2012 could happen

Given the spate of disasters damaging the world recently, my friend and I were discussing how 2012 might, after all, actually happen. We were musing on how terrible it would be that millions of people in our age-group would be dying before seeing so much in life, and how it's even worse that kids were coming into the world without seeing anything at all. As horrific as it sounds, I thought it was ok, because if the whole world was dying anyway, there won't be any life - no one - to think back on this and feel sad about the billions of life that were lost in the catastrophe. To think about the billions who didn't live to see the many wonderful things life had to offer. Life, and indeed, existence itself, might be a concept that's lost to the universe - we still haven't come across life forms anywhere else, and everything might stop existing as we know it, because there is no one to prove the existence of anything. Such a Sophie's World-like thought.

And then we moved on to discuss what would be our preferred form of dying, if 2012 did happen. My friend preferred inhaling some gas that would lull her to a peaceful sleep that she would never wake up from. No water, I said, drowning is terrible. Fire is painful, not that either. None of the choke-for-air-and-die types for me. Earthquakes are terrible too - I don't want to be crushed by some heavy pillar and die a slow death. I finally settled for a nuclear bomb explosion. One explosion, and poof! we are dust. Wiped out, meaningless, the very fact of existence in question.