If not the end of the world, then what?

Last week, Leanne wrote an excellent post about dystopian literature (and you should all go read it, if you haven’t already). This week, however, I take advantage of the combination of our regular “Topical Tuesday” and the start of a brand new year. And not just any year. 2012. The year the Mayans either did or didn’t predict would be the end of the world.

("Did or didn’t", I suppose, is a rather vague description. Of course the Mayans either did or didn’t predict the end of the world. We all either do or don’t predict that on a daily basis. Just as you either did or didn’t get up from your bed this morning, you did or didn’t eat breakfast, and then you did or didn’t get abducted by aliens.

I’d wager, though, that there is a larger following of the theory that the Mayans did predict the end of the world, than it is one believing you got abducted by aliens after having swallowed your morning coffee.)

Now. Despite what the Mayans did or didn’t predict, and despite what we do or don’t interpret is as, I don’t much believe in the end of the world. I hope that 2012 will make a better year than movie. I’m not entirely sure how. But all the same, it is very unlikely it will end the world. 2012 – the movie didn’t end Hollywood, after all. There is still hope.

Hope, yes. But for what? “The world not coming to an end” is a pretty low standard for what we need to have as a minimum demand to make this a successful year. Let me show you an illustrative figure:

Assuming the modern interpretation of the Mayan prediction is correct, this figure shows that "Not the end of the world" is pretty far down on the scale where "utopia" serves as the other extreme from "the end of the world". 

Then we are free to fill in several other possible occurrences or events according to their degree of terribleness relative to the end of the world/utopia:

Yes. I'm aware that "Vesuv" is the Norwegian spelling of the volcano called Mount Vesuvius in English, and Monte Vesuvio in Italian. Blame my "End-of-the-world-terribleness-indicator"-maker. She appears to be Norwegian (and quite fond of chocolate). 

As you can see, there is quite a lot of bleakness that is considered less terrible than "not the end of the world". It is my claim that this is the state we all know and love as "dystopia":

The red circle should, clearly, extend all the way to "Not the end of the world", and perhaps close in a little tighter to "out of chocolate". Again, my  "End-of-the-world-terribleness-indicator"-maker  is Norwegian. Also, I hear, she's not a proper scientist.  

This state of red circle is what we all should fear, more so than our fear for the end of the world. If it ends, it ends. We're out. It is much more scary, in reality, to think of everything that is slightly less terrible than the end of the world. It's not just about chocolate or terrible movies, but also death, war, destruction. Awful things, that - all joking aside - actually will and can happen. Yes, there will be more wars, natural disasters and pointless human suffering. Yes, we might tumble into new financial crises. The Euro might fall. Wall Street might win. Or lose. The Middle East might show us further upheavals still. North Korea might explode, or implode, or plode in other frightful manners. We might actually run out of chocolate.  

All in all, though, these are worst-case scenarios. They might not happen at all. And if they do, they probably won't all happen at once. Thus, the chances are we'll still be stuck in the fuzzy area between dystopia and utopia. Everything isn't great, but it's not all bad either. The world hasn't ended. Hitler isn't back. There will be chocolate. 

If you're still not convinced, and you still believe the Mayans were right - ponder this: 

This weekend I had the dubious honour of baby sitting a room.

Actually, it wasn't so much the room, as all the stuff inside the room. You see, we had an event at the embassy, with lots of kids and adults who weren't always entirely sober. Now, the main part of the event took place outside, since the weather was gorgeous, but since we couldn't be sure of that in advance, we had also prepared some indoors activities, in our lovely multipurpose hall.

The problem with this hall is the multipurpose part. There is a rather expensive AV-system there, and the walls are peppered with buttons and touch pads that control the AV-system, the air-conditioner, the lightning, the blinds, and so on. There is even a red button with a sign above it reading it capital letters - DO NOT TOUCH!!!  Obviously, this would be terribly tempting to touch...

Thus the baby sitting.

During my guard duty, two girls of about ten were playing in the hall. They were just that age. A little too young to realize the full consequence of their every action, but definitely old enough to know when they were doing something they were not supposed to. It goes without saying that they pushed the button.

Now, as far as DO NOT TOUCH!!!-buttons go, ours is relatively innocent. The only thing that happens is that it messes with the settings for the system, so it creates extra work for the next person using it. Hardly comparable to what I'm about to compare it with, but bear with me...

You see, these girls, knowing that they shouldn't be doing something, but not being able to resist it anyway, made me think of something else that is never far away from my thoughts these days. All things nuclear.

Mother nature produced radiation. But for the most part, she kept it neatly tucked away, out of our reach. As man grew old enough to realize there was something his mother was holding back, he decided to ignore that he didn't know exactly what consequences pushing the button would have, and just do it, even if he knew he probably shouldn't.

Humans wanted so bad to use these resources hidden from us. We put our best scientists to the task. They got some great results. Marie Curie's discoveries led to great achievements in medicine, but she eventually gave her life to her research. Like a Mummy's Curse, injuries from long-term radiation came sneaking in on the eminent scientist unexpectedly. Perhaps we should have taken this as a warning, and been content? Use x-rays and avoid developing these substances we did not know how to control further?

But there were more buttons to push. The power contained in the tiniest piece of all - the atom - was too tempting not to explore further. Like the explorers desperate to win the race to the South Pole in 1911, the curiosity - and perhaps the glory? - was too much to resist. In 1911 Robert Scott died in attempt to get back from the pole, after having discovered that he had been beaten by a countryman of mine, Roald Amundsen. Scott took four expedition members with him in death, people who willingly (I presume) had gone with him to try to be the first to go where no man had gone. The nuclear scientists who tried to do what no man had done,  also took others with them in death. Only the numbers are infinitely larger, and the willingness is more than questionable.

Japan knows the effect the enormous powers contained within a minuscule fraction can have. This nation has felt it up close, even if it is a long time ago. Stories of the horrors experienced in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 66 years ago have been a part of what every Japanese child has been taught about their own country ever since. And yet. Japan too had to go nuclear when it came to energy.

I get it, in a way. With the bombs ending World War Two, then the subsequent 45 year standoff between the US and the USSR where both parties held enough nukes to destroy the planet multiple times. It must have felt good to finally be able to put the atomic power to positive use again. Nuclear didn't have to be a synonym to weapons. Power plants! Peaceful use of this wonderful energy!

How clever they must have felt, when the first nuclear power plant opened. It worked! It really did! It generated electricity, it was (relatively) cheap, it was - marvelously so - CLEAN! The nuclear age was upon us, and it was every bit as wonderful as imagined. People didn't even turn into spider-superheroes or other cartoony predictions. We touched the button, and the button had delivered.

Of course there was Chernobyl. Three Mile Island. Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas warned us in The China Syndrome. Hippies sold anti-nuclear stickers. But the hippies also sold "save the planet"-stickers, and nuclear power plants was the only way to ensure stable, large-quantity, energy supplies that were also environmentally friendly. You can't have both, hippies.

I must admit I haven't been particularly nuclearly aware in my life. Norway doesn't have nuclear power plants - we don't really need them, due to an abundance of hydropower and then the oil and gas, of course. We have neighbours whose plants we aren't too fond of - an accident at the Russian plants in Murmansk, the British ones in Sellafield, or even the Swedish ones, might prove disastrous to Norway. We actually still have problems after Chernobyl, which due to the direction of the wind those fateful weeks in 1986 ensured that a significant amount of radioactive material ended up in the Norwegian mountains. But it never felt very close.

Here, in Japan, it definitely does. I've stood with you, Japan, through the crisis. I admired your high-held heads, your dignified grief, your determined reconstruction starting from day one. But if there is one thing I find hard to forgive in the midst of this, it is the nukes. Whose delusional idea was it to build a massive amount of nuclear power plants on a seismic fault line? Didn't it occur to you that even your superior technology might not be able to harness the wrath of Mother Earth once she decided that we had gone too far in pushing the buttons she deliberately asked us not to touch?

Those two girls discovered that pushing that particular button had limited effect. I asked them - a little sternly - not to touch anything, and explained why. They agreed not to do it again, and to my knowledge, they kept their promise. The system had to be reset, but nothing was broken.

The same cannot be said for the nuclear button. We pushed too hard, this time. It's time to find something else to play with.