Doomed

“Why worry so much about the future of a doomed world?”

A delightfully nihilistic quote attributed to physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the main architects of the Manhattan Project and of the first atomic weapons, although it’s probably apocryphal. It seems to originate in French from Michel Houllebecq’s book H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. The English translation of Houllebecq actually mentions in a footnote that the quote is untraceable.

Houllebecq is, shall we say, a not uncontroversial writer who may conceivably be projecting his own profound misanthropy and negativity onto Oppenheimer; Lovecraft’s, too. Even so, it’s in character for a man who made it possible for the human race to render itself and most other life on the planet totally extinct within a matter of minutes.

It’s also in character for Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “The first ten million years were the worst, and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”

Protect your precious bodily fluids

Design by Paul László for John A. Hertz Residence Fallout Shelter, Woodland Hills, California, 1955. (Collection: University of California, Santa Barbara).

Post-apocalyptic California looks so serene and pretty, doesn’t it? It would have been a shame if there’d been a nuclear war in the 1960s, because only the richest and most paranoid arseholes would have survived, albeit only for slightly longer than everyone else.

How to survive an atomic bomb

Don’t stand too near it when it goes off is what I’m mainly taking away from the diagram. Also put your coat over your head, preferably while you’re dressed like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, and don’t panic. You’ll be fine.