The world is aflame.
It might sound like an exaggeration, but that is the most apt description of the current situation, unfortunately. I have laughed and cried from the ridiculousness of this situation, both as a believer and a man of science. I thought it wouldn’t get this bad, that as a species we wouldn’t… nay, we couldn’t push ourselves so hard towards absolute extinction.
Some might think that it was inevitable, that humankind is self-destructive and that sooner or later we would have faced demise by our own hands. Part of me believed that too, but I also chose to believe that there was good in us; that no matter how bad things got, a glimmer of hope would always remain… I’m not so sure anymore.
What sort of catastrophe could have pushed someone to utterly lose faith in their own? Could it have been climate change? It was the source of many disasters and an embodiment of the planet’s rejection to us. Perhaps complete socio-economical collapse? It has brought civilization to war and strife before, motivated by poverty and famine. As outlandish as it may sound, maybe the apocalypse has come and the planet has become “Hell on Earth”?
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The answer is… All of the above.
Denial is the first stage of grief, and I would understand if you didn’t believe what you just read. “That’s preposterous, it can’t be all of that! Can it?” would be a natural reaction and it would transition well into anger, the second stage. Now would be a good time to pray, to beg for this to not be true, for yourself to be saved, for terror to flood your every nook and cranny. Bargaining. Then would come the devastation, the realization of what this all means, the hopelessness of the situation… Depression settles in, the fourth stage.
Perhaps you know, or could even guess what stage comes next; Acceptance. But how could you accept that our world is ending? Would it even matter? For that you need a purpose; something to live for, even if the remaining time is short. What better motivator is there to fulfill your goal than a fate worse than death? Feel free to call me insane, for I suspect that my sanity ran out the moment I went through the five stages myself.
I, along with a group of like-minded individuals, have banded together to put the last nail in humanity’s coffin, to at least give our death a dignified departure. There is no hope left for us, of that we all agree in this place, but there is one thing we can do to redeem ourselves towards the future. We will not survive Armageddon… but our memory may live on. Our actions can serve those who follow in our steps, so that they don’t make the same mistakes we did.
We are here to fulfill yet another world-ending scenario… The creation of a true AI.