You know that “Doomsday Clock” of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that scares us every year as its hands tick closer to midnight? This year it has just under two minutes left until the bell tolls twelve. Humanity, beware. Put your ear on the ground. That thundering noise you hear comes from the hoofs of four horses.
If you’re concerned about humankind and the arrival of the Four Horsemen, relax those shoulder muscles a bit. Chill. Humanity can take heart that it will survive, probably for thousands of years. And why? Time itself will save the species though time is, itself, the notorious path to personal midnight.
I don’t expect the lyrics of most songs to make much sense. The composer/lyricist has to balance music and thought, a task so difficult that one or the other takes precedence. Since we listen to music more for the sound than for the thought, many composers repeat phrases or write esoteric gibberish that just seems to fit the notes that evoke emotions.
Thus, songwriters can thrive on nonsense. Take some lines from the powerful “Now We Are Free” by the talented composer Hans Zimmer in collaboration with singer/lyricist Lisa Gerrard. Gerrard sings the tear-jerking song as the slain Maximus, the hero in Gladiator, walks through a field of wheat in the Afterlife to join his departed wife and son. Here are some of the lyrics:
La la da pa du le na da na
Ve va da pa do le na da dumda
La la da pa da le na da na *
Amazing in a way. Not Shakespearean, right? The syllables make no sense; yet, they move audiences to tears. Without the Zimmer’s music that accompanies the lyrics, those syllables are no more meaningful than early rock-n-roll’s “Doo wop” music. Yet, the song was powerful enough with those meaningless syllables that it earned Zimmer an Academy Award Nomination for Best Music Score and both Zimmer and Gerrard a Golden Globe Award. Gerrard wrote the lyrics for “Now We Are Free” in her idioglossia, a language she invented at age 12.
But what do music and lyrics have to do with that Doomsday Clock ticking toward midnight and the arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Certainly, there’s no stopping their ineluctable arrival. No, not for individuals as everyone learns in time. Each of us will take that same walk through the field of wheat that Maximus takes in the film.
But for the species? Isn’t that what the Doomsday Clock is all about? Not an individual’s clock striking twelve, but a group midnight predicted in the downward-spiraling pessimism of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to be just 100 seconds from now? Are they speaking gibberish?
Is there another song those esteemed scientists might hear or sing that could, possibly, rewind the clock or set its hands back? Maybe a more optimistic set of syllables?
I’m thinking here of “Save You” by Turin Brakes. ** I like the song, and I think I get his gist, something along the lines of a person asking another person to “come back,” I suppose, from a breakup possibly caused by emotional wounding. Anyway, in the song Brakes sings “Time will save you,” a thought that might be as applicable to our species as it is to an individual.
Will it? Will time save us? Or should we look for a religious or political savior. Is there evidence that in time’s passing, there’s hope for humanity if not for individual people? Surely, for billions of individuals, a religious savior is cause for optimism, but billions more seem to rely on the promise of political saviors, those people with a supposed power to stop the Doomsday Clock’s hands from reaching midnight.
Except through faith, we cannot know from the perspective of being alive what the effect of a religious savior will be on the ultimate destiny of individuals. Religious saviors are saviors for individuals who hope to take that walk through a field of wheat in the Afterlife. But we do have a history of political leaders that rise in societies quite frequently as group saviors. Unfortunately, past experiences tell us that such saviors offer false hope. Their promises have never been met for more than brief moments; thus, the hands of the Doomsday Clock keep moving with only temporary pauses. At 100 seconds before midnight, those pauses seem to be getting shorter and more intermittent.
But maybe time will save us. Consider what happened in East Asia and Europe between 19,000 and about 45,000 years ago as summarized by Ann Gibbons for Science. * Based on research done by David Reich of Harvard Medical School and China’s paleogeneticist Qiaomei Fu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and others, the humans who inhabited the China Plateau and Europe 40-45,000 years ago disappeared sometime during the Last Glacial Maximum. When it ended, the hunter-gatherers more directly related to people today repopulated the landscape.
So, fossil DNA gives us evidence that a Late Glacial Maximum Doomsday Clock actually reached midnight for modern humans. But it also gives us evidence that the clock restarted, probably, we might speculate, on its own. No individual rewound it or pushed the hands counterclockwise. There were people, and then there weren’t people, and then there were people again, all this ascribable to the passage of time. And sure, this was, in fact, a process covering millennia, but there’s evidence on different continents that the same peopling, de-peopling, and re-peopling has occurred numerous times, cyclically with devastating diseases, supervolcanic eruptions, and glacial maxima. Just as life recovered after the so-called Five Major Extinctions, those major Midnights, so human life will most likely survive the next Midnight. And though morning’s light might be a long time in coming after the predicted modern Midnight, it will shine again even over once de-populated landscapes. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists might be right for parts of the planet, but as our species has survived in the past, it will do so in a future running through millennia. Granted, that’s not solace for individuals, but it is so for our resilient species.
Time’s always there doing its work, its unstoppable passing, its moving toward a Doomsday’s Midnight and an ensuing Dawn. Time will save us.
Notes:
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYZvoFAEuSc
**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wupg6FzqYMM
**Gibbons, Ann. 27 May 2021. Last ice age wiped out people in East Asia as well as Europe. Online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/last-ice-age-wiped-out-people-east-asia-well-europe Accessed May 27, 2921.
If you’re concerned about humankind and the arrival of the Four Horsemen, relax those shoulder muscles a bit. Chill. Humanity can take heart that it will survive, probably for thousands of years. And why? Time itself will save the species though time is, itself, the notorious path to personal midnight.
I don’t expect the lyrics of most songs to make much sense. The composer/lyricist has to balance music and thought, a task so difficult that one or the other takes precedence. Since we listen to music more for the sound than for the thought, many composers repeat phrases or write esoteric gibberish that just seems to fit the notes that evoke emotions.
Thus, songwriters can thrive on nonsense. Take some lines from the powerful “Now We Are Free” by the talented composer Hans Zimmer in collaboration with singer/lyricist Lisa Gerrard. Gerrard sings the tear-jerking song as the slain Maximus, the hero in Gladiator, walks through a field of wheat in the Afterlife to join his departed wife and son. Here are some of the lyrics:
La la da pa du le na da na
Ve va da pa do le na da dumda
La la da pa da le na da na *
Amazing in a way. Not Shakespearean, right? The syllables make no sense; yet, they move audiences to tears. Without the Zimmer’s music that accompanies the lyrics, those syllables are no more meaningful than early rock-n-roll’s “Doo wop” music. Yet, the song was powerful enough with those meaningless syllables that it earned Zimmer an Academy Award Nomination for Best Music Score and both Zimmer and Gerrard a Golden Globe Award. Gerrard wrote the lyrics for “Now We Are Free” in her idioglossia, a language she invented at age 12.
But what do music and lyrics have to do with that Doomsday Clock ticking toward midnight and the arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Certainly, there’s no stopping their ineluctable arrival. No, not for individuals as everyone learns in time. Each of us will take that same walk through the field of wheat that Maximus takes in the film.
But for the species? Isn’t that what the Doomsday Clock is all about? Not an individual’s clock striking twelve, but a group midnight predicted in the downward-spiraling pessimism of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to be just 100 seconds from now? Are they speaking gibberish?
Is there another song those esteemed scientists might hear or sing that could, possibly, rewind the clock or set its hands back? Maybe a more optimistic set of syllables?
I’m thinking here of “Save You” by Turin Brakes. ** I like the song, and I think I get his gist, something along the lines of a person asking another person to “come back,” I suppose, from a breakup possibly caused by emotional wounding. Anyway, in the song Brakes sings “Time will save you,” a thought that might be as applicable to our species as it is to an individual.
Will it? Will time save us? Or should we look for a religious or political savior. Is there evidence that in time’s passing, there’s hope for humanity if not for individual people? Surely, for billions of individuals, a religious savior is cause for optimism, but billions more seem to rely on the promise of political saviors, those people with a supposed power to stop the Doomsday Clock’s hands from reaching midnight.
Except through faith, we cannot know from the perspective of being alive what the effect of a religious savior will be on the ultimate destiny of individuals. Religious saviors are saviors for individuals who hope to take that walk through a field of wheat in the Afterlife. But we do have a history of political leaders that rise in societies quite frequently as group saviors. Unfortunately, past experiences tell us that such saviors offer false hope. Their promises have never been met for more than brief moments; thus, the hands of the Doomsday Clock keep moving with only temporary pauses. At 100 seconds before midnight, those pauses seem to be getting shorter and more intermittent.
But maybe time will save us. Consider what happened in East Asia and Europe between 19,000 and about 45,000 years ago as summarized by Ann Gibbons for Science. * Based on research done by David Reich of Harvard Medical School and China’s paleogeneticist Qiaomei Fu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and others, the humans who inhabited the China Plateau and Europe 40-45,000 years ago disappeared sometime during the Last Glacial Maximum. When it ended, the hunter-gatherers more directly related to people today repopulated the landscape.
So, fossil DNA gives us evidence that a Late Glacial Maximum Doomsday Clock actually reached midnight for modern humans. But it also gives us evidence that the clock restarted, probably, we might speculate, on its own. No individual rewound it or pushed the hands counterclockwise. There were people, and then there weren’t people, and then there were people again, all this ascribable to the passage of time. And sure, this was, in fact, a process covering millennia, but there’s evidence on different continents that the same peopling, de-peopling, and re-peopling has occurred numerous times, cyclically with devastating diseases, supervolcanic eruptions, and glacial maxima. Just as life recovered after the so-called Five Major Extinctions, those major Midnights, so human life will most likely survive the next Midnight. And though morning’s light might be a long time in coming after the predicted modern Midnight, it will shine again even over once de-populated landscapes. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists might be right for parts of the planet, but as our species has survived in the past, it will do so in a future running through millennia. Granted, that’s not solace for individuals, but it is so for our resilient species.
Time’s always there doing its work, its unstoppable passing, its moving toward a Doomsday’s Midnight and an ensuing Dawn. Time will save us.
Notes:
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYZvoFAEuSc
**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wupg6FzqYMM
**Gibbons, Ann. 27 May 2021. Last ice age wiped out people in East Asia as well as Europe. Online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/last-ice-age-wiped-out-people-east-asia-well-europe Accessed May 27, 2921.
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