So That’s It, Then

According to my calculations and I am not, it is to be admitted, a great mathematician the world ends in a few hours. Four and a half, more or less, hours from now.

Unless the ‘End of the World’ is working on GMT, which means that it will be twelve and a half hours.

Or Eastern Seaboard Time in US. Hollywood tends to suggest that everything is based on US times so we could have another sixteen and a half hours.

Slightly less time now because it takes me time to type.

Some years ago Asimov was asked by a TV interviewer what he would do if he were told that he only had six months left to live.

He replied, “Type faster.”

In this situation, though, one wonders for whom one is typing since nobody will be around to read it.

Of course, it is the end of the World for some people.

Every day is the end of the World for some people. Thousands of people die every day.

For them the war is over.

Some people will die at midnight tonight; one wonders if their final thought will be, “So it is all true!”

On the other end of the scale we should consider those who are being born today.

What about a thought for all those women who are in labour right now.

When their babies grow up they are going to get a lot of grief from Mummy along the lines of, “Only a few hours left to live and I spent those last hours with my legs in the air giving birth to you!”

Not fair, is it.

Not only is life not fair but neither is death.

Mum escaped all of this clamour by slipping quietly and peacefully away in her sleep. We, if the predictions from all those ‘worst case scenario’ people are correct, stand to be looking at being gradually shredded, roasted and liquefied by some sort of cosmic interlude of which the cosmos, in its vastness, will be totally unaware.

We shall have been a blink.

Ah! Speaking of which - there’s the green blinking light in the sky that tells me my transport is here.

I wonder if they’ll let me view the end of the Earth from moon orbit?