What a brilliant and beautiful essay, Umair. You carry off your porphyria with such style! (Can I just ask - can you take vitamin D or might it kill you?)
It makes such tragic ridiculously dramatic sense - that the person who is in the process of giving us the intellectual underpinning for a wholly new kind of society, is a vampire who has to live in the dark.
Wow!
If our civilisation falls to an EMP, 7 billion of us will be wiped out within a few years.
If our civilisation falls to war, disease and famine, the 7 billion will die a little slower and in more pain, but die they will.
If we stop burning fossil fuels THIS YEAR, start sequestering carbon THIS YEAR, turn our agriculture to regenerative THIS YEAR, possibly more of us will survive and possibly some fragments of our civilisation will battle through.
I think we're rapidly heading for a pivot point, a revolution, which will either kill us off or save us.
In the wise words of Terry Pratchett, "It's a million to one chance - so nearly a certainty."
But it's still possible.
In fact, if we do escape from our own stupidity, that will be proof positive that we're living in a simulation because it's so unlikely.
Sweetie, have you heard of a gas called carbon dioxide? Did you know that it stores energy in its molecular structure? So the more CO2 in the atmosphere the hotter it gets?
252 million years ago the Siberian flood basalt out gassed enough CO2 to take concentrations to 3000 ppm. A flood basalt produces a large amount of CO2. It's a different kind of volcano from the Hawaiian kind.
95% of all life, in the sea or on land, died.
It took 20 million years for the Earth to recover. For most of that time there were about 6 species around.
Let's not go back to that, eh?
I've been a published author since the age of 18, back when dinosaurs roamed. I have a newsletter too.
