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Enough with the Extinction Porn — it’s embarrassing

Graeme Ing
4 min readJul 17, 2022

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Photo by Denys Argyriou on Unsplash

We are not facing extinction. We’re not. I wish everybody would stop getting off on that dystopian porn. You’re embarrassing yourself with the endless articles about it. Since when did you become so afraid in the face of adversity?

Humans are famous for doom and gloom thinking. It’s a bad habit of ours to believe it’s always the end of the world. Every generation has this sick thought they are the last. Perhaps we like to be miserable? The pessimists will inherit the world, is that it?

Humans have faced tough times for… well, since we evolved from Neanderthals (and probably before.) In circa 10,000 BCE, there were catastrophic climate events that turned the Sahara region from lush forest to desert, and likely changed a forested Antarctica into ice. Were people running around screaming about extinction? Probably. But we’re still here.

About 75,000 years ago, the Toba eruption covered the globe in six inches of ash and dropped global temperatures by 3–5 degrees. Very few survived those times. Had there been written language then, we’d likely find carvings of their dystopian fantasies. And that nearly was the end of the world.

Historians often catalog AD 536 as the worst year in human history. Another volcanic eruption (this time in Iceland) led to a mini ice age. And then the…

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Graeme Ing
Graeme Ing

Written by Graeme Ing

Chiefly, I write about fascinating things from history. Professional author of fantasy/sci-fi, world traveller, geek and videographer

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