The Great Dying
A User’s Guide for the Herd or Tribe or Society or Whatever
Congratulations, fellow meat-bags. We’ve finally done it. After centuries of intense research, global conferences, and enough white papers to insulate the entire planet, scientists have finally pinpointed why, exactly, the Permian-Triassic extinction—the “Great Dying”—was so spectacularly effective at clearing the dance floor 252 million years ago.
Turns out it was a simple matter of metabolic intolerance to warming, oxygen-starved waters. Essentially, the ocean became a hot tub with the filter turned off.
The best part? We’re currently replicating the recipe with the frantic, unearned confidence of a toddler baking a “cake” made of dirt and household chemicals. We’ve successfully engineered the exact same atmospheric conditions, and we’re doing it at a velocity that would make a massive outbreak of volcanos blush with professional envy.
There’s a peculiar, morbid humor in being the first species capable of documenting our own extinction in high definition. We have the data and the models. We even have the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences telling us exactly how we’ll suffocate, yet we treat the prospect of global collapse with the same urgency as a minor update to a phone operating system. We are, as a collective, a herd of highly evolved primates that has mistaken the ability to calculate our own demise for the ability to actually, you know, stop it.
In fact, we should stop calling a group of humans a “herd” or a “tribe” or a “society” or whatever, and call people in large groups what they are—a suicide waiting to happen. We’re a suicide of humans—you know, like a murder of crows.
We like to blame our leaders, as if replacing one set of expensive suits with another would fundamentally alter the human appetite for short-term comfort. But the fault isn’t in our policy; it’s in our hardware. We’re built to dodge a sabertooth, not to contemplate the alarming thermodynamic collapse of the biosphere over several centuries.
History is littered with the corpses of our “low and slow” decision-making:
We spent more than two and a half centuries obsessed with the mystery of how the Rapa Nui of Easter Island moved those big, stupid stone faces across their island, only to eventually realize the very forests they used as rollers to drag them into place were the literal life-support systems they sacrificed for the sake of social vanity.
We saw the Great Famine of 1315, where ruling classes ignored the obvious climate shift and agricultural limits until cannibalism became the local economy.
We let the Atlantic cod fishery collapse in the 1990s, choosing immediate profit over the existence of the resource itself, despite the science being crystal clear.
We spent decades poisoning our own children with leaded gasoline, knowing it was a neurotoxin, simply because the cost of doing the right thing was structurally inconvenient.
Hell, Donald Fucking Trump is still our fucking president, for fuck’s sake.
So we see the iceberg, we recognize the iceberg, and then we argue about whether the iceberg is actually just a very large, inconvenient cloud while the ship’s engines scream for more coal.
And here we are. We’re not going to “come together.” We aren’t going to magically pivot to a sustainable planetary utopia because some egghead wrote a really compelling newsletter about oxygen-starved marine life. That’s not how the suicide moves. We’ll continue to graze, piss and shit on things, complain about the weather, and act surprised when the temperature hits the threshold where our own internal machinery shuts down.
Enjoy the show, everyone. At the very least, when the lights finally go out, we can take solace in the fact that we were smart enough to watch it happen in real-time.
Wheeee!
