If Tomorrow Never Comes
The author F. Scott Fitzgerald once told Esquire in an interview: One should, for example, be able to...hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to "succeed." One could apply that to the world of today, another phrase often popping up, that of "life in the balance." Something I had written in the last few posts caused over a thousand readers --98% of them in the U.S.-- to vanish overnight (and as of today, not to return). What it was I wrote that caused that, I'll likely never know. Such is life in general, complete with its ups and downs, something that befalls each of us. One day can be among the brightest ever and the next, well, not so good. With a bit of time now passing, I glanced back over to the original post I temporarily withdrew after the events at Manchester, UK and am posting it now. But before you read on, here's my reasoning. What appears to start out as a glib almost carefree look at life and death, it was meant more as a review of sorts, to think of where we are in today's world, not only individually but collectively. Things happen outside of our "bubbles," many of which we have no control over; but beyond that perhaps we should look a bit deeper into what we really treasure and what brings real meaning to our lives...and do all that while we are indeed alive. The original post follows...
There is something about denial, particularly about what we know to be true; far from admitting that we are wrong (for some reason, this is linked more to males than to females), we live as if there is always tomorrow. Certainly there is death around us --in the movies, a bird's scattered feathers on the lawn, an animal hit and lying on the side of the road, us attending funerals and in turn seeing the myriad graveyards that dot the landscape-- but somehow we have it locked in our minds that none of that is for us, at least not today; poor unfortunate souls, cries the witch to the Little Mermaid. And indeed, as we move past the lifeless cat or the vehicle accident or the obituary column, we tend to think that it was so unfortunate but that we need to and we will go on to "live another day." This is likely as true a feeling for the 90-year old as it is for the 20-year old, although that slight pain in the body might be a bit more concerning for the former. So then why would anyone (including myself) pick up a book titled, And Then You're Dead.
Truth be told, I have thoroughly enjoyed this somewhat-macabre collection of tales, perhaps because the teaming up of a scientist with a freelance writer proved just the right mix of reminding us that not making it to tomorrow can happen in far more ways that we care to imagine. If we're going to face the inevitable, why not bring some humor into it? Being pulled down in quicksand and having your last breath be a gulp of grainy mud? -- it's never happened (read that again...never); with quicksand being thicker than water, you would sink to your waist and stop or basically float. Get eaten by a great white shark? Turns out that the great whites don't like the taste of humans...we're actually rather repugnant to them (the bites and tears on swimmers and surfers are apparently "trial" bites until they discover that we're not a seal or other ocean prey that is "edible" to them); researchers have pieced back together the victims of attacks by the great whites and have never found any flesh missing...never And getting hit by lightning? Most people survive unless it's a superbolt which can be 100 times as powerful as an ordinary lightning bolt and basically leave little trace of you other than a fine mist .(the authors add this about lightning: How a cloud generates electricity is still not totally understood, but we think it has to do with how ice and water travel up and down drafts of a storm cloud, generating bits of static electricity in the exchange, like lots of tiny wool socks rubbing on a carpet.) Or one more on falling into the icy waters of the North Atlantic as happened to those on the Titanic: The ocean's salt allows the water temperature to drop below its freezing point. In the North Atlantic, where the Titanic went down, the water was 28 degrees, and because water is already extremely efficient at lowering your body temperature by virtue of being so dense, you would be in one of the world's most dangerous places to go for a swim. You would be rubbing up against molecules packed 800 times denser than they were just a few minutes ago on the Titanic's deck, which means you would cool down 25 times faster in 28-degree water than in 28-degree air. Add it all up, our fears and horrors (being sucked out of an airplane, falling off a cliff, an elevator cable breaking (which happened only once when a plane crashed into the Empire State Building and severed the cable), entering a black hole...those fears are all there and all fulfilling our curiosities of the odd ways that we can die. So what's up with that? Why would this intrigue some of us and yet turn others away with little or no interest? Denial?
It doesn't really matter for perhaps underlining all of this is us simply wanting to know the unknowable, even as it stares us in the face. Some of us will look and question and for others, it will be nothing more than an exercise in futility. Why worry about that which you cannot change? But then again we can drive more carefully and eat the right things and avoid standing near the edge of a cliff, etc. All of that is good and preventative; and then I came upon this chapter in the book, one on nuclear winter, one created when only a hundred or so nuclear bombs are detonated: Your first problem? Radiation...When the nukes went off they would irradiate the area and transmute innocuous atoms into dangerous ones. One of the worst of these nuclear bastard children is called strontium-90. It's light, so it doesn't take many explosions for it to coat the globe and get deep into the food supply. Once ingested it's so similar to calcium that your body absorbs it into your bones...Once stontium-90 is in your bones its radioactive decay breaks up the DNA of your cells, leading to bone cancers and leukemia. So if you survived the initial nuclear exchange, you would have bone cancer to look forward to, but that's only if you could also survive the more serious smoke, ash, and soot problem...The second issue, after the dust has cleared from the initial detonations, is that the dust wouldn't clear. After a hundred multimegaton bombs exploded in the air, not only would they directly distribute carbon into the upper atmosphere but they would start enormous forest and urban fires that would release massive amounts of smoke. On top of that, the explosions would lift tons of fine dust -- all of which would be heated by the sun to rise and collect in the stratosphere...The smoke from your typical campfire stays below the clouds where it can be wicked away by rain. In the case of nuclear fallout, smoke and ash would be lifted above the clouds where it wouldn't be wicked away by rain, so it would stay parked for years and block sunlight...enough sunlight to drop the average global temperature by a few degrees. How's that for depressing? Unfortunately, modern war training exercises assume not a hundred bombs, but thousands. Should that happen (it almost did back in 1983 when every city with a population over 100,000 in both the U.S. and Russia was a scheduled target), the author writes: Within two weeks of something like this happening, 180 million tons of smoke, soot, and dust would coat our globe like black paint, and there it would stay...Light levels would be reduced to a few percent of what they are today so high noon would look like predawn. Midsummer highs in North America would be below zero. All of this sort of brings a new light, so to speak, on the many tests North Korea is conducting (several thousand buried missiles are reportedly aimed at South Korea in the event of any sort of attack). Obviously North Korea has nuclear bombs, as does China, Israel, Pakistan, and countless others. An attack there, or here, or anywhere, would likely affect the world.
A few days from now, John F. Kennedy would have been celebrating his 100th birthday; it would have been a time of reflection both good and bad (the civil rights movement is still struggling some 50 years later). Camelot and Cuba, black & white televisions and crate-sized speakers, the Vietnam war and ironically, the initial signing of a partial nuclear test ban treaty. But then Kennedy couldn't have known that a ride through Dallas in an open car would prove to be his last day alive. And then we have that word, alive. The other night friends came over and a grand meal turned even nicer as conversation swept across the table for several hours, all put in equal measure with laughter and opinions and reflections of our own. In short, it was a celebration of life; and as odd and interesting (and sometimes depressing) as the book's scenarios were, that night we already knew all of that, that someday --unknown to us-- we would no longer be here to share food and drinks and laughs with friends and family. Someday, we'd be dead. But not tonight, not yet...that night it was far more fun to look the other way, to share those moments, those hours, those times, together, laughing and thinking about how wonderful it was to be alive. Let's face it, we --all of us-- are lucky to still be here. So with all due respect to the authors, rather than read their book And Then You're Dead, I think I would have much rather read the book I was actually living and experiencing that night over dinner...And Then You're Alive!
There is something about denial, particularly about what we know to be true; far from admitting that we are wrong (for some reason, this is linked more to males than to females), we live as if there is always tomorrow. Certainly there is death around us --in the movies, a bird's scattered feathers on the lawn, an animal hit and lying on the side of the road, us attending funerals and in turn seeing the myriad graveyards that dot the landscape-- but somehow we have it locked in our minds that none of that is for us, at least not today; poor unfortunate souls, cries the witch to the Little Mermaid. And indeed, as we move past the lifeless cat or the vehicle accident or the obituary column, we tend to think that it was so unfortunate but that we need to and we will go on to "live another day." This is likely as true a feeling for the 90-year old as it is for the 20-year old, although that slight pain in the body might be a bit more concerning for the former. So then why would anyone (including myself) pick up a book titled, And Then You're Dead.
Truth be told, I have thoroughly enjoyed this somewhat-macabre collection of tales, perhaps because the teaming up of a scientist with a freelance writer proved just the right mix of reminding us that not making it to tomorrow can happen in far more ways that we care to imagine. If we're going to face the inevitable, why not bring some humor into it? Being pulled down in quicksand and having your last breath be a gulp of grainy mud? -- it's never happened (read that again...never); with quicksand being thicker than water, you would sink to your waist and stop or basically float. Get eaten by a great white shark? Turns out that the great whites don't like the taste of humans...we're actually rather repugnant to them (the bites and tears on swimmers and surfers are apparently "trial" bites until they discover that we're not a seal or other ocean prey that is "edible" to them); researchers have pieced back together the victims of attacks by the great whites and have never found any flesh missing...never And getting hit by lightning? Most people survive unless it's a superbolt which can be 100 times as powerful as an ordinary lightning bolt and basically leave little trace of you other than a fine mist .(the authors add this about lightning: How a cloud generates electricity is still not totally understood, but we think it has to do with how ice and water travel up and down drafts of a storm cloud, generating bits of static electricity in the exchange, like lots of tiny wool socks rubbing on a carpet.) Or one more on falling into the icy waters of the North Atlantic as happened to those on the Titanic: The ocean's salt allows the water temperature to drop below its freezing point. In the North Atlantic, where the Titanic went down, the water was 28 degrees, and because water is already extremely efficient at lowering your body temperature by virtue of being so dense, you would be in one of the world's most dangerous places to go for a swim. You would be rubbing up against molecules packed 800 times denser than they were just a few minutes ago on the Titanic's deck, which means you would cool down 25 times faster in 28-degree water than in 28-degree air. Add it all up, our fears and horrors (being sucked out of an airplane, falling off a cliff, an elevator cable breaking (which happened only once when a plane crashed into the Empire State Building and severed the cable), entering a black hole...those fears are all there and all fulfilling our curiosities of the odd ways that we can die. So what's up with that? Why would this intrigue some of us and yet turn others away with little or no interest? Denial?
It doesn't really matter for perhaps underlining all of this is us simply wanting to know the unknowable, even as it stares us in the face. Some of us will look and question and for others, it will be nothing more than an exercise in futility. Why worry about that which you cannot change? But then again we can drive more carefully and eat the right things and avoid standing near the edge of a cliff, etc. All of that is good and preventative; and then I came upon this chapter in the book, one on nuclear winter, one created when only a hundred or so nuclear bombs are detonated: Your first problem? Radiation...When the nukes went off they would irradiate the area and transmute innocuous atoms into dangerous ones. One of the worst of these nuclear bastard children is called strontium-90. It's light, so it doesn't take many explosions for it to coat the globe and get deep into the food supply. Once ingested it's so similar to calcium that your body absorbs it into your bones...Once stontium-90 is in your bones its radioactive decay breaks up the DNA of your cells, leading to bone cancers and leukemia. So if you survived the initial nuclear exchange, you would have bone cancer to look forward to, but that's only if you could also survive the more serious smoke, ash, and soot problem...The second issue, after the dust has cleared from the initial detonations, is that the dust wouldn't clear. After a hundred multimegaton bombs exploded in the air, not only would they directly distribute carbon into the upper atmosphere but they would start enormous forest and urban fires that would release massive amounts of smoke. On top of that, the explosions would lift tons of fine dust -- all of which would be heated by the sun to rise and collect in the stratosphere...The smoke from your typical campfire stays below the clouds where it can be wicked away by rain. In the case of nuclear fallout, smoke and ash would be lifted above the clouds where it wouldn't be wicked away by rain, so it would stay parked for years and block sunlight...enough sunlight to drop the average global temperature by a few degrees. How's that for depressing? Unfortunately, modern war training exercises assume not a hundred bombs, but thousands. Should that happen (it almost did back in 1983 when every city with a population over 100,000 in both the U.S. and Russia was a scheduled target), the author writes: Within two weeks of something like this happening, 180 million tons of smoke, soot, and dust would coat our globe like black paint, and there it would stay...Light levels would be reduced to a few percent of what they are today so high noon would look like predawn. Midsummer highs in North America would be below zero. All of this sort of brings a new light, so to speak, on the many tests North Korea is conducting (several thousand buried missiles are reportedly aimed at South Korea in the event of any sort of attack). Obviously North Korea has nuclear bombs, as does China, Israel, Pakistan, and countless others. An attack there, or here, or anywhere, would likely affect the world.
A few days from now, John F. Kennedy would have been celebrating his 100th birthday; it would have been a time of reflection both good and bad (the civil rights movement is still struggling some 50 years later). Camelot and Cuba, black & white televisions and crate-sized speakers, the Vietnam war and ironically, the initial signing of a partial nuclear test ban treaty. But then Kennedy couldn't have known that a ride through Dallas in an open car would prove to be his last day alive. And then we have that word, alive. The other night friends came over and a grand meal turned even nicer as conversation swept across the table for several hours, all put in equal measure with laughter and opinions and reflections of our own. In short, it was a celebration of life; and as odd and interesting (and sometimes depressing) as the book's scenarios were, that night we already knew all of that, that someday --unknown to us-- we would no longer be here to share food and drinks and laughs with friends and family. Someday, we'd be dead. But not tonight, not yet...that night it was far more fun to look the other way, to share those moments, those hours, those times, together, laughing and thinking about how wonderful it was to be alive. Let's face it, we --all of us-- are lucky to still be here. So with all due respect to the authors, rather than read their book And Then You're Dead, I think I would have much rather read the book I was actually living and experiencing that night over dinner...And Then You're Alive!
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