Curiously timed to coincide with Worldcon, Slate magazine is running a week-long feature entitled “How Is America Going To End?” This exercise in futurology plans get all sorts of clever (and perhaps a few not-so-clever) people to predict the form that America’s demise will take.
In addition you can play along yourself, via the Choose Your Own Apocalypse game. This provides 144 imaginative sources of terminal decline, ranging from the mildly plausible to the downright whacko. Slate‘s writers have done a pretty good job. Here are some examples of the sorts of apocalyptic disasters they predict:
- The Rapture happens;
- The Mayans were right about 2012;
- Alien invasion;
- Asteroid strike;
- Gray goo;
- Robot overlords; and
- Invasion from Canada
But I am sure we can do better. There is, for example, no explicit mention of tentacled beings from beyond the stars; of the Humboldt Squid inventing machine guns; of re-animated dinosaurs; of sex change drugs in the water; or of Americans becoming addicted to yaoi. Besides, we all know that there cannot be only 144 causes of apocalypse. There have to be 666.
Your mission (Jim, should you choose to accept it), is to come up with lots of crazy new ideas. Let’s see how creative we can be.
(Hat tip to Kelley Eskridge who pointed me at the Slate article.)
How is it an apocalypse if America is all that’s going to end? A very omphaloskeptic header on that one.
Yes, it would be an enormous tragedy, except for non-USA film makers, of course who would then get access to a lot more markets. Again it shows that tendency for some Americans to assume that the whole world exists between the Atlantic, the Pacific, Canada and Mexico.
Is it wrong that I initially misread that as “gay goo.”
Rapture of the nerds
Would that make it a seminal apocalypse, Jay?
Finnish fans bid for a Worldcon, win, and then decide to open the event to the general public with free memberships.
Terry:
It may also be the case that America is the only place on the planet that you can find a high concentration of nutjobs who actually believe in all this stuff. But remember, we are not taking this seriously, except with regard to exercising our creativity.
Jay:
Slate did manage to list “gay marriage” as one of the potential “disasters that will destroy America”. I’m sure a lot of their readers will pick it. Probably along with general decadence, recreational drugs and belief that Obama is a god.
I didn’t notice reality television or remaking movies that don’t need remaking on the list, either, though both of them are a bigger threat that… I dunno, socialised medicine? 😉
The fact that two of the forms of apocalypse are gay marriage and multiculturalism suggests some Americans believe life in Canada and the End of Days are indistinguishable.
From up here in Canada, it really doesn’t look so bad.
Kate:
I’m sure if they knew that about Canada they’d be even more afraid of an imminent apocalypse. Fortunately most of the ones who worry about gay marriage and multiculturalism probably can’t find Canada on a map.