Member-only story
The Long Eclipse
What quantum physics, a cigarette ban, and the ozone layer tell us about where we’re going
by Josh McClary of Considerate Burrito, Bloomington, IN
Before people understood what a solar eclipse was, the disappearance of the Sun drove them mad. Completely unhinged.
The sky goes dark in the middle of the day. The birds stop. The temperature drops. Everything your body knows about the world becomes suddenly, terrifyingly wrong. And then — the narration starts. People filled that darkness with whatever story their culture had available. Monsters. Punishment. The end.
They were wrong about the cause. But they weren’t wrong about the alarm. Something fundamental had changed. The thing that everything depends on had gone away. The body knew, even when the mind couldn’t explain it.
Now imagine the Sun doesn’t come back.
You’d narrate that too, in real time, and until the end. At first in panic, then in rapid succession of grief-filled moments.
But, imagine if this could go on longer, somehow, for the sake of illustration, the “no Sun” world became a stable trajectory, slow enough for life to continue, for a while. Imagine, then, that humans would indeed build cultures around the new dark. We’d optimize for it…
