“KEVIN Costner should have stuck to making westerns,” sneered critics of Waterworld. Certainly, cinemagoers who paid to see the big budget flop would liked to have seen the auteur shot or hung at dawn. Yet, like so many Hollywood pariahs, the original and best Bodyguard was simply ahead of his time. It seems no other filmmaker has envisioned the future so accurately, except perhaps for the guy who did Bruce Almighty.
It’s no secret the planet’s sea waters are rising rapidly – with coastal cities such as Miami seeing levels accelerate more than a foot over the past decade. Despite bleak predictions that several American cities face complete submersion by 2080, see-no-evil politicians clearly feel no urgency in tackling such a cataclysmic and imminent threat. Likely due to the fact most of them own superyachts that will serve as their personal Noah’s Arks.
Perhaps, in 60 years time, the inevitable disappearance of America’s two liberal epicentres – the country’s East and West coastlines – will be dismissed as fake news by the downloaded conciousness of Emperor Trump. Now an omnipresent online entity following his biological death, Trump’s immortal electric brain will inform us through our neural implants there was no flooding – that it was simply bulging American wallets causing the ground to sink.
Yet, even the top floor of Trump Tower won’t be a high enough haven to protect the server hosting the President’s stable genius mind. When Antarctica and Greenland’s rapidly melting ice sheets eventually collapse, it’s been speculated that New York will be entirely submerged, with only Ross from Friends’ quiff left poking above the water. Don’t be too concerned about the fates of New York’s elite one-percenters such as Trump, Rudy Giuliani and Jay-Z however – they’ll be having a great time repopulating the Earth with other billionaire superyacht owners.
One does feel a degree of sympathy, however, that any luxurious pads they may have owned are all ultimately destined to become barnacle-encrusted squats, inhabited by the lucky Noo Yoikers who quickly evolved gills and webbed feet. Just like Costner did in Waterworld.A biologically impossible genetic mutation? Well, Kev was certainly right about global flooding. And we were all fish a few billion years ago.
Let’s build a big wall
IN the event you don’t evolve into a fishperson, be warned that sewing your toes together in advance of a real-life Waterworld scenario may be a wasted mutilation. Scientists are on the case to stop global flooding – but before you return to your beer, box sets and digital bubbles, note that the solution they propose would be the biggest civil engineering project in human history.
Our only option for survival, according to researchers in European geosciences journal The Cryosphere, is to build some unimaginably large walls to “cage” these colossal ice sheets and stop them from falling apart.
Even if this was somehow achievable – and without the help of advanced extraterrestrial technology, it isn’t – this is a solution focused on just one of the countless consequences of climate change.
What about famine, drought, disease, water acidification, seismic storms and freak heatwaves? These will clearly not be problems unique to Saltcoats in the future.
On the plus side, mass tsumamic catastrophe may actually be a gift to Scotland’s tourism industry. It appears our country’s somewhat elevated ground may initially keep us high and dry for a while – and survivors of the second great flood will clearly need somewhere to go on holiday to get over the trauma. With the planet’s most popular coastal resorts long gone, perhaps Ayrshire’s seaside towns will enjoy a resurgence in popularity, serving as desirable holiday destinations for the first time since the 18th century.
Ark of the Alien: Covenant
THOSE who view life through either a prison or prism of Judeo-Christian doctrine may cite the tale of Noah’s Ark as a historic precedent of global flooding.
And, for once, these true believers are actually on the same page as scientists – who are currently racing against time to create their own “Noah’s Ark”. And similar to the last time God lost his rag with humanity, the animals will again be saved two by two – only this time it will simply be matching pairs of DNA.
The £3.5 billion BioGenome Project – described as the most ambitious undertaking in the history of modern biology – has brought together 24 leading geneticists from around the globe to store the genetic codes of 1.5 million species of animals, plants and fungi in the event of global extinction. This scientific A-Team aims to revolutionise our understanding of DNA, unravel the secrets of evolution and – vitally – provide a blueprint for aliens who visit Earth post-apocalypse to repopulate the planet.
Of course, fearful of scaring the horses and losing their funding, they only admitted the true purpose of their work in code.
Read between the lines: “The project will inform a broad range of major issues facing humanity, such as the impact of climate change on biodiversity, the conservation of endangered species and ecosystems, and the preservation and enhancement of ecosystem services.” A clear plea to extraterrestrials with advanced terraforming technology.
Yet, with only 0.2 per cent of the project complete so far, its a daunting and ambitious scientific endeavour. But at least there’s 24 of them. Noah, had to collect a pair of every animal on Earth – then quickly hammer together a 450ft boat all by himself. And no wonder he didn’t have time for a shave – those would have been some colossal piles of s**t that he would have had to shovel overboard.
Everything gone to seed
The little-known Svalbard Global Seed Vault collects countless crops and plants from around the world in the event of global meltdown, keeping them preserved in sub-zero temperatures at a mysterious island near Norway. Their vault remained safely frozen until recently – when, rather ironically, climate change caused the permafrost to melt.
The vault was intended as a fail-safe backup in the event of the world’s crops being wiped out, but scientists behind the project now admit we’re already long past the point of no return. “I don’t like the ‘doomsday vault’ name,” says Marie Haga, executive director of the Crop Trust, which looks after the bank. “These doomsdays are actually happening all the time.”
When civil war broke out in Syria several years ago, farmers who feared the worst handed over thousands of seeds to the “doomsday vault” so the strains unique to Mesopotamiain soils were not lost forever.
The BioGenome Project works much in the same way in terms of preserving the genetic blueprints of endangered lifeforms. Even when our species inevitably goes to seed itself, it still might not all have been in vain – with the entire blueprint of all life of Earth blasted off into the stars to fertilise another Earthlike planet. Or, perhaps, that’s what originally happened with this wee glowing orb.
And finally...
KEEN on surviving the apocalypse to protect their grant funding, scientists have certainly proposed a number of diverse solutions to solve the global warming crisis.
Some suggest we block out part of the sun – just like Mr Burns in The Simpsons. Others favour seeding Antarctic clouds to create never-ending snow, similar to Freddie Mercury’s birthday parties.
Speaking of the late Queen frontman, perhaps his very existence proves there was never a need for scientific intervention in the first place. Mother Nature may have foreseen the necessity for a great protective wall in the future, evolving Freddie as a biological host for a couple of super-sized, indestructible enamel barricades to serve as fortification in the event of ice caps melting.
If Freddie’s front teeth were indeed our salvation, we “May” not yet have blown it by cremating him. Nature clearly had a back-up plan for soaking up any rogue floods – his bandmate Brian’s supernaturally buoyant barnet.
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