Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Remember When We were Doomed by the Coming Ice Age?

"Ice Age"
Tales of Future Past

"By dint of laborious calculation it has been shown that the sun's heat is by slow degrees becoming less and less, and that some day, long years hence, the sun will no longer give out the warmth necessary for human existence. Mounting his "time machine," Mr. (H. G.) Wells plunges off into the future...."

After that quote from Pearson's Magazine (1900), The "Ice Age" entry ends with:

"...If you live in most parts of the world, the words 'ice age' are the haunting promise of a planet shrouded in a funeral pall of ice, cities crushed by relentlessly grinding mountains of ice, and all of human achievement smothered under a blanket of never ending snow as the populace stare out in numbed horror from their tiny hovels, like pin-point oases of warmth, at a world in the hand of icy death.

"If you live in the American Midwest, it means it's September."

I live in central Minnesota, a couple hundred miles short of where the upper Midwest ends and Canada begins.

It's not all that bad, really, as long as you don't mind living in a place where water is a mineral for a fair portion of the year. On the up side, the wide selection of invertebrate blood suckers we share the state with are dormant then.

Tales of Future Past is part of a large, complex website, so I prepared this 'bread crumb' trail, to help you find this and related pages: Tales of Future Past > "Dystopias" > "End of the World" > "Ice Age."

Good luck, and don't let the Martians get you.

If you're particularly earnest about the more recent crises du jour, don't worry: the Dystopias section on how the world will end also has pages for "Overpopulation," "Pollution," and "Vogons."

If this isn't relevant enough, come back in about 22 hours: The Lemming has something on Solar energy lined up for tomorrow morning.

3 comments:

mutuelle santé said...

thanks for this reflexion

Mutuelle said...

Nice view

Brian H. Gill said...

Mutelle,

Thanks.

Everybody else,

The "Mutelle" name links back to what appears to be an insurance service's website. So does the "mutelle santé" name.

The company's name translates as something like "Compare Mutual Health and Complementary Health Mutel." But my French is shaky, at best.

Despite my spam policy, I'm leaving these comments in place, since it's possible that an interested person is using Mutelle accounts to visit this blog.

Which may be within company policy: quite a number of employers have discovered that it's beneficial, in the long run, to let their employees stay in touch with the world and learn.

Which is another topic.

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