things, considering that we've been around maybe 200,000 years as humans, and yet only got around to, say, agriculture, permanent civilization or the Internet in the last 10K. It'd be like waking up and just lolling around all day on the sofa, then at 11:30pm, opening the front door and taking off sprinting down the street because it finally got warm enough to go outside... Fascinating stuff. Then I realized (and this is where I switch from my out-of-character talk about interesting scientific stuff back to the usual navel-gazing) that I have this sort of disturbing tendency to root for disaster. "Wow, another ice age. That would be awesome!" So New York would be crushed by a sheet of ice 2 miles thick... OK, whatever. Same with the "economic crisis"; I keep secretly wondering exactly how bad it's going to get, but in an almost gleeful kind of way. I don't even know why, except that it's been a long time coming, and a correction of some kind is much-needed, even if it's just that credit becomes less easily available...

Weird, I know.

2 comments:

Bex said...

didn't George Carlin say something like this before. I believe the term was "entropy buff" he loves chaos because it's exciting. hehe

Mara said...

Sounds like something he'd say...