Fortune-tellers, soothsayers, seers, prophets — do we believe in them? Do we dare not to believe in them? Ultimately, there’s a grain of belief in even the most skeptic of us. Black cat, knocking on wood, breaking mirror, etc., etc. — insert your own superstition here. This is not about the answer. This is about the question: What if they’re right?
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21 October 2007 at 7:54
I’m not a supersitious person, but I have wondered about strange things. Something like this huge meotorite that may hit earth someday. How would I act or react? There would be no need to gather wealth or food or try to find a safe place to hide, because the whole world, except the roaches and ants, will be destroyed. Would I even want to be part of any survivors? Life would be so changed and difficult afterwards that I think I would just as soon go out with a bang.
21 October 2007 at 11:45
You’re not superstitious? I can hardly believe it. Superstitions come in many flavors, many of which are almost imperceptible. Like, for example, imagine the way someone gets dressed in the morning. This someone has found out that when putting on first the pants and then the shirt, the remaining part of the day goes pretty smooth — no big mistakes, no downfalls, no nothing. So the someone tends to stick to this way of dressing up every morning, in order to ward off the bad things that might happen. Naturally, there are days when bad things happen to our someone. But those bad things get ascribed to something else that the someone had done differently, like putting on first the left shoe, instead of the right shoe. The belief in the way of dressing remains intact. That’s superstition, alright. If you think hard about yourself, you just might find something that you do this way, and not that way, for no apparent reason.
You’re talking about a major catastrophe that might happen. I feel the same way about the best way to go out, although I have to disagree on one point — I’m not sure that even the roaches and the ants could survive. I think it’s more likely for some deep-water species to live through this, which is good, because we’ll have to go through the whole evolution cycle again, but at least we’ll have a starting point that’ll be much further ahead of the onecelled organisms. Which, of course, does not do one bit of good to us, humans, at the time of such disaster.