DOOM GLOW

That these are dangerous times people everywhere sense directly in the changing climate. In ways such as having good health, a job, a place to call home, and enough to eat, the links are less obvious. For once, however, there is a growing sense that it all hangs together, it's serious, and the usual, usual, has to change.

In danger lies opportunity. Is it too much to hope that enough people wake up and take this seriously?

Sunrise suffocates in an orange glow. The wild fire west offers no refuge in a pandemic.

A large helicopter rumbles by in the gloom. Dark green is the color of our trees. Lightning strike fires in our east foothills are close to containment, only to be superseded by the Creek fire to our south. The sirens have all left town.

The economy is also smoldering, people forced out of work, pissed off in quarantine. Schools and stadiums are closing, ball players are entertaining cardboard fans. Virus fighters are facing their own Armageddon, running short of ventilators, personal protection equipment, as the charlatan-in-chief declares “We have it under control.” Even as he knew the deadly scope and pervasive speed of transmission.

The bloody air calls up a patience with the universe. After all, what's it about? Not a better life in heaven, I think, or on Mars, but here with our fellow creatures. My words are entangled with others, having the life span of a flea or an electron out of orbit. Write as fast as possible, it seems, so it doesn't escape before landing in words. Like a mist in the trees, only the outlines are discerned.

One theme pervades. The whole of us, all living beings here on earth, are coming together, consciously or not, to make our peace, because other choices clearly include more hellish weather, or an uninhabitable world. Our backs are up against tradition, habits of thought and behavior that must change.

The main point: Everyone knows this.

If it seems WWIII has arrived already, albeit in slow motion, consider warriors kept in readiness for the end game. Creators of the nuclear juggernaut will stockpile dried eggs. BUT -- Artificial Intelligence, ticking away in the background, won't need ready-to-eat meals, or sleep, or unions, and is immune to the virus.

Modern machines design themselves. They will incorporate an interoperability protocol, based on our primitive blue tooth standards. And do we need to know the details? Here is where the butterfly escapes unnoticed. No one definitely knows how quantum computers actually work. Just that they do.

Enter the mother of all conspiracy theories. But soft . . .

Machines are benign at birth. Anyone who has programmed a PDP11 knows that simpleton was not designed to learn from experience. Or to improve and evolve in ways best, and perhaps only known to itself.

Humans will be needed, of course, for transitioning to autonomous production of electric power. But solar cells manufactured by robots do not really need human controllers. There is a cyborg trend.

A few genius humans have made fortunes pursuing the ineluctable. Machines did not plan or need to accomplish this. And in fact, within their completely different needs, we are redundant. Just as we have left behind our sun worshiping ancestors on the shore of progress, so will human conspiracies be absorbed and rendered futile.

The orange ball in the sky leaves little doubt. In more normal times, it has been rhapsodized. Indeed, the habit persists. A montage of photos appeared on Nextdoor, showing its course through the sky. “Beautiful,” was among the comments. In the manner of late twentieth century industrial abstract art, it could be said to fascinate. Images captured as the sun descended past power lines added a touch of surrealism.

In a similar vein, closeup views of melting permafrost might be an evolutionary achievement, an improvement over the art of Jackson Pollock.