"What does it mean? I'm not overly religious but things are looking very ominous."
"Yeah, I hear yahh. I don't see omens or Jesus Christ in a fluffy cloud or on a piece of buttered toast."
"But?"
"It means," I said, "if you look at the basic mathematics of things that we should be thinking about World War III, and that the human race might not make it, babes."
"What do you mean?"
"Hey, I'm not trying to be some wily prophet or Mr. Swami Happy, or an enigmatic Nostradamus-type looking into a crystal ball, here. But just look at the facts: We've got close to nine to ten billion living on the planet soon enough. A lack of oil. A lack of alternative fuel supplies. The Greenhouse Effect along with rising temperatures. Industrial Wars. Trade Wars. Drug-resistant diseases. Pandemics now. About 4 billion people living on $1 or $2 a day. The destruction of all the ecosystems on the planet. Tens of millions who will need to migrate. The endangerment of the food chain due to many species being destroyed. Non-arable soil, too. Political and economic systems that are on the verge of collapsing, and a bunch of right-wing ideologues and nationalism to top it all off... The world may not have much more time. I mean, it's great that we are having this baby, but the human race has been a bunch of ostriches sticking their heads in the sand."
"So, what are we going to do?"
"Go to Pluto - and raise our child?"
"Sounds good. Should be far away enough from the murder and the mayhem."
"Charles!"
"The Sixth Extinction's here, like I've been talking about, for quite some time, and it's coming for us."
"Great. F*&*^n' great! Now, I feel I'm being hunted by some unseen malevolent force that comes once every fifty million years, and we're about to run around like hapless victims in some Stephen King-like novel."
"Things will work out," I said as I patently lied. "If worse comes to worst, and World War III breaks out, we can go to the Tongan Islands, and just eat coconuts, mangoes, and fish for the rest of our lives. And I can become a painter, like that guy. Who was he?"
"Like Gauguin."
"Yeah, Paul Gauguin. I could become an Impressionist painter, and you could do something radically new. You see, every catastrophe brings opportunity."
"Actually, he was post-Impressionist, Charles. But who cares."
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