Live Tweeting the Apocalypse
This is a time capsule from 2023, a message to all future Smiths, friends, and associated branches of the family tree.
Greetings! If you are reading this, that’s a good sign. It means humanity survived in some fashion — or at least some of you did. Perhaps you’re reading this while orbiting the earth in a mixed-use business park built by Amazon. It also means that a digital record of our time was preserved, and future versions of us are still literate and interested in history — whether of morbid curiosity or a desire not to repeat it.
Holding vigil on the apocalypse is a Smith family tradition. It began hundreds of years ago when our people fled their homeland of Germany. Rival factions of Protestants and Catholics raped, pillaged, and otherwise ravaged the homeland in the Thirty Years’ War. They came to America with other Dutch and Palatine refugees, starting towns like Zion, New Jerusalem, and Pella, thinking they could start over and outrun Babylon — as if Babylon weren’t in all of us.
My parents have been predicting the exact date of Christ’s return as far back as I can remember — especially my mother. It became a seasonal event with every passing prophecy conference. In the 1960s and 70s, my grandfather, a Welsh, Latter-Rain, Pentecostal preacher, prophesied that my generation would be the last to walk the earth. Granddad had reason for concern. I was born during the height of the Cold War. President Nixon had just resigned in disgrace, and there were legitimate concerns that nuclear fallout and environmental damage would forever impair our ability to pass along healthy DNA.
By the time I reached sixth grade, the book “88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988” hit the shelves. Then came Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” series in high school (the only movie adaptation I’ve ever seen get a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes — ask your AI robot assistant what what means or take a guess if tomatoes still exist).
Reading the tea leaves became so commonplace that by the dawn of the new millennium, while Kristen and I partied like it was 1999 (a popular song by Prince — rather, the artist formerly known as Prince), the rest of the family holed up in the basement with dry goods and potable water ready for the Second Coming on Y2k.
If you study history (and you should), you’ll notice distinct hash marks on humanity’s timeline. These are moments when new technology arrives and forever changes the game. Evolution isn’t a steady game. It goes in spurts and jumps. There was Gutenberg’s printing press and Marconi’s radio. Soon, we split the atom. You may recall my grandfather’s work in the Met Lab at the University of Chicago where they were building the atom bomb (talk about a reason to fret the apocalypse!).
In the 90s, writer/philosopher Terence McKenna invented his apocalyptic “Novelty Theory.” It speculated that humanity would accelerate at increasing rates of novelty until we reached the End of History when some truly wild stuff would hit the fan.
Speaking of which, let me tell you about a recent leap in scientific understanding and technological capability, which I hope has served you well in yours. It’s a story that begins with a project named GNoME, an AI-driven venture that revolutionized the field of materials science. If Grandad was still alive, his mind would be blown.
This AI was like a master librarian who could predict which books would be most enlightening before they were even written. It predicted the existence of over 2.2 million new materials, with 421,000 stable crystals that might hold the key to technologies you may now take for granted. Perhaps the batteries that power your gadgets, the materials in your smart homes, or even the very infrastructure of the business park you float in were all discovered in this period of innovation.
Imagine it like this. Once we had a modern Library of Alexandria where humans accumulated 20,000 books over many decades, each representing a unique material. Computational methods then added another 28,000. But GNoME? It added not just another shelf, but an entire new wing to the library, with 421,000 books, all in what would have been a blink of an eye for us.
This brings us to the present day. Let me tell you about my year.
For some context, we live in a world only three years removed from a global pandemic. For a while, they told us that COVID came from someone eating bat soup. This divided our country along political lines. Many on the left stuck with the official “bat soup” narrative and others, on the right, tended to blame China. Comedian John Stewart was invited on “The Late Show” for an interview with his friend and former colleague, Stephen Colbert, who asked if he thought there was a chance it could have been caused by a leak at the Wuhan Virology Institute. Stewart, considered fairly liberal by those on the right replied,
“A chance?! Oh, my God! There’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. The disease has the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think? And then they ask the scientists, like, ‘How did this — so, wait a minute. You work at the Wuhan Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. How did this happen?’ And they’re like, ‘A pangolin kissed a turtle? Hmm… Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and then it sneezed into my chili — and now we all have coronavirus.’ Come on!”
Now, what was once a fringe conspiracy theory seems to be gaining popular bipartisan support. It’s really tough to sniff out the truth these days.
That’s one of the problems with rapid technology growth and adoption. After the “Gutenberg Revolution,” when Bibles became readily available, everyone who could read had a “hot take,” and new sects and religious movements cropped up all over Europe. In our day, post-internet, with social media and podcasting abounding, anyone with a mic can spread a conspiracy theory — with or without merit or factual support. If they are funny, attractive or persuasive, they can be well-paid and even be elected to public office. That will probably never change.
There was a phenomenon called “live Tweeting” where people would post their thoughts in real-time in 140 characters or less on a platform called Twitter (changed to “X” after being purchased by Tesla and SpaceX founder, Elon Musk). Unfortunately, social media panders to the lowest common denominator of humanity’s base fears, desires, and tribalism. It’s how your Mark Zuckerbergs of the world make billions.
Evil super geniuses and religious fundamentalist billionaires hope to usher in the apocalypse — via technocracy or theocracy — both fashioning God in their own image. They are using social media to drive humanity apart. They do this while building massive underground compounds so that they can survive and repopulate the world, outer space or their own planet. But there are also beautiful people, spreading viral messages of hope and light. That’s the thing, every advancement grows the possibility for both good and evil.
We also have Vladimir Putin and his arsenal of nukes battling Ukraine, and a humanitarian crisis between Israel and Palestine. Elsewhere around the world, our relatives in Peru experienced massive floods and California hit record snowfalls. In Iowa, we are having a mild winter, courtesy of El Niño.
Oh, did I mention that government whistleblowers finally admitted that UFOs (now called UAPs) exist? Tiny objects have been appearing on a regular basis for the last few years (decades) and perform physics-defying feats over our nation’s airspace. As crazy as it sounds, Kristen and I once saw one hovering over the road for three hours straight in the Arizona desert sky on a drive to California. It didn’t shift, move with the moon, or twinkle like a star. It stayed steady at about 30 degrees above the road, about the size of a planet on a clear night.
Steven Spielberg, one of our most pre-eminent science fiction cinematographers, speculated earlier this year about technology, aliens, and A.I.:
“What if they are not from an advanced civilization 300 million light years from here? What if it’s us, 500,000 years into the future, that’s coming back to document the second half of the 20th Century and into the 21st Century because they are anthropologists and they know something that we don’t quite know yet, that has occurred? And they are trying to track the last 100 years of our history.”
But not all hope is lost. Every day, new amazing developments arrive. The biggest news may be what’s happening on the artificial intelligence front. Time Magazine dropped an article in January about quantum computing. They described our current binary computing processes like playing a Rachmaninoff concerto in Morse code. Quantum computers will perform tasks a million times faster than our personal laptops. This could be great, but we’re also not fully ready. But it may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. Talk about a conundrum!
I was talking to the co-founder of our technology company the other day about it. He said to imagine our current state of encryption like a giant Rubik’s cube (an old 3D square puzzle with six different colored sides). Our current encryption is based on the idea that solving the puzzle would take too long. But with quantum computing, that puzzle is solved in seconds. But those same quantum capabilities can also simulate new ways of restoring our oceans, preventing the permafrost from melting, or sequestering massive amounts of carbon. Which is why there is also reason to be hopeful.
This year, our software company launched a new website tool for insurance agents. It’s powered by A.I. tools that help agencies use a remedial (and still cutting-edge) form of A.I. called Open A.I. to create content for their online businesses. The same week that we launched this, GPT-4 demoed their ability to build a website from a picture drawn on a napkin. Its tough to keep up!
For a research nerd and hoarder of information, like myself, the ability to synthesize, compile and organize information quickly, has changed my life. I use it daily, primarily for proof reading, translation services, and simplifying complex topics.
In conclusion future Smithereens, they call my generation “Generation X.” Sometimes, I picture the “X” as a person with two arms aloft and two legs straddling a time line representing two distinct epochs of human history and the dawn of this modern technological revolution. Kristen’s great-grandmother told stories about coming across the plains on a covered wagon and her grandchildren lived to see rovers on Mars.
As wild and scary as it is to live in interesting times, I can tell you this. If I had a chance to be from 500,000 years into the future and was given the opportunity to quantum leap back to one point in the past of humanity’s history, I’d have chosen the exact time I am experiencing today. And for that and many other reasons, I consider myself one of the luckiest men alive.
Now, you know things about my life and how it ends that I don’t. So, don’t go sending any time travelers back to ruin the ending for me. Just let me enjoy this moment. All we have is the Now.
Love you all! The artist formerly known as Grandpa Matthew.
