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The other prophecies

2020-07-14T18:57:49.493Z


The other prophecies.The story of a pandemic that destroys the world we had read and seen many times, had been told by Boccaccio in his Decameron, Albert Camus in The Plague, Jack London in The Scarlet Plague or Mary Shelley in The Last Man, where the author of Frankenstein imagines a plague that devastates the Earth in the 21st century. The king of terror, Stephen King, published in 1990 Apocalypse, where the fugitiv...


The story of a pandemic that destroys the world we had read and seen many times, had been told by Boccaccio in his Decameron, Albert Camus in The Plague, Jack London in The Scarlet Plague or Mary Shelley in The Last Man, where the author of Frankenstein imagines a plague that devastates the Earth in the 21st century. The king of terror, Stephen King, published in 1990 Apocalypse, where the fugitive from a secret laboratory transmits a lethal virus to half the planet, and in Spain Apocalypse Z was successful ,Manel Loureiro, where a command attack on a chemical facility in Dagestan, Russia, generates an epidemic and an international collapse. Intentional contagions and conspiracy theories star in Ken Follett's On Target ; there are mysterious phenomena that make people lose their sight in Essay on blindness , by José Saramago, and prophets like Dean R. Koontz, who in 1981 guessed what would happen to us 40 years later: The eyes of darkness speaks of a virus called Wuhan-400, developed in a laboratory in this Chinese city around 2020.

The question is whether the rest of the apocalyptic predictions of natural or artificial catastrophes that we have conjectured will also go from fiction to reality. The arrival of the aliens seems fanciful, but they have just discovered a green streak on Mars that says that there could be oxygen and therefore life elsewhere. There are more threats: the tidal waves, a thaw that floods everything, the turning off of the Sun, the scarcity of water —a background theme in Rosa Montero's novels in the replicant Bruna Husky's series— or Damocles' flying sword of those celestial objects that could crash into us to extinguish us like dinosaurs. Who has not seen movies like Meteor, Deep Impact, When the worlds collide, Armageddon, Melancholy or 3 days , by Francisco Javier Gutiérrez, about a meteorite that would destroy Earth in 72 hours.

The Bible speaks of a punishment from above, "hail and fire mixed with blood" and how "a third of the trees and all the green grass were burned." Edgar Allan Poe refers in The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion to a star that takes nitrogen from Earth and causes oxygen to set it ablaze and burn. In HG Wells's Comet Days , a space rock, brushing past us, causes tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. And Arthur C. Clarke scared us with The Hammer of God.

But those risks also exist off the books. In India, a meteorite caused the hole where Lake Lonar is, whose waters have now turned mysteriously pink. In our century asteroids have fallen on Sudan and Botswana, off the coast of Brazil or in the Urals, where the so-called Chelyabinsk Bolide released an energy of 500 kilotons, 30 times higher than the Hiroshima nuclear bomb. And there is the QQ23, discovered in 2006, which has a diameter of 173,000 square meters and travels 16,737 kilometers per hour.

All this, of course, if we do not anticipate our fears of a third world war that, like all this, is improbable but possible: after all, it is we who have invented the weapons that can destroy us and if we have learned anything from Coronavirus is that, overnight, we are nothing.

Source: elparis

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