There are times when “positive feedback” is a bad thing. This is one of them. The is the scariest freaking headline I’ve read in a long time:

When I’m contemplating the many ways civilization, and even humanity, might collapose, it doesn’t help to be nudged along by NASA scientists telling me I’d better freak out about the likelihood that one of about 20,000 asteroids will fall to Earth and destroy a major city. (Is that all?) They spend more than $4 million a year at NASA already looking for asteroids, but they want at least a billion dollars to find them all by 2020.

Robert Reich’s article in The American Prospect on NASA’s asteroid report is very well timed, since I also happened to have just finished reading the latest in my series of apocalyptic novels this week — a newish young adult novel by Susan Beth Pfeffer called Life As We Knew It.

See that looming moon on the cover? In the fictional world of the book, scientists told the people of Earth that an asteroid would hit the moon, but they made a little miscalculation.

Last Fall I read another novel of teen post-apocalyptic survival, Into the Forest by Jean Hegland. Life As We Know It is nowhere near as bleak, if that can really be said of such a desperate situation. Through the main character Miranda’s diary, we see her make the gradual switch from superficial teen focused on boards on a fan site to becoming an essential member of her own family as they work to survive a nearly impossible situation.

A lot of reviews of Life As We Know It mention that the readers want to run out right then to buy canned soup and collect firewood. The focus on remaining resources definitely makes it clear that planning helped some survive. Whatever it takes to get people to prepare themselves for catastrophic disaster or more common emergency.

I am keeping my library account on notice to find the companion novel recently finished but yet to be published.

As expected, members of the Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday clock forward. The clock now stands at five minutes to midnight. Their justifications include nuclear threats, environmental degradation, and the troubling possibilities of emerging technologies. The Board issued this statement:

This deteriorating state of global affairs leads the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists–in consultation with a Board of Sponsors that includes 18 Nobel laureates–to move the minute hand of the “Doomsday Clock” from seven to five minutes to midnight.

They also outline steps that would constitute “major progress toward a safer world.” All of the steps concern reduction of numbers and testing of nuclear weapons, greater authority to the IAEA, and “serious and candid discussion.” Imagine that.

The Doomsday Clock, maintained for 60 years by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, is a symbol of the danger they want us to understand from nuclear weapons.  Currently, the clock stands at 7 minutes to midnight.  Next Wednesday the hands will move forward.

In order for you to prepare for potential futures you might face, you need to be able to imagine yourself in that future. I am not sure most of us could let our imaginations go quite that far.

Fiction might push you a lot further down that road of imagination than you intended. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road took my breath away. The stark dialogue between father and son and the stark choices they made to survive their reality make so much of what we do seem irrelevant. Yet, the love and devotion shines even in this context as the child learns to be “one of the good guys,” the ones “carrying the fire.”

Reviews

• “Apocalypse Now,” Washington Post, October 1, 2006.
• “The Road through Hell, Paved with Desperation,” New York Times, September 25, 2006.
• “This is the End,” Pop Matters, September 18, 2006.
• “End of the Line,” Village Voice, August 31, 2006.

I always sang along on the “live by the river” part, but I never actually knew what the rest said until I saw it written out.

The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
Engines stop running, but I have no fear
‘Cause London is drowning and I live by the river

Joe Strummer & Mick Jones
The Clash, “London Calling,” London Calling, (1979)