Waking up

I was waking up from just a dream I thought. But then the coughing started.

The oxygen depleted atmosphere is now filled with other gases that our lungs are not designed to inhale, or exhale. Gases like carbon monoxide and methane are now competing to dominate and upset the delicately balanced miasma that has supported oxygen-dependent life for millennia. I’m not dead yet, but I am dying. But I guess I was always dying. I struggle to get up, and shuffle over to my HAM radio, hacking through the thick, smoke-like air.

As I tap out my message to Helen on the brass telegraph machine, I wonder if I will get an answer today. I look at the plants, dead on the window sill, symbols of hope that died many months ago, and I think about how even carbon dioxide, so vilified at the beginning, is now in too short supply to keep even these small houseplants breathing. Then I hear the familiar code coming through.

“Still alive. No news from Gilles and his team for more than ten days. Presumed dead.”

The relief that floods my body knowing that I won’t have to face another day wondering if Helen is alive feels like the deep breath that I long for so desperately.

But reality hits soon after, as I stumble, gasping, to the pantry to see if there is anything I can choke down between increasingly rapid breaths. I didn’t think the end would feel quite so much like resignation. I always imagined myself, and Helen, and the rest of humanity, when you get right down to it, fighting back. Railing against the threat to our lives with all the grit and determination of a stubborn cowboy pitted against the odds. I imagined us emerging, maybe even just Helen and I, after waging our final war against runaway climate change that had upended our atmosphere using some new technology that could put oxygen and carbon dioxide back into the mix in the correct proportions, and we could watch everything return to a beautiful life-sustaining balance. I still imagine those things while I struggle to fall asleep in a tin can, under a hazy sky, dank sky.

But that’s not how it has unfolded. After the biggest climate upheavals, the endless floods, fires, hurricanes, and cyclones. Even other scourges resulting from our changing world, like the locusts that took the fields, the poisonous jellyfish and toxic algae that took the oceans and robbed them of life.

After all of that had settled, and we began to die in larger numbers. Dying of starvation, heat exhaustion and exposure mostly. But then reports of pockets of the atmosphere that had become toxic. People dying of asphyxiation. When that started, I began to understand what was really happening. I began to see the pattern, patterns that exist everywhere around us. Nature doesn’t afford eternal life to anything. Not even a planet.

The humans that remain are too tired and weak to fight now. We must resign ourselves to what we are. Our place in the Universe now. We are the unlucky biological creatures born to a time that will witness the death of our Earth. We are certainly complicit in that death, I understand that as well. Akin to a decades long murder-suicide drama.

But humans are borne of Nature, programmed by her. In the same way that bacterial colonies, in a closed system, will over-consume food resources and apex predators, without a check on their numbers, will suffer population crashes, we are just an expression of a cycle that exists all around us.

Astronomers have seen this in the wider universe too, it is not a rule unique to Earth. Stars that die all around us, taking their satellite worlds with them. Even galaxies go through thousands of years of death throes before all of their gases have been used up and turned into strange, dark places – neutron stars or black holes. But these deaths spur new life. Massive black holes spew gases from their galaxies, feeding other nearby galaxies and creating starbursts that bring about thousands of new worlds.

And I wonder to myself, through wheezes and broken sleep, how many times have we died like this, and on how many other worlds? What form of life will our death help create? Only Nature knows this. Only Nature can decide.