WILL OUR CIVILIZATION BECOME EXTINCT?

Do you care about what happens to your grandkids' grandkids? Most of us never really think that far ahead.  Just getting your children raised and educated is about as far as your worries go during middle age.  All of a sudden, the kids are grown, and now you have grandchildren, and the worry cycle starts all over again. Will they get through childhood illnesses, bullying, bad SAT scores and finally become happy successful adults?

But what about your descendants thousands of years from now? Lately, I've been reading about lost civilizations and wondering if that's what's going to happen to us.  Global Warming, terrorism, oceans full of plastic, for starters.  With most extinct animals and lost civilizations, scientists really can't figure out what happened.  Since I'm not an educated environmentalist, I can only report on the scary things I saw in my own backyard this year.

For thirty years, we've had sun patients (flowers) that grew and blossomed all summer long.  Geraniums were a no-brainer.  Stick them in the ground, water every so often, and there you go. Beautiful, robust flowers until Thanksgiving. This year, in the middle of July, they simply shriveled up and either rotted or burned.  They say farmers are seeing half as much soy bean and corn yields this year.  I hope it's an anomaly, but what if it's not.  What if this earth is going to get so hot that  we can't produce enough food for this overpopulated world?  And what if Earth ends up like Venus, where the temperature on a typical day is 900 degrees?

My thought is that there will be pockets of survival scattered throughout the globe.  Maybe those natives spotted by a drone in Brazil, who've been living millions of years without any contact with the outside world will make it.  There may be some remote islands where natives will survive.  And maybe those people will progress to the point where they discover electricity and invent the internet. And eventually, they may find traces of lost civilizations in Germany and Indiana.  And they will scratch their heads and wonder what happened, and how all of these people became extinct.

For the sake of future generations, let's start getting serious about climate change.