Futurism & Prognostication

I have an idea about what happens after you die. I think when you go to heaven, St. Peter lets you in, they show you to a room. You take a sauna, somebody brings you a plate of cookies or a slice of cake. Then you take a nap.

Later on, when you're ready, they take you to a huge room, and everyone you've ever met is there. And everybody gets together and tells each other exactly what was going through their fucking heads. Then you all have a good laugh about it all. I see lots of back slapping and smiling eyes.

Wouldn't that be a great thing to look forward to?

Link: A Geologist Investigates a Mass Extinction at the End of the Permian Period

A friend commented on the above as a warning.

Well, I do believe we need not to treat the world like an infinite resource, or to assume we can't push things past the tippng point, but the good news is, the Permian extinction event was both unusually catastrophic and very fast as these things goes... it took only about 60,000 years, or, roughly 12x as long as recorded human history. And whatever happened, it was very bad — the trilobites had ruled the world for nearly twice as long as the dinosaurs would when, in a geologic blink of an eye, they, along with 96% of the other plant and animal species living at the time, vanished forever. But despite it, 250 million years later, here we are, in full flower, and…

I believe after humans wipe themselves out a generation or two from now, the eventual next dominant species on earth will be descended from corvids. Most people think it'll be cockroaches, but corvids are already as intelligent in some ways as human children and comparably good at problem solving, they have the biggest brain volume per body mass on earth except for humans, and, they can fly away from danger. Sounds to me like a recipe for success once the hairless apes with the guns are out of the way.