Quick! There’s an asteroid barreling toward your corner of the earth and you have no chance of escape. The world as you know it ends in 4 hours. What do you do?! Listen to the latest BF, that’s what! On this show we tackled that ever-present subject of the apocalypse. Kevin Saunders joined me alongside the recently crippled Jediah Cummins. We also had our FIRST EVER “caller” on BF, the lovely and entertaining vlogger Margaret Kammer. So sit down, relax, and enjoy your pending doom the BF way!
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This week’s post-show song pimpage: “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” by R.E.M.
29/01/2010 at 1:15 am Permalink
I can’t believe no one mentioned the sun going nova and destroying the planet! That was my first thought when the subject of apocalypses . . . apocalypsi . . . an apocalypse without a post-apocalypse came up.
Also, this isn’t strictly speaking about the End of the World, but I was informed in a science class once that the magnetic poles are not fixed points, but instead very slowly, but perpetually, moving, so that one day the North Pole will be the South Pole, and vice versa. And in the hundreds of years when the poles are in the middle of the shift (so N and S poles are in the E and W), you’ll be able to see the Northern Lights from NYC every night. Of course, this process would also destabilize the planet a bit. But I think we, as humans, will be advanced enough by that time to use technology to compensate for any ill effects. Since hearing that, I’ve thought that this would be an awesome setting for a SciFi story. Not a story having the switching of the poles as a plot point, but just having this idea of the poles switching, tech compensating, and the Northern Lights seen every night from North America, as a background setting for the plot to take place in.
Hey, if we didn’t have tech to compensate, that could probably count as a type of apocalypse with a post-apocalypse to follow.
(Yeah, I watch the episodes on the Stickam site when they’re video only, and then think of what I want to say so I’m ready to comment when the episode finally gets officially posted on the BF site. I also just like to talk a lot.)
30/01/2010 at 2:08 pm Permalink
I’m a new fan of your site, having only discovered it like about only less than a week ago, but I’ll be downloading your past postings into my digital listening device until I catch up to hearing all of them. PLEASE don’t let the end come soon! Your discourse is way so much better than anything that I find on the radio dial of my car.
So, if you’re all philosophers, how come nobody made the connection between the definition between the Sanskrit word Om (or Aum) and what happens “when the fat lady sings” after the final note fades?
31/01/2010 at 10:25 am Permalink
Howdy Mossy,
Always glad to have a new fan! As you’ll probably find out as you make your troll through our archives, we’re not all actually philosophers. (Stephen is, and some of our occasional guests are as well.) Instead, we’re just folks who like to talk about the bigger things in life. I like to thinks that our lack of real philosophy training is part of what makes our shows unique.
04/02/2010 at 1:42 am Permalink
I’m with ChaosPlatypus. When I heard the world apocalypse my mind immediately went to the sun going into super nova. I don’t know if you’ve seen Knowing with Nicholas Cage. It’s not a great movie. I guess though if you look at the story of that movie, everyone dies. Only pre selected children are spared by an alien race…like I said, not an amazing movie.
ChaosPlatypus: Scientists have overwhelming evidence about Earth’s poles. You can actually track the switching of the poles on the ocean floor. Learned that in geology and it’s something learned over and over again in my science classes.
Liked this episode though. I personally like the thought of robots taking over the world. Simultaneous flash floods was one I’ve never thought of before. It was an interesting thought. 🙂 I also liked the earthquake theory. Maybe there will be a mass combustion at Earth’s center and something with lava and magma will occur and earthquakes will happen and all that bad stuff.
17/02/2010 at 5:46 pm Permalink
I too, I must admit, also went to the stellarpocalypse, but not before thinking of an obvious and altogether more fantastic (and therefore some might say less plausible) end to our collective personal realities. What about “The Rapture,” guys? Having recently set myself the arduous/ noble task of reading the bible cover to cover it’s understandable that the Judeo-Christian armageddon should be at the forefront of my thinking, but as terrestial climaxes go it’s something of a biggy; I’m surprised it didn’t at least get a mention.
Not that religious considerations occupied much thought during the episode as I spent much of it (upto about 39 minutes in) mentally screaming my response to Stephen’s question of “[why the apocalypse fixation.]” What I found interesting was that we both arrived at the idea of the human fixation on mortallity, something very much a part of the human condition, but that we came at it from different directions. While you guys focused more on the fear of our on deaths extended and explicated through the hypothetical demise of the planet that sustains us, I came approached the problem with logic over psychology (though of course both feature heavily in each.) Rather than fear, I thought about the way man views himself and his imediate surroundings; we see birth, we see life, we see death and this is, how ever reductively, the process of being. When applied to reality the life is seen in the present, in the day to day. The birth is accounted for by countless creation mythologies. But what of the death? Well obviously that hasn’t happened yet, but, given the evidence of experience, it’s something that must come to pass at some point. The mystery (or the unknown thus the fear, i suppose(damn!)) therein means that, clearly, it’s upto us to fill the blanks, much as we do with our own deaths (i.e afterlife mythologies.) More than simple fear but the rational recognition of inalienable existential pattern.
Great episode guys. I had to skip the previous 2 because I’ve watched neither Avatar or Doll House yet but fully intend to soon.
And before I go: such is my irrational fear of the Zombocalypse that a few months ago I came ridiculously close to purchasing a couble of crowbars, a step ladder as well as planning the most efficient way of disabling my stairs.
Max Brooks is a great man.