Survival

My brain is already "not all there." The last thing it needs is to be distracted. But...

I decided I would make an easy breakfast: a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit. I got the box of biscuits from the freezer, opened it, and extracted a biscuit. At the same time I was listening to the TV news about Ukraine. I removed the biscuit from the wrapper and placed it on a plate. I placed the plate in the microwave oven and then—something happened. The instructions on the biscuit box call for heating the biscuit for 90 seconds at 30% power, then turning the biscuit over and heating it for 55 seconds on HIGH. But I never go by the instructions. I found that heating the biscuit on HIGH for 42 seconds on each side was perfectly adequate, and that is what I intended to do.

But, as I said, I was distracted by the TV and my mind was off in another world. I don't know what happened, but I punched in some time on the oven and went to my computer desk and sat down and watched the TV news. At some point, I became aware that I had been sitting at my desk for a few minutes and the microwave oven was still running.

Uh-oh.

I jumped up and went to the microwave and turned it off. I removed the biscuit from the oven. It was extremely hot. I tapped the biscuit and it felt extremely hard. After it cooled a bit, I tried to bite it. It had the density of vulcanized rubber. In other words, what I now had was not a small brown biscuit, but a small brown hockey puck.

I went to the freezer and pulled the remaining biscuit from the box and heated it properly. It was tasty. 

I shouldn't watch the news. There's so much video from Ukraine, and it is upsetting, and it makes me think that the human race will not inhabit this planet for much longer, because we are barbarians with nuclear weapons. It is amazing that we've refrained from using nuclear weapons for almost 80 years. But the day will come. Eighty years is nothing. A hundred years is nothing. We have enough weapons to destroy most life on earth. Let's see what happens in the next 500 years, the next thousand years. Do you really think we'll last that long without annihilating ourselves? If you do, then I would call you an optimist, a dreamer.

There was a 1967 book titled The Naked Ape. That's us. We are very clever apes who have developed the power to destroy our planet. We're new at this game. Homo Sapiens has been on Earth now for 200,000 years. We've had nukes for 80 years and have already come close to nuclear war. How much longer can we depend on luck and the self-preservative instincts of dictators and madmen?

The only way to secure our survival is to have a world government. That is unlikely to happen, because no one (today) would support having such a thing. But the only way I can see for us to avoid one government attacking another government with nuclear weapons is to have only one government on Earth. The day is coming. It's our choice. The coin is in the air and it is tumbling. Heads, we all live in peace under one government; tails, we all die. Heads...tails...heads...tails...the coin spins and tumbles while we watch and wait.