Asher Elbein writes in Scientific American today:
"There’s a phase of acute radiation exposure sometimes called the walking ghost phase. Receive a lethal dose, and your body initially seems not to notice. But a threshold has been passed, and your very cells are melting at the seams. You’re effectively dead by the time the symptoms start; your body just hasn't registered it yet.
Can an entire society have a walking ghost phase? In a funny and devastating climate essay from 2021, writer Sarah Miller describes a conversation with an editor: “I felt like all I did every day was try to act normal while watching the world end,” she wrote. “What kind of awareness quotient are we looking for? What more about climate change does anyone need to know? What else is there to say?”
The article continues:
"By the time you see Godzilla, in other words, the bomb has already dropped. By the time you see Godzilla, highways and pipelines sprawl out and the oil has flowed for decades. You still feel fine, normal, alive: not like a walking ghost at all. And then you see that rough beast ashore, and the weight of decades of missed chances crashes into you, and the sun burns down. You are still walking around. But it’s too late."
"Godzilla Is Warning Us Again about the Threats to Our Planet." It’s not just nukes: the power at the heart of the Godzilla franchise is our awareness of the global consequences of human folly. Asher Elbein, Scientific American, November 3, 2023.
"Five graphics that show some of the biggest threats facing the natural world," Words by Flo Cornall, graphics by Woojin Lee, CNN, November 6, 2023
"Deep in the Sonoran Desert, high on a mountain’s wind-swept peak, there lives a tree known as Bigelow 224."
"Written in the Wood," Sarah Kaplan, Bonnie Jo Mount, Emily Wright and Frank Hulley-Jones, Washington Post, Dec. 20, 2023.
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