Too, you have the disappearance of the Bald Eagle, the sinking of Venice, and the disintegration of the sewers of New York. The Bald Eagle is cutting down his numbers at the same rate that man is multiplving his. There will be eight billion of man at the end and one of the Bald Eagle. The Venetians are pumping out, for their own use, the water of the underground lake that Venice floats on, so it's gradually slipping under. But they don't care. And New York's sewer system has five more years before it starts letting loose. But because it would take 17 years to be replaced, there's no point in trying now.

Part of the beauty of it all coming together at the finish is the emergence of drugs during these last few years to help us all achieve revelation before It goes. The motto of the celestial forces that slipped drugs into the experience of the now and future generations is "Let Everyone See the Clear Light Before He Sees the White Light." The "white light" being that of nuclear detonation.

And there's a certain Zen fulfillment in seeing it all go up in nuclear fission. Zen and Hinduism and most Eastern religions believe that a subatomic high level of pure energy is the highest level of consciousness- the level at which we merge with all existence and become one with it all. By losing our human values, we don't stop existing but rather change the state of our existence. Nuclear sim-

plification, as the war could be called, would return us to being the one of us that there only is.

The most depressing aspect about the end of the world is the thought of seeing several decades of science fiction go unfulfilled. For there never will be any gleaming silver spaceships gliding silently through the stars to civilizations entirely different from our own. Even travel around our own land will probably never become faster and more convenient than it is now, given the unavailability of land for needed new airports and the impossibility of speeding up traffic on expressways in and around the cities. We will never have robots that will do all man's work for him. Technology is carrying us all in the direction of Alphaville and New York City.

OF COURSE, when the world ends, it will probably be drawn out and painful. Most people assume that on the Judgment Day God will appear above the clouds shortly after sunset and announce, "Well, guys, this is about it worldwise." The end of the world is actually much more likely to see its 6 billion people choking for three weeks on the fleeting oxygen in the air, and wretching with discase from the rotting corpses. Many kooks and nuts will rise to brief power during these final weeks. The New York Times will stop publishing.

All of which raises the question of whether or not we should be doing anything to put off the end. For we don't like to see mass suffering, and the symptoms of the end, millions shortening their lives on polluted air and starving to death in overpopulated countries, are already with us. And because the binds of a complex technology make our every action a cause or effect on someone else's life, we are responsible for their agony.

What it comes down to is that we should act in a way consistent with the values of our existence in a given moment or a given situation. That is, we should try to fight the end by trying to mitigate the bad effects it has on our daily lives. We should not resist the idea that the world is going to end because that is going to happen and soon. But until it's over we should fight it- try to ban the bomb, CBW, DDT, and the SST- because the values of our existence are structured that way.

This does not mean that we should pretend that the end of the world is not coming or that we should ignore it. Rather, with the end of the world somewhere in mind, we should avoid doing absurd things just because we hope that they will be "remembered by mankind." Mankind will not be in a position to remember anything. We should not slave all our lives at dull jobs just to pile up enough cash so "our children will have everything."

People in this country have been convinced to work now for a reward they will get later. But the future never holds any value in the present. So the coming end shouldn't intimidate us now. Its threat is part of the definition of our existence. And because it exists, we should value it, too.

(If you were to tell me that you were a person, and that the end of the world was a threat to your existence as a person, then I would argue that your existence was that of a person whose life was threatened by the end of the world, and nothing threatence that existence.)

If realization of the coming end of the world has a disruptive effect on one's thinking, it is only because his values have been previously misaligned. For example, if you had been writing a book, you might think the book would be meaningless after the end of the world. However, you can't really write a book because you think people will read it and then think something of you, you have to write it because you enjoy doing it.

The moment of the end of the world should not be one of despair any more than the moment of your individual death should be. In fact, if we're all around at the time, we'll all enjoy in common the metaphysical glory of transition into another state of energy. Also the end of the world will have a great meaning. It will mean that it happened, as my meaning is that I exist.

Finally we leave ourselves open to the consideration that there might be intelligent life on other planets even though we will have finished off what there was of it here. The universe is not infinite; we know that for a number of reasons, one of which is that light can't escape it. But some astronomers have estimated that there should be one intelligent technological civilization in every 500,000 stars. This would mean that the nearest to us is less than 1000 light years away. Signals that we have been sending out with our radio astronomy equipment can reach that far. Others ought to get the message that we exist about 900 years after we stopped.