#extinctioncore

nucleomituphobia is so fun because one thing is if someone’s afraid of spiders you can rationalise them into moderate tolerance by explaining how they save us from flies and if someone’s afraid of heights they can avoid air travel and climbing and mountains and if someone’s afraid of ghosts they can be convinced that ghosts don’t exist or that if they did they wouldn’t be malicious but when global tensions are actively rising and the red button is real and shiny to the eye of domineering dictators who would and could sacrifice their own country to prove themselves true to some mythical ideology and mutually assured destruction is only a deterrent if the conflicting parties care about anyone other than themselves and the air conditioned bunker they could hide their families in and there’s no way to provide any semblance of control for the average layperson or to be consoled without half-truths that hide the fact that, essentially, if a missile was coming we wouldn’t know, and then we’d find out, and we would have three minutes, and pray to whatever gods haven’t fucked off yet that those three minutes will be the end of it for you. because i’ve seen threads 1984 and it’s scarier than any zombie flick. zombies aren’t an active threat; what we see on screen in threads could be all of our reality the very next day and there’s no science fiction to it, no element of fantasy or exaggeration to numb the stench of singed flesh. i don’t fear death, i don’t fear it for me at all. but mass death - the extinguishing of countless lives, countless histories, countless minds, countless machines - a thousand libraries of alexandria - the great filter - is what terrifies me beyond belief. an existential threat of our own making. a damocles’ sword none of us are able to avert. are we just prolonging this eventual inevitability? it terrifies me even beyond my own lifetime. that we may be the engineers of our own destruction. what will be left on this husk of a planet?