Times Two

Early in the twenty-first century...

...it happened.  It was a holocaust beyond the collective memory and consciousness of the human species.  There was little warning of the impending disaster.  It came suddenly.  It was devastating. The only good news was that it happened in early winter.  If it had been spring, the chances of mankind’s survival would have been much slimmer.  There was of course no way of knowing whether humanity would ever regain the heights, or slowly wither on the cold slopes of a hostile world.  Prior to the disaster they stood precariously on the peaks, giddy with enterprise, drunken with the desire to consume the visible universe in their gradual metamorphosis into the gods they historically worshipped.  In the mid-twentieth century they went to the moon.  They landed machines on Mars.  In another hundred years or so technology may have even allowed them to visit a solar system of a nearby star, at least via robot.  Who knows?  In a thousand years they could have edged very close to the core secrets of the universe and existence itself.  After all, at the beginning of the twentieth century powered flight was impossible.  By the end space travel within the solar system was realised.  One hundred years.  Less than an instant in geological time.  Little more than an extended lifetime of one human being who could easily have witnessed the Wright Brothers’ success at Kitty Hawk as a small child and lived to see men on the moon. It was capitalism which initially released all this potential power within the human species.  Capitalism was a method of creatively inventing wealth in such a way that it could be accumulated and stored.  Like an enormous battery.  When it was released it gave birth to the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Technology which followed it.  Much has been said of capitalism since its conception.  It has been called an economic system, but that belies its power.  The real beauty of capitalism is that it is an idea.  Nothing more.  That is, it was a unique combination of reason-directed emotion, crafted over a relatively short time to become the most powerful economic engine the world has ever known.  And, like the combustion engines it spawned later, its exhaust gases proved to be noxious.  But many forget that without capitalism, humans would not have flown or reached for the stars.  Arguably, there would have been no Mozart or Darwin, either - or Marx.  There would perhaps have been other artists and scientists and thinkers more thinly spread, but capitalism also gave people more leisure to invent.  Wealth spread from the very, very few in the Middle Ages to a whole class of people instead of being held in a scattering of hereditary hands.  It was a way of widening the gene pool of those with the time for ingenuity, along with the wealth to explore and experiment.  Sharing of information around the world increased the pool to a lake.

Technology foreshortened everything.  After the seventeenth century, inventions came thick and fast.  With increasing technology, they came faster still.  In the end it almost took the breath away. The eruption of Vesuvius early in the twenty-first century was not quite the end, but it was far worse than the one in the year AD 79 when the cities of Herculaneum, Pompeii and Stabiae were overwhelmed by a rain of ashes and mud.  In that eruption over two thousand people died.  In 1631 five towns were destroyed in an explosion which killed three thousand.  There was another big one in 1906 with another big loss of life.  Since that time smaller eruptions have happened in 1913, 1926, 1929 and 1944. This eruption, though, blew a huge hole in the lower leg of Italy.  Generally, the longer a volcano is dormant, the bigger the bang - such as the explosion of Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 or Mount St Helens in 1980.  Vesuvius was never expected to be the first volcanic eruption in over seventy-three thousand years to be classified as a VEI 8 event.  It dwarfed the 1815 eruption of Tambora, Indonesia, itself ten times more violent than Pinatubo and a hundred times more powerful than Mount St Helens. In this one the indescribable forces underneath Vesuvius blew into the atmosphere more than 1,750 cubic miles of ash and sulphur aerosols, excav