Asteroid!

I thought I would have a chat about the end of the world. I’ve done a little research and there are countless ways in which the Earth could be destroyed or suffer such a terrible calamity that there entire human race is wiped out.

I’ve narrowed the list down to ten possibilities – five realistic and five more ridiculous. Over the next few posts I shall attempt to discuss them in my own peculiar way, starting with the realistic ones and heading into weird territory after that.

First up: asteroid collision.

You may have seen the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact which basically have this subject covered. In both films, the Earth is threatened by a huge asteroid and the world combines forces to try to avert catastrophe.

While I enjoyed both films, ultimately they were the kind of film where you have to switch off your brain and enjoy the carnage – otherwise you end up laughing throughout the movie saying things like:

“WHAT? A bunch of oil riggers are going to drill a hole and blow up this asteroid with a nuclear bomb?”

The truth is I am sure that America has a plan to destroy any huge rocks they discover heading towards the Earth; they always manage to save the world across the pond.

But surely their success depends on the size of the approaching asteroid. For example I’ve read about something called a rogue planet and, worse, a rogue star and no bomb will be big enough to destroy either of those, I can tell you.

Basically a rogue planet is something at least the size of our moon that drifts through the galaxy uninfluenced by any star. If such a thing hurtled into our solar system all we could do is hope that one of the outer planets decided to add it to their collection of moons.

We certainly couldn’t destroy it – and even if we could, there would be thousands of smaller pieces all heading towards us each with the power to wipe us out with the same ferocity as the relatively small one that wiped out the dinosaurs all those years ago.

The truth is that I think such a thing is unlikely to happen in our lifetime.

However, if it did, and the asteroid wasn’t a giant planet sized monster, we could try asking it nicely via the medium of a huge explosion whether it would consider joining our little family (the Earth and the Moon); we could guide it into an orbit that would give us something even better to look at during the night time. The downside to this is that, of course with an extra moon, lots of things would happen on Earth.

For example, we would suffer earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes would start to erupt in a cataclysm that would also do some serious damage to humanity across the globe. The new moon itself might also go as far as to cause a mass extinction itself.

If we were to be wiped us out, perhaps the creatures that evolved in a million or so years’ time would look back at our fossilised bones and make a movie called “Quatenaric Park” about humans resurrected from the blood in the stomach of mosquitos from our time, terrorising whoever is in charge of the Earth at the time.

That all sounds a bit silly to be honest doesn’t it?

But the question is, does it sound sillier than plans to build a spaceship and send a bunch of brave volunteers on a one way trip to an Earth-like planet in the Goldilocks Zone of a distant sun? I guess ultimately we will end up doing this anyway – unless we are visited by aliens who help us to sort something out with their local neighbourhoods.

But that is something for another post.

Basically, my opinion is that if a fairly chunky piece of space rock is on collision course with Earth then we are fucked, even if a brave bunch of oil drillers volunteer to blow themselves and the asteroid up with a nuclear bomb.

Hello Again!

Hello again, Internet.

It’s been a while – over two months to be exact – but I do have my reasons. There has been a lot going on and I may reveal some details in due course. But then again I may not.

Anyway, enough about that.

How have you been?

By the way, when I say “it’s been a while” I really mean that it has been a while since I have bored you with drivel from my ample yet flawed imagination.

Of course I have been lurking, reading about how Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un are trying to start World War 3; reading about yet another psychopath with a gun in America;  reading how Donald Trump is slowly bringing America to its knees while still pretending that he wants to make America great again; reading how the United Kingdom is heading towards oblivion with Brexit, like a ship heading towards a huge waterfall while pretending that the waterfall doesn’t exist, with politicians trying to convince the population that the ship will fly into cloud cuckoo land instead.

It’s all very depressing and doesn’t help my mood.

Yet, after all of this, I am trying to be positive again and despite fate, life and circumstance I think I am back on that road, looking forward to 2018.

Yes – that’s right. I have cast 2017 into the dumpster alongside 2016 – and you may note that it is only October.

Still – it is my birthday in just under a week so I’m looking forward to being at the age where I can get my hands on my pension, should I have the desire to jeopardize my retirement. Don’t worry, I’m not stupid enough to blow it all on a Ferrari or a round the world trip (as tempting as that is).

Normal blogging buffoonery will resume next week (I’m sure you can’t wait).

See you then.

P.S. I’ll leave you on a positive note with a nice little tune that I like from Steven Wilson’s new album.



See you soon.

We're All Going To Die

The end is nigh, dear reader.

If you believe the hype, then the world will end on December 21st, 2012. I will have just turned 50 so at least I will have made it to the half century.

Personally I think it is a load of old codswallop.

Nobody can predict the future, even when there is evidence that may support a claim that the world is about to end in a painfully horrible fashion.

Let’s take the millennium as an example. As we entered 1999, we were about to fall foul of two potential global catastrophes as well as many other miraculous occurrences.

One of the driving forces was the supposed second coming of Jesus, which would signal the end for all of us. Many thought that there would a war of Armageddon, started by the Antichrist, and we all suffer horrible and extremely painful deaths with born again Christians rising to heaven.

What was the evidence for this nonsense? There was none; none whatsoever. It was utter, utter bunkum. The only good thing that came from predictions of Satan rising to claim the Earth was the movie End of Days where Arnie took on the Devil himself and saved the world – a cracking but flawed movie.

Did the world end? Of course it didn’t. I wouldn’t be typing this if it had – and you wouldn’t be reading it.

And the other catastrophe predicted for the millennium was none other than The Millennium Bug.

I’ve worked in IT since 1984 and even then I, like a few other programmers, were aware that perhaps we ought to take account of the turn of the century and we started to do it. What’s more as the millennium approached this awareness spread and most if not all software producers modified their software, a few years in advance. To cap it all, almost everybody involved in IT performed stringent tests, probably from 1998 onwards to make sure that the Millennium Bug was not present.

Yet the media, doom mongers and large numbers of people who know little or nothing about computers, software and technology, decided that the Millennium Bug would wipe out civilisation.

We were warned of aircraft dropping out of the sky, people being eaten alive by their own toasters and washing machines rising up and murdering entire families.

Some idiots were so convinced that Hell would be unleashed on Earth that they actually packed up, left the cities and moved into the wilderness where they dug a big hole and buried themselves underground to avoid the nuclear war that would be unleashed when the Millennium Bug hit the world’s nuclear arsenal.

In their view, the war of Armageddon would be triggered by the Millennium bug and we would all be wiped out. What’s worse is that they were absolutely convinced that they were right.

The Millennium Bug was arguably the biggest anti-climax ever. I laughed so much because I knew it would be several years beforehand.

Now we are approaching another Armageddon moment, with the evidence coming from the fact that the Mayan calendar ends on 21st December 2012. What doom mongers fail to notice is that the Mayan calendar is cyclic – one ends and a new one begins.

The doomsday hoax is the result of pessimism from a bunch of idiots, just like the Millennium Bug and the predicted war of Armageddon in the year 2000. These people see things that just aren’t there. They interpret flimsy evidence as fact and end up in a flap about it, forcing their opinions on people. Even when proved wrong they refuse to accept how ridiculous their arguments were.

Before I stop, I would like to just mention Nostradamus. He apparently has predicted everything from the Great Fire of London to World War 2. And of course, he has predicted the end of the world.

Nonsense – of course he hasn’t.

Nostradamus wrote a bunch of cryptic quatrains, which could be interpreted as anything. Here’s one that is supposed to predict the attack on New York City on September 11th 2001:

Volcanic fire from the center of the earth

will cause trembling around the new city:

Two great rocks will make war for a long time.

Then Arethusa will redden a new river.

Those who chose to believe that Nostradamus had a gift have actually translated the original French line:

au tour de cité neufue

as “around New York” rather than “around the new city”.

All of this means, to me at least, that the quatrains of Nostradamus are open to interpretation by those who believe that he could actually see the future.

I suggest to you, dear reader, that he could not and that he either had a vivid imagination or sold himself as some kind of seer for personal reasons.

I mean I could write some utterly ridiculous cryptic crap and state that I can predict future events and I could state that I know for a fact that such events will occur within the next thousand years because I have seen them in my dreams or somehow interpreted current events and projected their meaning into the future using a combination of my prophetic gift, astrology, my horoscope and imaginative elucidation of the global trends.

In short – it would be a load of old codswallop written with one hundred per cent horseshit.

I could write something like this:

When the colon of Ura meets the turn of Sa

And the line of force penetrates the centre of Terra and Sol

Then the four horses of the Armageddon will rise

And bestow words of fire on the kingdom of unity.

What does that mean? Absolutely nothing!!!

I’ll tell you what Nostradamus means to me, dear reader - this

Enjoy and come to Manchester for a party on 22nd December, 2012.