WELCOME, readers old and new. At last count, the Herald sub-editor and my dear auld ma. For the uninitiated, Future Shock explores Scotland’s economic inequalities, political polarisation and the seismic long-term effects of social deprivation left in the wake of 2008’s financial crisis and subsequent austerity measures.

Only kidding – this is, of course, an establishment-funded, agenda-skewed, fake news MSM reality-distorting smokescreen of fluff designed to keep you hypnotised, hoodwinked and compliant as demons run amok and the world burns. There’s science and technology too.

------------------------------------------

Dying for a ciggie

DEFENSIVE podophiliacs will deny it, but each human’s carbon footprint emits five cubic tonnes of toxic gas annually. Behave – I said annually. This is The Herald, y’know. On a Sunday, no less. Sabbath day innuendo is reserved solely for the inevitable Carry On film on STV’s rainy afternoon schedules.

To fully acknowledge the extent of our species’ cancerous presence on Earth, here’s another fun fact that’ll assist a wee thought experiment we’ll embark upon – whale testicles each weigh a tonne.* So to visualise your own yearly contribution towards the planet’s demise, simply imagine 250 or so of these weighty orbs stacked up high. Like one of those rock towers happy couples make together on the beach.

You may now be wondering where David Bowie comes into all this. Well, picture one of these testicle towers being so tall that it stretches all the way out of Earth’s atmosphere into outer space. Perhaps fittingly, that is the epitaph to decadence left behind by the “starman” himself.

It turns out this 70-a-day human ch-ch-ch-chimney not only Swiss-cheesed the ozone layer with his jet-setting and hairspray, but also – according to a disturbing new academic report – contributed greatly to poisoning the planet’s oceans with the discarded butts of his beloved biftas. And  when you consider the amount of folk Bowie inspired to pick up their first ciggie, it becomes quite clear he was the fish Antichrist.

So forget plastic straws – it’s another Freud-validating manmade object that is now the most abundant oceanic pollutant – the humble ciggie. Apparently the billions of butts washed out to sea each year have proven deadly to marine life – releasing toxic chemicals as they languidly rot.

And this process can take a very long time indeed, with all filters made from a particularly nasty compound called cellulose acetate – a plastic which takes more years to decompose than Michael Jackson.

This newsflash came too late for Bowie, and it’s “doubt”ful any of his rock n’ roll peers like Keith Richards will give up the habit of a lifetime, no matter the environmental consequences. Keef needn’t feel too guilty, however. All his carbon-emitting sins were immediately balanced on the karmic wheel when he snorted his father’s ashes – a truly selfless, trailblazing example of biodegradable recycling which the green lobby have been too slow to applaud.

The future is rubbish

SO what to do when sparkle-lunged liberals unfamiliar with the joy of nicotine stop us turning our oceans into ashtrays? Simply blast them off into space, of course. No, not the self-righteous killjoys – our casually discarded ciggies. And perhaps our old fridges, and Hunterston’s radioactive waste.

Thanks to Scotland’s first commercial rocket launching successfully last month, it’s inevitable one of the country’s thriving environmental waste “recycling” companies will soon have a Eureka moment that will turn binmen into astronauts overnight.

Geographically, our wee corner of the planet has been described as the perfect terrain to launch rockets – a commercially fortuitous quirk of fate.

With each blimp-sized bag of pointless packaging blasted into infinity, our economy will increasingly align with Saudi Arabia’s. And with the human capacity for creating waste almost as infinite as the universe itself, this goldmine will stay open indefinitely – unlike the North Sea.

With a spaceport now being planned for the Highlands – a sentence that serves as conclusive proof we are now living in the future – Edinburgh-based rocket developer Skyrora may one day, like Tony Soprano, be heavily involved in waste management. Their projectile admirably reached an altitude of four miles and soon, thousands of micro-communication and observation satellites will be fired into the atmosphere from Scotland – closely followed by your gran’s old couch.

Spare a thought, however, for any spacefaring extraterrestrials for whom evolution may have failed to gift legs or buttocks. Understandably confused when a Harveys deal of the week spins past them, perhaps they’ll assume it’s a spaceship – and our loose change the inhabitants of another world.

Warped minds

IF we ever do blast our junk into deep space – and we will – waste disposal firms can’t just rely on bigger rockets. They’ll require an entirely a new type of propulsion system.

Right on cue, it appears Nasa is currently making progress on something pretty wondrous – a Star Trek-style “warp drive” which could potentially take mankind to the stars.

The “EMengine” works by bouncing microwaves around inside an enclosed container. It has no exhaust so requires no propulsion. Yet, it appears Nasa may have somehow missed the boat, sorry, spaceship, with such unfathomable futuristic tech – with the Chinese Academy of Space Technology recently claiming it had developed a similar system, which it now plans to test in zero-gravity conditions.

The question remains whether China is simply engaging in cheeky propaganda banter or has found a way to outsource iPhone production to aliens. Either way, no matter which country plants the first flag on another planet, it will still no doubt have been Made in China.

Bad head space

SO, with intergalactic space travel looking achievable within our lifetimes, perhaps we’ll all get a chance to experience the wonder of basking in infinity with reverential awe. Who wouldn’t be humbled by seeing Earth as a floating, glowing orb? The eternally unimpressed Frank Borman, that’s who.

Now 90, Frank was one of the three astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission in December 1968 – and one of the first humans ever to see the far side of the moon. “Boring”, said Frank in a new interview. “Devastation. Meteor craters. No color at all, just different shades of grey.”

Even the feeling of weightlessness failed to impress the Nasa veteran, dismissing it as “interesting for maybe the first 30 seconds”. With a limitless well of misanthropic cynicism like that, perhaps the HoS can let Frank cover for me when I’m on holiday.

And finally...

TALKING of mammoth-sized testicles earlier, it transpires a mysterious research facility based in darkest, coldest Siberia is actually aiming to recreate the real deal – along with the rest of the extinct beast’s body, of course.

Together with South Korean geneticists, Russian scientists are currently mapping the genome of a number of extinct species once native to the area such as woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceros and cave lions, with the ultimate aim of bringing these species out of extinction.

Millennia of sub-zero temperatures mean wonderfully-preserved soft tissue samples have been unearthed locally, but it leaves geneticists the still-monumental task of piecing together fragments of DNA by using living relatives to fill in the gaps.

Only one animal has ever been cloned after going extinct – the Pyrenean ibex – which first perished in 1997. This poor beast died just seven minutes after birth, however – bestowing it with the unenviable honour of being the first animal to go extinct twice.

* Yes, smartypants, I’m aware “cubic” tonnes indicate gas volume while “whale testicle” tonnes regard physical weight and are thus not directly comparable, but this thought experiment was provided for entertainment purposes only.