This was the plot of Timescape by Gregory Benford, a book I liked except for the rotten ending.
ETA: I like it better as FICTION.
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Obligatory:
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Probably a more realistic obligatory:
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Well if you’re going to go there, obligatory dance remix(es):
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I don’t get how nuclear conflict counts as any sort of apocalypse. An apocalypse is supposed to be a significant shift in perception that yields astounding new insights into existence. Knowing that “some people are violent assholes who sometimes annihilate each other” sounds like the status quo, an insight as old as time itself. Y’all are giving war far too much credit, here.
It reminds me of the episode of Monkey Dust where marketers re-brand cancer with some hip new name to increase its appeal. Instead it’s re-branding war as “breakthrough” to make it sound palatable.
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Oh, you do so get it. It refers to Revelation (from Greek apokalypsis uncover) and that’s how English speakers have used it for centuries: to refer to the catastrophic end of the world. One might as well complain that one cannot have a cataclysm without a sufficient supply of water, or indeed a catastrophe outside of the end of a theatrical tragedy.
“War never changes,” sez Ron Perlman, and it sounds as if you’d agree, except for the context in which he said it (the Fallout series of videogames) concerns the aftermath of a nuclear exchange lasting a little under two hours that kills off most of humanity as well as killing, maiming, or altering many other species of life as well. Death and destruction of a scale undreamed by the bloodthirstiest warlords of history. Yeah, just a dumb video game, sure, but “giving war far too much credit” for upending the status quo? Please. The very scale of destruction wrought by even a single primitive nuclear weapon is the reason why no president or potentate in possession of such an arsenal, however unhinged, has dared use one since Nagasaki. How many other armies throughout history have bankrupted themselves developing weapons they never intend to use?
You don’t have to use the language the same way the multitudes do, but “disingenuous” doesn’t mean you’re a slave in ancient Rome, either.
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Or that the movie Armageddon happened nowhere near the place in Israel.
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Not really, that would be conflating any and all revelations with one specific one from the Christian bible. But I am not Christian, and think it would be ill-advised for those who understand neither the mythos nor the lexikos to coopt its general use. Just like I have no incentive to force “vision” to refer only to “the vision of Saint Jerome” - because that would make normal daily communication stilted and awkward. YMMV
And besides being IMO lexically dubious usage, I still assert that its use here lends dignity and grandeur to genocide, if perhaps inadvertently.
Hmm, what is language but a means to express emotional response to stimuli? The ship has sailed; common usage of the word Apocalypse is understood to mean a calamity - human-caused or otherwise - that would devastate the population and leave ruins across the globe.
Not unlike what I wish upon Canon for their terrible printer drivers.
Edit:
I personally keep out of calamity threads, but this thread seems useful for members to keep track of humanity’s dangerous Tapdance on the prepice of self a destruction. Documenting and commenting on current events is useful, I think.
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I dunno, colleague. Could be there’s more than one person seeing “dignity and grandeur” applied to nuclear-powered genocide hereabouts, but I suspect it might only be you. It’s not like it’s a particularly evocative term in any positive fashion, unless one enjoys the dignified silence of blasted landscapes littered with scorched corpses.
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If you’re speaking Greek, I agree. The Greek word, used in an English context, however, is generally used to refer to a specific revelation, (or rather, Revelation). And, generally, used without awareness of the original Greek meaning.
Words change meaning when they change languages. The word “caution” comes from the Latin for “take heed.” In English, “caution” means “take heed, I warn you of danger.” In French, it means, “take heed, I guarantee this.”
You use the word “astounding” in a context with no relation to thunder. You use the word “cancer” for something with no relation to a crab. You use “coopt” to mean something the exact opposite of “choose together.” And that’s just examples from your last two posts in this topic.
“Apocalypse,” in Greek, means exactly what you say it does. In English, though, it has come to have a different meaning than it did in its original language, just as “cancer” has.
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Note to self if/when I get cancer: Tell people I’m going into an intensive round of chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery because I have a bad case of crabs.
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So, of course no love from me for prescription of English word use based on languages far removed from contemporary English. I mean, really, who does that help?
But I would give this: I’m glad it’s not hereabouts, but there are a lot of people who treat apocalypses with a lot more dignity than they would a long series of cruel deaths, even if that’s all they actually mean. I think maybe it’s some mix of these:
…or maybe I just like posting comics but they don’t actually work in lieu of making a coherent point. I sure hope not.
But for whatever reason, the attitude is often thus: the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million a statistic, the death of nearly everyone a spectacle almost to be hoped for. Not to everybody, but definitely for too many with too much influence.
An etymology I appreciate is that rabies is Latin for rage. Because when you tell people, at first they’re all “ha, infected with rage is how they describe zombies in that one movie, that’s funny” – but then when you think about it, it’s nothing funny at all, that’s exactly what rabies is actually like.
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Turkey bombing the Kurdish fighters is one of the most destabilizing things in that region, along with the current situation in Israel and Palestine. And the religious right is actively pushing this instability because they think the end of the world will bring Jesus and the destruction of all of us who don’t fit their ideal (which is much of humanity). It’s a scary time. I’m actually surprised they only moved the doomsday clock to 2 minutes to midnight, frankly.
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I would hope that if Jesus came back, he would take all of us and leave the right wing nut jobs behind. When they ask why, he just says “You didn’t get it”.
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