The day after I was born a human error was made on a US national security computer the size of a car. A training tape was fed into the machine and in return it concluded trouble.
Screens across America showed the sky was full of Soviet ballistic missiles. As is often the case things were not what they seemed.  

Someone’s nerve held and mutually assured destruction was averted. The end of humanity and most life on earth would have sucked. Also, I would never have known the briny joy of an oyster, the boney tactile perfection of a lover’s knee enclosed in my hand or even the sensation of eating solid food. My existence would have consisted of a few hours with my worn out mother who was reeling , damaged by the experience of bringing me into the world and of the surly matrons of St Helen’s Hospital Newtown who were setting about making the experience worse.

It is human nature to think the sky is falling. It is also human nature to deny it ever could fall. Perhaps we are divided into people who see the end of it all as imminent and people who see the stretch of humanity as inexhaustible and perhaps these two groups are the same as people who can picture their own funeral in mental high definition and those who are secretly convinced of their own immortality? Perhaps.
One day those of us who see the end will be proved correct to the cosmic gallery , unless of course the other lot are right in  which case we are the cosmic gallery.

My point is just because we have been predicting the end since forever that doesn’t mean the end will never come.

The seas are rising.  Of course, you may choose to believe YouTube fantasist engagement farmers who are making hay while the sun shines out of a pasture of gullibility. You may believe you are immortal.

And We Come to the End
The sea looks welcoming today.
The sea looks like paradise they say.

 Tool told you to learn to swim, Neurosis told you to become the ocean, Waits said the ocean didn’t want him today. I say the sea looks like paradise they say.

 Bone-Fire

When the end of the world came we collected the works of the transgressors

We built a raging bone-fire of righteousness that burnt for days

The ill deeds of the authors gave the flames a blue tinge like a gas burner on full,

We cast stones with abandon , the compasses spun like roulette wheels,

What use is art to the apocalypse we chanted, what use is beauty to the burning?

 and then once the world had ended we had nothing to read.

So much angst over ‘cancel culture’ as the planet burns. Sending back the overdone steak on the Titanic. Then again what are we going to do, save ourselves?