It is November 1, 2024, four days before the world-wide American presidential election and 90 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday Clock.

It is also almost 100 years since the pragmatic concept of "splitting the atom" emerged with its unimaginable release of nuclear energy that portended the ending of all things.

The ending of any thing is always "just around the corner." Which corner and when you make the turn are the bearings, the defining moments... a product of Polygenic Intelligence.That's all we have. Artificial Intelligence is not Polygenic.

What is not astonishing is that in these past three decades the worlwide awareness of the in-your-face threat of nuclear annihilation has faded away in the minds of average people and willfully ignored by those who know... as they ride the horse of profit. Unimaginable profit versus unimaginable destruction.

No one likes to be called 'dumb'... uneducated, okay, because it's a fact. 'Ignorant', maybe, because it has the feel of being temporary. But 'dumb'... is like truth serum, it settles deeply in the conscious and stirs the sub-conscious with a big paddle. Even the truly dumb, who truly can't acknowledge that they are 'dumb', react with anger and menace when labelled with the term.

Of the few television shows that I can bring myself to watch, I'm attracted to "Real Time with Bill Maher". It's not the usual blah-blah talk show. What attracts me is 1. Maher's unrelenting disgust for the dumbness of religiosity, and 2. his oft-repeated pronouncement that the American electorate.is dumb, a democracy of sorts that is propelled and perverted by 'dumb' voters.

Do the citizens who vote not see the shadow of nuclear disaster as it hovers over the planet? Is it so mind-boggling that it blanks their minds and rolls over into happy talk? It raises the question: is it dumb or ignorance? It's probably both.

And so, my amazement compels me to repeat once again a statement,
a film statement that stays in your face year after year.

On The Beach
There is still time brother!

Those stinging words are in the final chilling image of Stanley Kramer's On the Beach. Released in 1959 in the hot ice of the Cold War, if not the first, it is one of the first apocalyptic, dystopian films created for the Hollywood screen. Based on Nevil Shute's novel, it was made without the cooperation of the U.S. government and set in the future of 1964 (as were Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe). From the mind and the fingers of Kramer, a maverick, independent producer, the film is a powerful, disturbing entertainment that has remained so down through the years.

Amidst the fear and ignorance of the death-wished irreversible use of nuclear weapons, Kramer succinctly juxtaposed people trying to understand, grasping for hope, fading away from hope, not understanding.

Now, 65 years later, amidst the proliferation of the death-wish from the U.S. and Europe, to South Asia, China, North Korea, the Middle East and the spectre of miniature, portable devices in the fists of jihadist crazies and their home-grown copycats, understanding and hope are fading into a mirage. It is a dark dream that is permeating, occasionally leaking through into conscious reality.

How long will it take for you and me and our brothers and sisters to accept what is no longer a dream? And when we do, what will we do? Create a vaccine to deny the effects of all-consuming radiation. Not in this century! Call Pandora to pack it back into her box and shut the lid. She's no longer on the planet! Launch a traffic-stopping, all-world conference at the UN and demand that all things nuclear be forever destroyed. Dream on my sibling dreamers... dream on.

What was once a terrible possibility is now inevitable. As we foreplay with our smartphones, and make-believe that gathering more stuff and goods will insulate us, that the goodness of the heart is impervious to the badness of the gamma ray, the clock ticks, the stockpiles grow, the controls loosen, it's going to happen: life and all of its species are going to disappear from the planet Earth.

In what little time we have left, there are just three choices to get the monkey of hope off our backs:

Dig deep into the surface of the planet, hollow out an appropriate space, create a self-sustaining habitat, stock it with humans and other species, seal it off. A dull, depressing option but possibly a survivable one.

Or, in case there are no other humans in the extant universe (which I don't think is true), create a self-sustaining space vessel, stock it with life, and aim it to the nearest habitable earth-like planet.

Or, do nothing.

Which is what we do.

Standing on our evolutionary beach, we are a tender, primitive species that may be worth saving.

There is still time brothers... and sisters.