Science Education Invokes the Rapture

[Marc Bousquet]

crossposted from http://www.thevalve.org and http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm

So I'm spending a lot of time these days encouraging my son to vomit on my shoulder, which translates into more time than usual with my friend Tivo, and there is a sort of pause in the Democratic knife fight (except for the part where Ferraro pours gasoline on the Clinton candidacy and lights it while Hillary wonders whether a fire extinguisher is required).

Anyway.

So in the middle of the night I tune in to what all the kids are watching -- National Geographic Channel, Animal Planet, all that.

And I watch "Aftermath: Population Zero," appearing on National Geographic. The concept isn't the worst: the producers ask, what will the planet look like after humanity? As you'd expect, it's a platform for exploring all the unsustainable things that humans do. <em>Subtract humanity, and watch how the planet finds a balance.</em> For popular science, not bad, though Emersonians and evolutionary biologists will both have pretty valid complaint ("Nature" isn't humanity's other; there is no evolutionary history "apart" from humanity, etc).

The subtraction of humanity from the planetary equation is one of the oldest gambits in the book, with an endless number of plausible scenarios. We kill ourselves with war. Disease. Nuclear armageddon. Overpopulation. Pollution. Greed. Or the aliens come and use us for food. Whatever.

But what do the producers choose for their post-humanity gambit? The rapture.

No kidding. When they talk about humanity vanishing, they mean literally vanishing. In an instant. For the first hour of this moronic program, they imagine what would happen if all human bodies are sucked out of running cars and airplanes (uh, they crash) and nuclear power plants (they melt down).

Really, most of the program's energy and intellectual power is devoted to a ridiculously somber discussion of a ludicrous what-if: If God calls the whole planet to heaven at 3 p.m. on a Friday (without giving us a chance to land our planes or shut down the power grid), just how much radiation will be released, and how many pounds of carbon dioxide will be generated by the still-running vehicles of the Raptured?

Things speed up a bit in the second half and we get to some of the popular science considerations that should have driven the program from the beginning: Will the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty come down first? (Hint: copper lasts longer.) Dogs will become dingoes, unless they're toy poodles, in which case they'll be eaten by dingoes. Oceans and trees capture carbon. And we learn that the first winter will kill off a lot of elephants, which is sad, and cockroaches, which is not -- evidently nobody loves a cockroach, even in a post-human world.

[pingzing58]

1. The "rapture" is not a biblical term. I challenge any fundi to prove it!!!!

[mike_c]

2. america is obsessed with its religious insanity....

What a waste of time, money, and electrons to make that documentary.

[varkam]

3. Welcome to DU!

They didn't happen to have me breaking into the Lexus dealership on that show, did they? :evilgrin:

[eppur_se_muova]

4. Oh, poo ... this isn't education ... this is the teevees. nt

[electron_blue]

5. Does the show actually say what if God is responsible for this?

Or are they vague on why the humans disappear? Just curious how far gone this show is.