Imagine you knew without any doubt that the world was going to end… but not just yet. Not imminently. Well, imminently in relation to the lifetime of the planet but not imminently in a four-minute warning, rush next door and jump into bed with your neighbour sort of way. Say the world was going to end one year from now. What would you do?
Firstly, everyone would down tools because there really would be no point in working. Money would have no value and nobody would be able to make a difference. And if nobody worked, nothing would work. There’d be no phones, no TV, no radio. In a matter of hours life would return to a pre-industrial state. Turbines would stop turning, electricity would stop flowing, fuel would run out.
Shops would be looted and never re-stocked. Lorry drivers would turn round and head for the ports in the hope of getting to somewhere sunny to rest out the year with cocktails on the beach. But they’d find the ferries weren’t running, or had already sailed. You couldn’t get out from the airports either because all the pilots would have flown, and they’d be crashing into each other because the air traffic controllers would have downed tools too.
So you could tear up your bucket list. No Nile cruise for you. No trek to Machu Picchu. No swimming with dolphins down the Champs Elysées. Everyone would be stuck at home with a year to kill and nothing to do but forage.
This is the premise of the novel I haven’t been writing for the last 10 years. Not writing a novel is a common pastime of anyone who makes their living from writing, as Peter Cook encapsulated when, at a party, somebody announced to him that they were writing a book and he replied, “No, neither am I.”
Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to explore how humanity would respond if you gave the whole world one year to live. You might argue that that’s no different to what life is – a finite period of pointlessness that we are all challenged to bring meaning to – but there’s something about our indefinite future and our concept of legacy that allows us to press on with a sense of purpose. If you knew that nothing you did now would have any lasting effect for anyone beyond the next turn of the wheel, that would be a different challenge.
Then I remembered that I read once that spiders only live for a year. So how do they motivate themselves, I wonder? What gets them up in the morning? What philosophy do they espouse to get them through the daily grind?
You might think, “Never mind the spider, what about the poor mayfly?” But it’s different for the mayfly, with its infamous 24 hour lifespan – a life so short it doesn’t even bother growing a mouth. Life is simple for the mayfly: you hatch, you fly about, you copulate, you die. You don’t have time to think about dinner or what you might do at the weekend or even tomorrow. There’s never that sense of having been round the block several times before.
At the other end of the scale, the Greenland shark lives for over 400 years. Think about that. There’ll be a Greenland shark alive today that was around during the English Civil War. (When I say “around”, it probably didn’t play an active part but you know what I mean.)
Now the Greenland shark does appear to lack motivation. It moves at less than a quarter of a mile per hour and, because it’s very big, it takes 13 seconds for its tail to arrive where its nose was. The Greenland shark has the careworn demeanour of a fish that is constantly asking itself, “What’s the point?” And this is a creature that has had all the time in the world to make a difference.
So that could be the sequel: a world where the average human lifespan is 400. How would that change us? Would we slow down, get bigger, do less and eat more squid? There’s so much to think about. But wait, if the world has been wiped out in part one, there can be no sequel.
Ah well, at least I don’t need to find the time to not write it.
