29 March - 4 April 2001
Issue No.527
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 29 March - 4 April 2001 Issue No.527 |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Choosing Armageddon
I paused recently at an item I read in the papers, and paused again when I realised I had been thinking about it almost every day. In fact, I still can't bring myself to forget it.
The news concerned perdition: the world, I realised, had already been demolished twice, completely eliminated. This was the strangest part: people assume that when the world is thus abolished, there will be nothing left. Yet, as I was finding out for the first time, the world had already disappeared not once but twice. And on each occasion every form of living being -- every sign of life on earth, in fact -- completely vanished.
If it has happened twice, it might happen a third time, any minute now: a stray asteroid or some other astral body could hit the earth, and that would be the end of everything. Perhaps modern science allows us to account for and predict phenomena to some degree, so we may have a general idea of when this will happen, but even then we still cannot prevent it.
Whereas before the danger came only from natural phenomena, moreover, now we have weapons of mass destruction and environmental hazards too. When it comes to perdition of the third degree -- and this is the most disturbing thought -- the end of the world will be the prerogative of humanity.
Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy.
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