The Bright Side of the Dark Side

I haven’t written in a really long time.

Occasionally I start thinking BIG thoughts. You know what I’m talking about. The looming existential questions the nag and nibble at our grey matter like the bugs in coffins. (Yeah, it’s that kind of a day.)

Screw you, Maggots. I'm getting cremated. No brains for you.

So recently I’ve been having a lot of apocalyptic thoughts. Not Biblical. Some scientists say that in 20 years, the global warming effects are going to be significant enough to cause huge damage to populations. Astrophysicists warn that one asteroid could kill us all. We know for a fact, one day, in four to five billion years, the sun will die out, as all stars do. And that’s it for all life in the galaxy. Even being on Mars won’t save us then.

Cheery, no?

I'm just a ray of sunshine. An eventually extinct, dying ray of sunshine.

I sit with these thoughts and think, for the most part, “Well, I don’t have to worry about most of those, I’ll be probably be dead.” Which is relieving. I get to put off thinking cataclysmic scenarios.

Except, you know, that an asteroid could really hit us. There’s plenty of asteroids out there on a course with Earth. The Chelyabinsk meteor that struck Russia last year taught us that. NASA knows about most planetary debris that’s out there, but that one was a complete surprise. And the US keeps pulling back on funding for NASA, so good luck getting a program into place to defend and warn people.

There’s the other side of that coin too. That fear about NOT being here that creeps up on anyone as they get older and mortality starts looming in the distance. That absence of being that’s so terrifying.

 

THE NOTHING. Which was a lot scarier before it was a wolf puppet.

Basically, what this boils down to, is that I'm neurotic and sometimes a pessimist. There seems to be no upside, except that... I fear this absence now, I fear Heaven and Hell now... but most likely it's like that social anxiety that you deal with before a party. Either you don't go, and you don't have to experience how bad it might be. Or you go and it isn't nearly as bad as you thought.

You died, but good news... there's cake! 

Or so I'm hoping...

At any rate, on a (somewhat) lighter topic, while I was looking for the maggot picture above I found an article on scientists developing robotic maggots designed to target tumors, while a patient is MRI, and the doctor can just run around remote control electrocuting the cancerous tissue and sucking it up. Like maggots do.

Yes, that sounds like a medical technology people will embrace. A robotic worm squirming around inside your head.

I hope they call it something else. Like Targeted Malignancy Removal Nanites or something, because Robo-Maggot...

On second thought, I sort of lose respect for the medical profession if they don't have the balls to call it the Robo-Maggot.