Catch a Falling Star

Today was another holiday spent alone. My mother-in-law is dying in San Antonio, so all those who could travel that far in my family went there. The dog and I are alone at least until Friday. And both of us are ill. I have a urinary tract infection that I managed to catch early enough to get in to see the doctor on Tuesday. Sulfa drugs for Thanksgiving dinner. The dog is also old and ill. She still goes for a walk, but her stomach rebels and she sleeps more than ever before. At 13 she’s an old-lady dog in her unlucky year of life.

But those are expected complaints and worries. There are looming things ahead that concern me far more. The high-heat heatwave of this summer, more than two weeks at 108 degrees Fahrenheit or more, was another thing like Covid that probably should’ve killed me. We survived as the air conditioners in the house all held on and the electric grid did not fail at fatal junctures. That kind of luck is not going to continue for long in preserving me. I did not die in the extreme cold. I did not die of Covid. I did not die of extreme heat. The government did not fail as a result of any of these unprecedented things. The food-production capacity of the midwest, where my family still owns a farm, did not fail either, in spite of drought and stormy weather. None of these instances of good luck saving our proverbial bacon can still be counted on the next time it comes up.

I am determined to vote for the good guys if I survive until November of 2024. But I fear the proto-fascist Mango Hitler, Donald Trump, is going to win the presidency again. Greedy-rich bloodsuckers who get tax breaks beyond the dreams of avarice support him financially and have so far prevented him from being executed for treason, murder, and malfeasance. Life will be even more of a hellscape than it was under his last reign of terror. And he will undo what little has been done to repair the world from climate crisis. If his election happens again, the planet will not survive as a living organism.

So, what am I actually thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day?

Hope is not yet gone. I may not live for very much longer, but the life I have lived has been richly satisfying, though ultimately not an easy ride. And if I can still complain about all these increasingly horrible problems, it means I can also still do things to keep hope alive.

Two sisters and their little dog too. Not only were they not supposed to have their dog at the mall, they were supposed to wear shoes indoors too. Needless to say, they got sent home.

At home, the sisters could go as naked as they wanted to. Of course, their other dog, the girl dog, decided to get between them and be naked too.

Sammy took this selfie with his phone at the beach. His Mom suggested that maybe he was trying to take a photo of something more than his own sassy face.

Ariel’s Blue Fairy is rather tiny, but she’s really powerful when using taxidermy-duck magic. Okay, a taxidermy duck is not that great when you wished for a soft pillow.

We are headed for massively tough times. Billions will die as a result of how the climate crisis will change the entire planet. Today I learned that the colonization of Mars and even the Moon is something that takes far more time than we have. And it is not the utopian answer some science fictionists tend to offer. We have to master living in fishbowls, contained environments, and terrarium-type reverse aquariums.

I am brainstorming my own survivalist fiction now thinking not about life in space, but about life in reverse aquariums… underwater at the bottom of the oceans.

Of course, to do this, we have a number of problems to overcome… yesterday. The oceans are turning to acid which is generally inhospitable to life… and to the things we would have to build underwater to survive. We don’t want those things to dissolve. So a massive effort at deacidification needs to be already underway. As large areas of land will be covered with water, there will need to be industrial-sized efforts to desalinate ocean water to create fresh water to sustain not only us but also all the non-salt-water breathing things we take with us under the waves. And living in fishbowls under the sea will take a concerted effort to compensate for the pressures experienced underneath tons and tons of water.

The technology already exists to build underwater domed cities, safe from surface weather. And it may soon be the only safe place to build. The problem is that we are way behind in building such habitats.

And we would have to adapt undersea farming, raising food fish, edible seaweed, and surface plants in bubble farms at the bottom of the ocean growing vegetables under artificial sun sources. Underwater tramsportation would need to be inserted; tube trains, submersibles, pressurized undersea suits, and amphibious vehicles that can transition from underwater travel to surface sailing and even land roving.

Our society would undergo significant changes as culture and behavior have to become sea centered.

So, there you have it. Sufficient notes to begin contemplating the science fiction stories of nautical life in the great undersea of a climate-disaster future.