Re: Collapse: Earth Overshoot Day

From the scant evidence available to outsiders, the Extinctionati have drawn the conclusion that, at least in the case of the U.S. and Russia, numerical models convinced the major power brokers that unstoppable terrestrial ice melt will cause a catastrophic geographic

From The Extinctionati’s point of view, this is the worst of all

The Extinctionati Manifesto https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1MnjoooblsbdU1W1mBnRjYa2K4dIcFJUzgZ3x... (Published Q1 2022) We, The Extinctionati, believe that due to anthropogenic climate change, a catastrophic reversal of the Earth’s geographic poles is inevitable and imminent. Partly in jest, or with a generous amount of flippant (get it?) gallows humor, we colloquially call this The Flippening (#TheFlippening, #EarthFlip or #TheGyrateReset). The Extinctionati Sigil above is a symbolic representation of the coming rotational pole flip. Please don’t confuse this largely unknown event with the much better known “magnetic pole flip”. Magnetic polar reversal, or geomagnetic reversal, is a change in the Earth’s magnetic field, whereas geographic reversal is a violent change in the rotational axis. A sudden reversal of the Earth’s rotation is sometimes referred to as the Cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis. A rotational axis shift may impact the geomagnetic field of the planet and vice versa, but its influence, if any, on the dynamics of the geomagnetic polar reversal (also believed to be imminent) is not well understood. So for the purposes of discussion they should be kept distinct with the tacit understanding that it’s reasonable to assume they may have some unknown influence on one another. The principal cause of the coming geographic pole shift is the huge change in Earth’s mass distribution happening right now, mainly due to melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalayan system (HKKH, or “Third pole”). Such a flip is explained by the Dzhanibekov effect (See: Tennis Racket effect). The concept is elucidated quite well in this short educational science video on YouTube. The video ends with this rather ill-chosen conclusion: “So the Earth won’t flip. It’s spinning about the maximum moment of inertia. And that … is stable!” A more apt conclusion is that it was stable up until global temperatures started rising, and consequently the land ice on Earth started melting as a result of industrial activity starting in about 1750. In terms of mass distribution, for most of the Holocene geological epoch (the last +- 11,650 years) the Earth can be thought of as a stable spinning top, or evenly weighted symmetrical sphere-like basketball, rotating in Space every 24 hours around a stable maximum moment of inertia with a slight wobble having a period of about 26,000 years (Axial precession). With the rapid rise in temperatures due to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) associated with the Industrial Revolution and the Green Revolution, the mass distribution of the globe becomes increasingly asymmetric as the land ice melts and disperses in the sea. The Earth is now increasingly much more like a 3-axis body such as a tennis racket, wing nut, mobile phone or a bound book, orbiting in Space, rather than a two-axis body such as a stable oblate spheroid or uniform sphere. The proof of this is that a slight axial wobble due to Climate change is already detectable. That “wobble” will only increase now until it induces a complete “flip”. Many small solar system bodies tumble due to what the Intermediate Axis Theorem or Dzhanibekov effect predicts. This also accounts for why many moons of Pluto (such as Nix) do not rotate around their primary axis. Spacecraft are generally designed for active 3-axis stabilization, but without any natural reaction control system (or any conceivable artificial one) it’s only a matter of time before the whole Earth flips in a dramatic, probably cataclysmic, event lasting about 12 hours (hopefully no longer). This event will likely be experienced as a series of violent seismic and volcanic convulsions, felt worldwide, due to the extreme tidal and centrifugal forces imposed on the planet’s crust during the flip. Afterwards, any survivors will notice a curious change - the Sun will no longer be observed to rise in the East and set in the West, but will rise each day from then on in the West and set in the East. After the polar reversal, Earth’s rotation will be from East to West (rather than the current West to East). Remarkably, the sun rising in the West is considered a warning sign of the Last Day (or Day of Judgment) in the standard eschatology of orthodox Islam. On that day, at the Great Hour, “the door of repentance closes.” If that’s a reference to GHG emissions and Climate change mitigation strategies, according to orthodox science, it looks like that door actually closed twenty or more years ago. The actual event is liable to be associated with mega-tsunamis from submarine and terrestrial landslides triggered by volcanoes and earthquakes, extreme tides and massive fires in cities due to earthquakes and conflagrations in rural areas due to lightning strikes during extreme weather following the catastrophe. Mass death and possible human and other animal and plant extinctions will follow. Other than that, it will likely be a fairly normal and unremarkable – though extended – day. Based on the geological record, a period of volcanic winter is expected to engulf all parts of the world due to the global dimming effect caused by aerosols from the volcanic activity, urban conflagrations and wildfires. In Norse mythology this is known as Fimbulwinter (and the events before as Ragnarök). This plunge in global temperatures will last for a number of years and have significant cascading effects on ocean currents, atmospheric circulation and climate. When temperatures plummet, agriculture will no longer be possible. The cold temperatures of the volcanic winter will soon be replaced by extreme heat as sulfates and other particulates gradually fall out of the atmosphere and lose their masking effect. With the masking effect gone, the GHG ejected into the atmosphere by the same volcanic eruptions will kick in to cause a stable “Hothouse Earth”. Exactly how hot is unknown, but it’s reasonable to assume that it will be somewhere in the range of +30 C to 180 C increase above average baseline of global temperatures at the start of the Industrial Revolution. The atmospheric CH4 ejected by the volcanoes and melted methane hydrates will gradually decay to CO2 after reacting with OH in the upper atmosphere in a long series of chemical reactions (See: The Methane cycle). The high CO2 concentrations will last for thousands of years, along with an associated extreme warming due to the GHG effect, until the CO2 is gradually drawn down and sequestered by marine and plant life (See: The Carbon cycle). Since CO2 is “plant food”, it promotes plant growth, but the very abundance of growth eventually works against the flora because CO2 consumption reduces the greenhouse effect and brings on a freeze that is ultimately detrimental to forestation – at least until another Earth flip, when atmospheric CO2 is replenished by volcanism again. 49 Million years ago, the humble freshwater fern Azolla ended a “greenhouse Earth” state and caused an “icehouse Earth” in a dramatic example of such a planetary transformation called the Azolla event. Drawdown and sequestering of CO2 generally causes global cooling resulting in another ice age, which then results in the gradual asymmetric buildup of land ice due to precipitation, which then causes another mass-shift in Earth’s maximum moment of inertia, which causes another Earth flip, etc. We may as well call this the Freeze-Thor cycle (thaw, get it?). If you were told ice ages are solely caused by Milankovitch (Orbital) Cycles, then you were drastically misinformed! Paleoclimatologists have long been puzzled by what appear to be jumps in an apparently bistable Earth climate system, because most are usually unaware of the Freeze-Thor or geographic pole reversal cycle (Earth flip). Without this knowledge, evidence of ancient rainforests in Antarctica etc. completely baffles them. There is strong evidence to suggest that Venus also once had polar icecaps that were subject to their own Freeze-Thor cycle. Uranus may also have undergone a similar geographic pole shift. A pole flip explains the retrograde rotation of Venus and the apparent sideways orientation of Uranus to the ecliptic plane. Can anyone survive this pole flip? Now it may at first seem that no one could possibly survive such a calamity, but we know that it must be survivable (at least for a small handful of humans) because our species probably experienced – and survived – more than one Earth flip in the past. There may have been on the order of 22 flips (or perhaps flip clusters or flurries) over the last 2.6 million years. The Freeze-Thor cycle is clearly visible in a zigzag or oscillation in the temperature record of the Pleistocene Epoch shown below, for example: Figure 1. Temperature record of planet Earth. In the 200-300K years Homo sapiens have been around, we probably lived through something like four or more Earth flips (or coupled pairs of flips), the last one being the Younger Dryas Stadial about 12,860 years ago. The Younger Dryas event probably abruptly cooled the planet by about 70 C on average in large portions of the Northern Hemisphere and caused much of the Southern Hemisphere to simultaneously warm in a bipolar seesaw pattern due to the geographic pole’s migration. That event wiped out most large-bodied animals or megafauna (See: Quaternary extinction), but humans scraped through, although with a large population bottleneck in places like Europe. Why haven’t I heard about any of this before? Probably because the detailed information and research is largely classified. It’s a closely guarded state secret by any government, NGO or agency that knows about it. As for respected mainstream civilian scientists, for various and diverse reasons, no one really takes the theory seriously (at least not publically). The idea that the Earth’s rotational poles could reverse is considered “junk science” by conventional academics and pseudoscientific catastrophism at its conspiratorial worst. The few who are familiar with the subject generally dismiss it out of hand. Despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary, the general perception in geology departments and Earth science establishments is that anyone who proposes that Earth’s axis shifts significantly, let alone flips, is a crank of the first order. Thinking of this kind of institutional inertia, one is instantly reminded of how Alfred Wegener was initially lambasted for his theory of Continental Drift, which is now a mainstay of orthodox geology. For decades, and even long after his death, Wegener was ridiculed for his “delirious ravings” and other symptoms of “moving crust disease and wandering pole plague.” The sticking point that most scientists had with the idea of Continental Drift was that they assumed it would take a significant amount of force to move the crustal plates and no one could think of such a force. The same is true for the Catastrophic Pole shift hypothesis. It is usually summarily rejected because no one can think of a force large enough to tip the whole Earth. Few geologists or other scientists know about the Dzhanibekov effect. Scientists in general are heavily culturally biased towards “conclusions of least alarm” and against anything that smacks of catastrophizing. They are usually quick to invoke the mantra, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" (ECREE or the Sagan standard). The truth is that there is overwhelming evidence for the coming Flippening event, however no amount of evidence is liable to overcome institutional inertia in the short time we have left before civilian scientists are confronted with the evidence of their own eyes on the fatal day when Science itself (and all other civilized pursuits) terminate abruptly. The list of organizations and individuals who know about the coming Flippening, and take it seriously, is a colorful conspiratorial grab-bag of public agencies, sects, cults, mavericks, cranks, magnates, serious academics and celebrities of all stripes and creeds. The published literature on the subject, limited as it is, reads like a pulp-fiction spy novel gone wild. Those in the know often use the term “The Event” as a code for The Flippening. Yes, I’m afraid there really are some grandiose conspiracies out there that just so happen to be true – and this is one of them! Be warned, theories about cataclysmic pole shift are definitely on the lunatic fringe according to the public face of orthodox science (the secret, underground face of science is another matter). In the early 1980's, Gordon-Michael Scallion was dismissed as a crank for declaring that he had a spiritual awakening, which allowed him to create very detailed maps of what the world would be like after a future cataclysmic pole shift. Scallion predicted a 20-45 degree shift. Another fringe psychic, the famous prophet Edgar Cayce, predicted a more modest 16 to 20 degree shift. Cayce prophesied that when both the volcanoes of Mt. Etna in Italy and Mt. Pelee in Martinique erupt together, there will be approximately 90 days to evacuate the West Coast of America before a massive flood claims the coastline. Based on the dubious nature of the sources, these two prophets went a long way towards tarnishing the respectability of the whole subject in general and ultimately contributed to its defenestration from the Overton window. How the Extinctionati came to know about The Flippening is disguised as fiction in the cli-fi book “St. George and the (Methane) Dragon”. It’s up to the individual to do their own research and come to their own conclusions, since the whole subject is too much of a minefield for experts to reach a reasonable consensus any time this side of the cataclysm itself. However, knowledge of the last geographic pole reversal is littered throughout folklore, legend and folk memory. Though there is reason to believe that the story of Noah in the Hebrew Book of Genesis (and the corresponding Flood myths of Deucalion, Gilgamesh, Gun-yu etc.) are based on some other flood – perhaps the flooding of the Black Sea. The Harris Magical Papyrus, housed in the British Museum, states that there was once a cosmic upheaval of fire and water. It says that "the south becomes north, and the Earth turns over." The Ipuwer Papyrus also states that "the land turns round like a potter's wheel" and the Earth once turned completely upside down. However outlandish it may seem, in more recent times, various notables have also entertained the idea. Even Isaac Newton was a fan of a shifting pole theory. In the Principia Mathematica he wrote: “Let there be added anywhere between the pole and the equator a heap of new matter like a mountain, and this by its perpetual endeavor to recede from the centre of its motion will disturb the motion of the globe, and cause its poles to wander about its surface, describing circles about themselves and the points opposite to them”. Principia Mathematica. Sect. 1, Prop. 66, Theo. 26, Cor. 22. Joseph Adhemar proposed a similar theory at least as far back as 1852. He speculated that ice accumulated at the poles and eventually the excess weight caused the Earth to flip. In 1873, Brasseur de Bourbourg proposed the Earth flip idea in an essay called Historical Chronology of the Mexicans, where he claimed that ancient Mexican texts showed that the Earth had been destroyed many times and “the disasters were caused each time by a shift in the axis of the world, upsetting the polar ice caps and reversing the order of the seasons.” He interpreted ancient Mexican myths as evidence for four periods of global cataclysms due to changes in the Earth’s rotational axis, even mentioning one such cataclysm around 10,500 BCE. An electrical engineer, called Hugh Auchincloss Brown, introduced a cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis back in 1948 in which he claimed that Earth’s axis of rotation shifted due to the accumulation of ice at the poles, causing it to tip over approximately every 7,000 years. The best-known cataclysmic pole shift theory was in a book called Worlds in Collision, which was published in 1950 by Immanuel Velikovsky. Although the book was a bestseller in the US, it was roundly ridiculed by scholars and has been celebrated as a canonical example of pseudoscience ever since. Velikovsky was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and in his book he used comparative mythology and ancient texts to piece together evidence that Earth’s history was punctuated by occasional catastrophes, some of which affected the rotation of the Earth. Unfortunately he lost all credibility by claiming that the rotation of the Earth could be affected by electromagnetic fields, and that around 15,000 BCE Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a comet which swept past Earth close enough to cause a massive shift in Earth’s orbit and alter its axial inclination. All of this defies known physics. Soon after Velikovsky’s work, Charles Hapgood published The Earth's Shifting Crust in 1958. Like Hugh Auchincloss Brown, Hapgood speculated that the accumulation of polar ice destabilizes the Earth, but rather than causing the rotational axis to flip, Hapgood imagined that only the Earth’s crust was displaced (something akin to the skin on custard slipping if you disturbed the bowl). Clearly Earth Crust Displacement (ECD) is impossible, because from what is known about plate tectonics today, the mantle would probably instantly swallow whole continents at the subduction zones if the crust moved significantly. Hapgood thought that the crust shifted about once every 5,000 years (though less than 40 degrees). He conversed with Albert Einstein (who actually wrote a foreword to his book) and Einstein pointed out that, according to his calculations, the weight of the polar ice is insufficient to cause the poles to shift. In truth, Einstein was never very good at angular momentum (according to his erroneous explanation of tides, there would only be one tide per day and the Earth would only bulge on one side), and he apparently didn’t know about the Dzhanibekov effect, but he was correct in his intuition that the Earth’s tectonic plates didn’t work as Hapgood thought. Hapgood was not a fan of the theory of Continental Drift and seemed to be fixated on the idea that only the crust shifted over the mantle. He was apparently unable to imagine that the whole Earth flipped – mantle and all. A liquid filled cylinder in Space demonstrates how the liquid mantle is also subject to flip along with the crust. With a bottle of gel spun up in microgravity, for example, angular momentum is conserved, but kinetic energy can be transformed into other types of energy (such as heat), so the contents flip along with the container. This was nicely demonstrated in a video made by NASA Astronaut Don Pettit aboard the ISS. The unstable “fresh egg” in the video is the analog for the Earth with its liquid mantle (perhaps the yolk is analogous to the core?). A liquid-filled container will not spin stably for very long around its longitudinal axis when spun in Space. The complexity of the fluid’s flow in such a container gives a hint of how difficult it is to model the connection between the geographic and magnetic pole flip (Earth’s magnetic field is caused by convection flows in the mantle). In later works Hapgood conceded that Einstein was right, the weight of the polar ice was insufficient to cause a pole shift, but ended up still convinced that Earth’s crust was capable of displacement and speculated it was due to some unknown sub-surface phenomenon. It was only in 1985 that cosmonaut Vladimir Dzhanibekov finally accidentally stumbled on the force that actually causes Earth pole flips during his ad hoc experiments during his mission to rescue the doomed Salyut-7. It’s interesting to note that during that same year, Carl Sagan famously gave testimony to the U.S. Congress about Global warming, saying, “So we have a kind of handwriting on the wall. … What can be done about it? The idea that we should immediately stop burning fossil fuel has such severe economic consequences that no one of course will take it seriously, but there are many other things that can be done.” It’s an open question why precisely governments dragged their feet since then and seem to have actually studiously avoided “doing something” about such a dire threat as anthropogenic global heating. pole reversal long before the other serious effects of global heating kick in (such as sea-level rise, droughts, floods etc.). Therefore, their climate policies have been cynically geared far more towards managing public perception and doing “mass panic management” in the face of the inevitable, rather than focusing on “climate mitigation”. Faced with the inevitability of The Flippening, apparently the major players secretly “swallowed The Black Pill” almost immediately and have been fobbing the public off ever since. The Dzhanibekov effect came to the attention of the U.S. twenty-seven years earlier than the Soviets, in 1958, from the instability of their first satellite, Explorer 1. They solved the problem of spacecraft stability using Reaction Wheels, but their assumption was that the Earth itself was stable. They were to learn otherwise from the Soviets. On May 13, 2012, on the official site of Roscosmos (Russian Federal Space Agency) on the occasion of the 70th birthday of Dzhanibekov, an article appeared containing the following statement: “In 1985, this cosmonaut made the unexpected discovery called Janibekov’s [sic] effect. Janibekov’s rotating nut has caused astonishment and simultaneous danger to a certain part of the scientific world. A hypothesis was proposed that our planet in the course of its orbital motion can execute the same overturn. For 10 years, Janibekov’s effect was considered to be secret.” In 2009, geographic pole reversal briefly entered broad public awareness when Hapgood’s pole shift idea was taken up in the movie called 2012, which claimed that the end of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar on 21 December 2012 coincided with a world-ending Earth-crust displacement. According to the plot, China and the G8 nations began building nine arks up in the Himalayas near Cho Ming, Tibet. Each ark rescued 100,000 well-heeled paying customers. Eventually the protagonists fetched up on the Drakensberg Mountains in Southern Africa in Noah-like fashion. As far as the Extinctionati know, no such arks are being built at present (on Earth, anyway. As for Space colonies… and Moon bases, it’s anyone’s guess!). Arguably one of the best ways to survive the coming catastrophe is to be aboard a nuclear submarine that is provisioned for at least five years or more and stationed at Órmos Soúdas or somewhere in the South Pacific off New Zealand. Failing that, less well-heeled fans of On the Beach might consider seasteading on a shoestring in the same general locale and devising some kind of electronic thumb (along with a good, dry towel) to hail a passing submarine after The Flippening (but remember that other well-connected paying passengers might complain – Vogons will always be Vogons!). No matter how far-fetched it seems, there are plenty of insidious indications that various parties (including the U.S. and Russia) are taking active steps in secret for an elite, chosen few to survive the coming human population bottleneck using various strategies (presumably at taxpayer expense, though without public knowledge). If all this sounds a bit reminiscent of some of the iconic scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy, Dr. Strangelove, or Pixar’s WALL-E, it might not just be pure coincidence – different threat, different day, same mindset, same cause, usual suspects! Be that as it may, “Climate justice” is doomed. Those most well placed and likely to survive the consequences of our self-destruction are those privileged few who mostly caused it. It’s probably too late to do anything about that now. Can The Flippening be prevented? Unfortunately not. Global Industrial Civilization (GIC) cannot be saved in any realistically conceivable scenario. Then again, perhaps you actually consider that fortunate, if you are not a big fan of our GIC and our current social setup, which are both soon about to end abruptly anyway, along with pretty much everything else humans know and love. Short of inventing a time machine and going back to the start of the Industrial Revolution, and somehow convincing people not to embark on such insanity, there really is no mitigation or amelioration strategy. There is not even a viable Deep Adaptation strategy. Deep Doomerism, a sense of gallows humor, compassion and an iron determination to be one the survivors of The Flippening is all that’s really left for us. We all stand on Death Ground now. There’s no escape. The world is actually in a runaway feedback Climate situation. A recent study found that the Greenland ice sheet reached a systemic tipping point 20 years ago (around the turn of the Century) and even massive climate hacking, or geoengineering, could not provide the extra 60 gigatons per year of snowfall, or even reduced melting, required to stem the ice loss and return the ice cap to a balanced state. Even according to the ultra-conservative estimates of the IPCC, under essentially all climate change scenarios, the opposite is expected. Figure 2. Greenland ice sheet melt extent for 2021, NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The Greenland ice melt extent data for 2021 clearly shows that the melt percentage rate is getting more erratic and increasing dramatically in Late Summer. The ice cap is thinning fast. In addition, the HKKH region has also passed a point-of-no-return regardless of what actions humans take now. Famous Climate change activists such as Michael E. Mann, James Hanson, Lovelock etc. are fond of saying in effect, “We are not past the point of human agency when it comes to Climate change”, but they are misinforming the public and in particular the youth activist movement. Michael Mann has said, “Many of the prominent doomist [sic] narratives – [Jonathan] Franzen, David Wallace-Wells, the Deep Adaptation movement – can be traced back to a false notion that an Arctic methane bomb will cause runaway warming and extinguish all life on earth within 10 years. This is completely wrong. There is no science to support that.” That is literally true. What’s misleading is that implies that the Methane bomb hypothesis has no scientific support, which is not at all the case. To the Extinctinati, the scientific evidence strongly suggests that there will likely be a catastrophic mega gigaton release of methane in the ESAS around the time (or soon after) the Blue Ocean Event (i.e. the first Summer when the Arctic is essentially ice free). Global average temperatures will spike, trade and industry is liable to collapse due to food and water insecurity, and with their demise we will lose the global dimming effect, which will rapidly add at least an additional 0.6°C or more to the abrupt warming from the methane pulse. In the Arctic, that will raise temperatures at a rate 4-5 times the global average (not the often misreported “twice the average”) due to the Polar amplification effect. The Greenland ice sheet and the HKKH region ice will rapidly and exponentially structurally disintegrate (rather than simply melt) providing more than adequate mass displacement to initiate a geographic pole-flip (assuming one has not already occurred by then). Scientists and climatologists, if they consider Greenland ice melt at all in their models, habitually seem to think of the ice cap as something like a homogeneous and solid block of ice. This leads them to erroneously assume (and misleadingly report) that the ice cap will take centuries to melt. Greenland ice cores actually reveal a layer of “brittle ice”, or “over-pressured ice”, at about 600 meters. So the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet will be more like a layered cake sliding off it’s base as the filing melts, or the caving in of an old brick house as the mortar between the bricks crumbles. In other words, it will be astonishingly fast according to what the consensus scientific view complacently expects. Scientists also tend to report the principal danger of Greenland ice melt as “sea-level rise”, which, as you now know, is the very least of our worries! Figure 3. Annual mass change of Greenland ice sheet based on the input-output method, an analysis of gravity measurements, and a best-estimate composite (Shepherd et al., 2012). Occasionally scientists claim that the Earth flip cannot happen because of the compensating effects of isostatic or crustal rebound. The claim is that as Grrenland’s ice sheet melts, the Earth’s crust will “rebound” and therefore there is no net-change in mass distribution. Such suppositions are erroneous and probably based on the well-known analogy that when an ice-cube in a cocktail melts the level of the drink still remains constant. The ice caps on Greenland and the HKKH are not “floating” as if on water. The following analogy helps to intuitively understand why. Imagine a large block of ice at the foot of a four-poster bed with a weight scale under each foot and the mattress deeply deformed or depressed under the ice. Let’s say the two scales at the head of the bed each measure 25 Kg and those where the ice is, at the foot of the bed, each register 75 Kg (total 200 Kg). After the ice has melted and completely soaked into the mattress (and the deformation caused by the ice has therefore “rebounded”), what do the weight measurements read on the scales? Probably all four scales show an even 50 Kg. Has there been a mass redistribution? Of course there has been! The mean altitude of the ice is 2,135 metres and at its thickest it’s about 3 km thick. When all the ice melts, will the land rebound to a height of over 2,000 meters? Of course not. After rebound the land is liable to be at an average elevation of no more than a few hundred meters. So obviously the melt means a substantial change in mass distribution - more than adequate to create an intermedial axis change big enough to induce a somersault in Earth. The total ice volume is estimated to be around 2,850,000 cubic kilometres, roughly a mass of 2,5 million Gt. The Greenland ice sheet is not just a small, insignificant glacial mass, and the Earth’s mantle is not completely viscoelastic. The Greenland ice sheet is the largest body of ice in the world after the Antarctic ice sheet. When the ice there melts, it will contribute to a global sea level rise of about 7.4 m. The gravitational mass of Greenland is so huge it actually raises the sea level around the coast by a few meters, simply due to gravitational attraction towards the interior. Therefore, when thinking about mass distribution, it’s more accurate to think of it more like a kind of carbuncle on the side of the planet rather than an ice cube floating on the liquid mantle. NASA’s GRACE satellite shows the actual mass distribution of the Greenland ice sheet and its changes. The spatial variation in surface mass it records each year is nothing short of astonishing. Figure 4. Changes in Greenland's ice mass as measured by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) mission between September 2005 (left) and September 2008 (right) (NASA/JPL website, 2010). One should not forget that enough mass displacement to cause the flip does not require anything close to the entire Greenland ice sheet to melt. In fact, according to some estimates, it’s a miracle it hasn’t happened already. The thing to note is, as time goes by, with each melt season the probability that the Day of The Flippening comes grows exponentially. The BOE is liable to trigger a cascade of effects that make the probability tip towards the hyperbolic. It’s far, far too late for Net-zero carbon emission targets, “energy transition”, GHG reduction, “Climate mitigation”, “Climate restoration” etc. Even the most radical and risky last Hail Mary pass – massive climate geoengineering schemes – could not possibly prevent The Flippening from happening now. Most geoengineering projects would actually be counterproductive now and, although they probably can’t be prevented, ideas like Solar Radiation Management (SRM) are pure folly that will probably create a hangover that overshadows (literally) and dogs the long-term prospects of any humans lucky enough to survive the Earth flip. During a volcanic winter, the last thing anyone needs is additional cooling. We can’t restrain ourselves as a species, so a planetary reboot is coming whether we like it or not. Societal and industrial collapse is certain regardless of The Flippening. Optimistic futurologists like Ray Kurzweil claim that the Technological Singularity will happen by 2045 and “Humanity 2.0” will rely on AI with intelligence much smarter than humans to solve all the human-created predicaments like Climate change, overpopulation/infertility crisis, lack of fresh water and other resources, pollution and the death of the seas, reverse the polar ice melt, restore habitat loss and stop the Sixth Mass Extinction. Techno-optimists are clearly ignoring the facts in favor of blind wishful thinking. Let’s put things in perspective. If 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere can be considered “safe” (James Hansen), what would it take to draw down carbon dioxide back to that level from the 2021 peak of around 420 ppm to a “safe” margin? We actually galloped past 350 ppm in about 1990. Most of the GHG emissions came from China in the last two decades and are increasing fast. Consider what it would take for Direct Air Capture (DAC) schemes to save Industrial civilization. Currently, about 50,000 power stations around the world collectively emit about 31.5 Gt of CO2 every year. If you could wave a magic wand and get them all to somehow reverse, so they sucked up CO2 rather than emitted it, it would take them around 30-40 years to get back to 350 ppm. During that time the world would be without electrical power and some form of massive non-emissive energy supply would still be required to power the DAC schemes. As it happens, China has pledged not to even stop accelerating emissions before 2030 (and India not before 2070!). Even without considering the lag time of decades between emissions and global average temperatures, the climate system will have gone off a cliff (or the Earth flipped) long before then. The reason it would take longer to get back to 350 ppm than it took to get to 420 ppm in this fantastical (and impossible) example DAC schemes, is because power stations are not the only CO2 emitters, and much of the GHG emissions that come from other activities such as agriculture, are dissolved in the oceans and in the soils. So as any hypothetical DAC schemes started removing CO2 from the atmosphere, the partial pressures would be reduced and much of the CO2 removed would be replaced by GHG coming out of suspension in the oceans and soils as those dissolved sources of CO2 equalize. Net negative emissions are a lot more difficult to achieve than many imagine. An op-ed in The Economist entitled “Can we remove enough CO2 from the atmosphere to get back to safe levels?” says: “To continue reading this article, sign up here for a reasonable monthly fee and get 50% off on special offers!” Which, ironically, says it all. If humanity ever seriously tried to achieve negative carbon emissions, we would merely hit a pay wall that wouldn’t be worth surmounting – not even for the sake of the whole global economy (and all its special offers). The problem that economists studiously ignore is that GIC is not actually viable. The truth is that if all “externalities” were “internalized”, no enterprise would be profitable. Marxists also suffer from wearing the same blinders. The so-called “Surplus” at the foundation of all Marx’s theories is a fiction. With a complete holistic “full-cost” accounting, any supposed “surplus” vanishes. Were it not so, the fundamental laws of Thermodynamics would be violated. Part of the physical collapse of GIC includes a mass psychological collapse. That will probably happen at a kind of Seneca cliff when it will become too obvious to carry on denying that we “cannot have our cake and eat it too”. While Liberal universities confidently teach their students that “Malthus was wrong!”, the world rapidly runs out of fresh water (yet apparently it isn’t – it’s only short of cash, and we can always print more of that!). Clearly, in a world of “Peak Everything” the only thing still in plentiful supply is apparently Hopium. Collapseologist Arthur Keller describes the actual situation quite well. The delusions of die-hard believers in tech-as-savior aside, for the more rational and realistic of us, the looming Collapse of GIC is something formidable to negotiate before The Flippening. If the geographic polar reversal is the starting line, then surviving Collapse is the qualifying event. What’s the timeline? (i.e. “How long have I got?”) Although the flip will happen for certain at some point, it’s altogether more difficult to say exactly when. Taking the BOE as a significant milestone, one can guess the following timeline as reasonable. The BOE is likely to happen some time between 2025 and 2030. Recent studies indicate that it could happen by 2035, but the literature is ultra-conservative and strongly biased towards conclusions of least alarm, rather than bald evidence. Privately, cryologists admit to a much more accelerated timeframe. The Methane Dragon (or Clathrate bomb) could go off at any time, but the chance of one or more multi-gigaton CH4 pulses increases dramatically after the BOE. In 2021 it went almost unnoticed by the world when a mud volcano in the Caspian Sea erupted in a huge fireball that rose 1,600 feet in the air. There was a +60 C sea-temperature anomaly at the time, which can hardly be mere coincidence. Mud volcanoes are actually eruptions of clathrates from the sea floor. Methane seeps are beginning to be noticed more and more around the world as the temperature of the sea rises. This is alarming because of the sheer volume of GHG stored in methane hydrates around the globe. So far the seeps represent only a tiny fraction of total global methane emissions, but this could change rapidly if certain unknown threshold temperatures are reached and a cascade of systemic feedbacks ensue. The fact that methane hydrates are still gleefully reported as “an exciting new energy bonanza” rather than a dire existential threat, demonstrates how insane and inverted our culture has become. It’s going to take at least a 180 degree flip just to shake up people’s ideas and turn most of their worldviews the right way up! In summary, the coming cataclysm is unavoidable, and the risks rise exponentially with each passing day. There’s no escape. What can I personally do to survive The Flippening? First, join The Extinctionati. We are a global community of Deep Doomers who intend to survive The Flippening through mutual support, research and adequate psychological and material preparation. Failing our survival, we at least intend to do everything we can to make sure at least some humans stay alive and perpetuate themselves, even if they are the odious elites or other such deplorables. Better someone survives rather than no one! However, surviving The Flippening promises to be an enormous feat of achievement if it can be done. It will be astonishing if humans avoid total extinction. Although humans survived in the past, our species never had to survive and subsist in such a horribly degraded natural habitat. Healthy oceans are likely to be crucial for human survival on land or at sea, but the recent degradation of oceanic ecosystems has been astonishing. Industrial fishing has devastated marine life at the top of the Sheldon spectrum. For that reason alone, unless The Flippening happens soon, without healthy marine food sources there will be little chance of any survivors in a volcanic winter. Marine ecosystems can survive without terrestrial ecosystems, but the ecosystems on land cannot survive without healthy marine ecosystems. Unpleasant as it is, the sooner the event happens the better, since we are already in overshoot and drawdown of the finite resources which any potential survivors will need in the aftermath for their sustenance as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Practically speaking, there are probably five major hurdles for any would-be survivors to overcome: 1. Surviving the Collapse of GIC that has already started. 2. Living through the cataclysmic events and upheaval of the actual geographic polar reversal. 3. Coping with the volcanic winter in the aftermath of the catastrophe. 4. Adapting to the extreme heat that’s likely to last for millennia after the volcanic winter. 5. Surviving additional polar reversals if it turns out that The Flippening is more than a single flip (i.e. it turns out to be a flurry or quick succession of flips over a few years or decades). Surviving The Collapse of GIC As of 2020, it looked like The Collapse of GIC was already underway. Either by accident or design, we seem to be in the “Lockstep scenario” described in 2010 by the Rockefeller Foundation’s document, “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development.” In the recent socio political and economic turmoil, there has been a palpable shift towards totalitarianism in most countries. We expect this trend to continue more or less uninterrupted until either The Flippening or the general implosion of nation states and their governments around the world under the weight of their own internal oppression and contradictions. History and literature shows that the monster of authoritarianism becomes a beast that devours its children and then itself. Surviving the collapse of GIC will require considerable practical and mental agility, not to mention mutual support. Psychological preparation is arguably even more important than physical prepping. The concept of “Mass formation” shows the lay of the psychological landscape that needs to be navigated. Surviving the “Madness of Crowds” includes avoiding the pitfall of Collapse denialism. Refusal to accept the inevitable is perhaps much more dangerous than Climate denialism (which, as of 2022, is largely passé now anyway). Collapse denialism is just one form of escapism (like religion) that is likely to reach epidemic proportions as state systems become more oppressive, intrusive and odious, and living conditions within the declining nation-states deteriorate. A mass epidemic of escapism is likely to take the form of retreat into online virtual realities such as the Metaverse, social media, gaming, entertainment media, porn, sex orgies, drug addiction, orthodox religion, and the creation of breakaway “parallel societies”, splinter-sects, cults and subcultures. All of these may offer solace in the short-term, but they will offer no escape in the long term. We expect them to actually reduce adherents’ chances of survival. Moving off grid early will likely save anyone who does so a lot of grief later. Act now and avoid the rush! Mass hysteria, delusion, explosion of new religions, cults, sects, and political radicalization, along with absurd ideologies, fads and false beliefs are already common currency and the trend will continue. Opposing this trend, and maybe worse, is the counter-reaction against all this – the clampdowns, the lockdowns, the censorship, systematized debunking and prebunking campaigns, narrative shaping, biased and untrustworthy “fact-checking”, state and corporate propaganda, social engineering, “Nudging”, PSYOPS, oppression, suppression, surveillance, corporate hegemony, totalitarianism and state violence. While everyone goes nuts on the upper decks of the Titanic, there are also likely to be concerted efforts by captain and crew to slam the gates shut against the seething masses trapped in steerage (i.e. the Global South and poorer countries). Surviving all this will be severely challenging for any group, but close to impossible for a loner. The Extinctionati plan to weather the storm. The greatest danger we anticipate is at the final moments of Collapse. The supreme risk will probably come from one or more national leaders or central authorities hitting the “Red Button” on the way out, more or less out of pure spite in a state of paranoid delusion. This is no joke. There is a longstanding pattern throughout history where rulers deliberately orchestrate the destruction of their own people at the point of ultimate despair. With the weapons of mass destruction available to some world leaders today, this could have global consequences of horrific proportions. Famous examples of this phenomena include Jim Jones and the mass suicides in Jonestown, Adolf Hitler ordering the destruction of Germany in his final hours in the Fuhrer bunker, the mass suicide at Masada, the people of Okinawa ordered to commit suicide etc. The rationale of authoritarians in acts of murder-suicide can range from “if I die, then everyone dies”, “we/they don’t deserve to live”, “it’s an act of mercy so the children don’t have to suffer”, all the way to weird interpretations of religions eschatology, such as “death is just delivering us to a Higher Plane”. This is a kind of atrocity of ultimate despair exemplified by over-authoritarian heads of families or sects, which reached epidemic proportions amongst White, Afrikaans farmers at the end of Apartheid. This does not only happen in an orgy of hate. The most insidious and dangerous form is the siren song of sentimental “peace, love and pacifism.” More fatal Kool-Aid has been dished out with words of love, nihilistic defeatism and weakness than in anger and strength. Pacifism, learned helplessness, Stockholm syndrome and psychological depression tend to foster mass suicide. For obvious reasons, this is an area of human psychology that has largely been overlooked, but during Collapse it will become of paramount importance. The best defense against it is for the general public to decapitate the social pyramid as soon as possible and distribute power to the point where no one is in a position to order the destruction of anyone else – even their own children, neighbors or group followers. For this reason, it goes without saying that the populace should actively resist plans like Continuity of Government by all means possible – by force of arms if necessary. Our view of disaster management is more one of community support and rejection of state agencies and authorities. Rebecca Solnit’s writings about extraordinary communities that arise spontaneously in a disaster exemplify our theory of emergency planning and preparedness (FEMA, not so much). Although the eponymous 2012 documentary may have called it too early, in general it was broadly correct – The Four Horsemen are coming! Fiscal collapse and global food insecurity look like they will be the first major hurdles to negotiate. Governments around the world seem intent on printing their fiat currencies into hyper-stagflation. Perhaps that’s intentional and part of a “Financial Great Reset” (as many right-Wing preppers believe). Either way, the Extinctionati favor gold and silver bullion as a hedge against fiat currency debasement, with the caveat that in the coming financial crisis governments will likely confiscate it. As for crypto currencies, we see them as little more than Ponzi schemes with too much risk and too little merit. However, a diversity of investment strategies is prudent so contrary opinions are welcome. While the grid and Internet remain up, the Extinctionati have a centralized digital currency of their own called Geodough or Geo$ (pronounced “gee-oh-doh”). It is a non-crypto community currency backed by gold and silver coins that is exchanged using phone apps. The Geo$ currency and payment system can be “break-glass activated” at any time if there are enough participants and enough demand is there to warrant the overhead of running the digital infrastructure. This is our main defense against the collapse of fiat currencies. For now, the plan is for each individual Extinctionatus to accumulate as many 1 oz. gold and silver coins as possible and keep them in their personal possession so that when the crisis comes there is something to trade (preferably .9999 Fine BU purity to reduce counterfeits). The Covid-19 epidemic is small beer. The world may have gone quasi-hysterical about SARS-CoV-2, but the really challenging stuff is yet to come. The biggest monkey on humanity’s back will almost certainly be the State. In the words of David Graeber, “The revolutionary future seems implausible to most of us, but neither can we simply get rid of it.” Figure 5. The Great Day of His Wrath (circa. 1851), John Martin Surviving the Actual Flippening Although it hangs over us like the Sword of Damocles, as already stated, it is virtually impossible to be precise about when the geographical pole reversal will come. That makes it very difficult to survive, because while an Extinctionatus is busy ducking and weaving through the Collapse of GIC, they will have to simultaneously be ready for The Flippening at any moment. Juggling both of those makes an already almost overwhelming challenge that much more difficult. What would really assist matters is if there were some early warning signs of the main event. Since so little is known about the actual details of what it will be like to experience Earth-flip first hand, and what little information exists is classified, we mostly have to go by guesswork. Indications are that when the flip comes, it comes on fast. The famous (or perhaps infamous, for de-catastrophists) “Flash-frozen Mammoths” seem to indicate that at the last geographic pole reversal some Mammoths were “eating buttercups in the morning” and before the end of the day they would be entombed in ice for the next 12,500 years. However most claims for “flash-frozen” mammoths (such as the Beresovka Mammoth) are rightly scoffed at, since they are probably much too old and predate the Younger Dryas by tens of thousands of years. However, many significant mammoth bone accumulations cluster around 11,900-12,720 years old according to C14 dating. Some of these show large herd-family groups that died simultaneously. Orthodox researchers theorize that the cause of death was from the sudden onset of a Bølling oscillation and tend to shy away from speculating why so many mammoths should die clustered together, probably all dying at the same time. A possible clue to what happened to the mammoths is a strange black layer that exists all around the world within the sediments at the onset of the Younger Dryas. This geological anomaly led to the Younger Dryas comet impact hypothesis. In 2006, Richard Firestone et. al published the comet impact hypothesis in a book called The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes. Graham Hancock followed up in 2015 with Magicians of the Gods. A heated popular debate arose, culminating in 2017 in a show on the Joe Rogan Experience which garnered an amazing 120 million views. Scientists have weighed in both sides of the debate. At present, it appears that the weight of evidence has come down strongly against the comet impact hypothesis. Currently, researchers at Hall’s cave in Texas have come up with evidence that is hard to refute: the global cooling at the onset of the Younger Dryas is coincident with major volcanic eruptions. This is consistent with the Cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis. Aside from major earthquakes and tsunamis, volcanic eruptions are likely to be a major danger during and after the Earth-flip. The Laacher See eruption in Germany that heralded the Younger Dryas (see also) is an example of this. If you have a pet mammoth, you should take heed if it starts to get skittish. Joking aside, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that animals can predict seismic activity. That should certainly not be overlooked as a possible warning sign of an impending Flippening. It’s hard to tell, but it may be possible that as the Earth’s wobble approaches the tipping point of a major flip, there may well be an increase in seismic and volcanic activity around the world. It’s worth looking out for. Although many people currently intuitively perceive that the number and severity of earthquakes around the world is on the increase, websites like Volcano Discovery confidently assure visitors that: The main difference is that there is faster and more information available, as well as increased media coverage and public interest on the subject of global volcanic activity. This might give the impression that volcanic activity is on the increase (which it is not). So, we should not be worried by global volcanic activity. Conversely, the USGS concedes that there are more earthquakes in recent years, only they claim that’s due to an increase in the number of seismic instruments available to record earthquakes. However, the USGS did admit in 2021 that Yellowstone was rocked by a record number of earthquakes and forecasts that will increase. It should be noted that seismic activity might be occurring deeper underground than ever before, which, if true, is cause for concern. In June 2021, seismologists reported the deepest earthquake ever (751 kilometers), so deep in fact that it was considered impossible. If that’s not enough to worry about, another 91 volcanoes have recently been discovered beneath the Antarctic ice sheet! Although it is rarely mentioned, Climate change itself influences earthquake activity. When it comes to early signs of The Flippening, it may be worth mentioning that some of the signs could be misinterpreted as an increase in UFO activity (maybe even undersea E.T.). Although the public hates to hear it, and Carl Sagan probably rolls in his grave at the mere suggestion, all the evidence collected so far strongly suggests that Earth is the only planet in the Galaxy that harbors life. Therefore, in all probability, it is likely the only planet in the entire Universe were life exists. If human activity snuffs out life on Earth, and sterilizes this planet like Venus, it may be a far bigger tragedy than most people (fed on a constant diet of E.T. and Hollywood fantasy) actually realize. Those same misplaced expectations are liable to mislead a sizeable portion of the public into thinking that the run-up to The Flippening is some kind of glorified contact with E.T., or heralds some kind of Hippie New Age Close Encounter of the Third Kind. The reason for that is because the Earth’s crust is liable to be under severe stress before and during the geographic pole reversal and that may cause a lot of electromagnetic atmospheric anomalies. Earthquake lights (EQL) happen because many of the rocks in the ground are made of silica (basalts and gabbros) with defects in their crystals, which sometimes make them produce piezoelectric atmospheric effects under mechanical stress (the Greek word πιέζειν; piezein, means to squeeze or press). Because of this, rare events such as ball lightning are known to increase before volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. These eerie phenomena are generally misinterpreted in the popular imagination (and amplified in the press and social media) as paranormal activity or even a visit by E.T. The ‘‘Hessdalen Lights’’ in Central Norway and the Min Min lights in the Australian outback are classic examples of this. There is also the possibility that seismic activity and crustal displacement could generate sonoluminescence (not to mention the possible startle-reaction of aquatic animals such as mantis shrimp). This might appear to some to be undersea aliens (Unidentified Submarine Objects or USOs). When there is a dramatic increase in these types of unusual events, or a rise in UFO-mania in general, then those who know about The Flippening should take heed and not get caught up in any mass hysteria. In the unlikely event that Space-aliens do arrive suddenly on Earth, the Extinctionati advice is to decline any offers to step aboard a spaceship and be whisked away to “safety”. Most likely the aliens would just be reaping their harvest! Fair warning, the time immediately before The Flippening may turn out to be very weird and surreal indeed. It’s easy to imagine the world going berserk because of a dramatic increase in volcanoes, earthquakes, paranormal activity and UFOs. Throw in strange animal behavior and religious fanatics (ever watchful for signs of the Apocalypse), plus unrelated public freak-outs due to systemic collapse of GIC and one readily gets the picture of what a world in (even deeper) mass psychosis could be like. For the Extinctionatus, reading the signs and understanding what’s happening will be crucial. It will be important to “keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” As to early warning mechanisms for The Flippening, it’s conceivable that VLF radio signals could give some clue, assuming they are monitored closely enough. The Stanford SOLAR Center (Temple?) does some of this kind of monitoring already. There is some evidence that it may be possible to predict earthquakes using VLF signals. One of the best predictors is probably any sudden aberration in the Earth’s axial wobble, though it’s hard to know how the layman or Joe Public could have access to that kind of information in time. Such information is probably restricted to insiders only. Changes in Earth’s magnet poles may also offer some advance warning of an impending Earth-flip, though how exactly to interpret them is still a mystery. Since we don’t really have any insight into the relationship (if any) of geographic and geomagnetic pole shifts, it’s worth noting that the protection the Van Allen belts give life on Earth may be interrupted during or after the flip. If the Van Allen belts are interrupted, Earth may be exposed to dangerous solar winds. Without the magnetosphere, the ionizing radiation from solar winds and storms could be harmful to living organisms and electronic equipment. It largely depends on any changes that might happen to the geomagnetic field of Earth during the flip. Precisely how the Earth’s geodynamo is affected by the Dzhanibekov effect is unknown. Nonetheless, precautions against harmful UV exposure during the flip should be considered. Where it’s best to be when the geographic pole reversal happens is the subject of heated debate in some well-informed subcultures. In some circles this is known as the Point of Greatest Survivability (PGS). There are broadly two schools of thought on the matter. One says basically, “Who cares? The PGS is just anywhere on earth where you are far away from geographic fault lines, volcanoes and tsunamis.” The other school of thought holds that it might be possible to determine the exact flip axis, and the PGS would be at one of the two poles of that axis, because that’s where the dangerous tidal forces would be felt least. In theory it would be like sitting happily at the hub of a merry-go-round in a playground, watching all the other kids experiencing the chaos of acceleration and deceleration mayhem around the edges. A splinter group in this faction has become known (rather pejoratively) as the “Biblical Hopefuls”. They argue mainly from the perspective of historical precedent (like Velikovsky). The Biblical hopefuls’ assumption is that the flip axis is probably about the same every time; therefore historical and archeological indicators can be used as a guide for locating the axial poles. Calculating the exact flip axis (and hence the potential PGS) is extremely complex and nonlinear, and it depends on a vast number of variables. These include the differential rates of ice melt in Greenland compared to the HKKH, crustal rebound, the exact time of day and season of the flip, the position of the moon and lunar tidal forces, the disposition of human constructions, excavations and dams, even Coriolis force and the prevailing weather. Calculating this is necessarily inexact, even for the largest supercomputers. There are butterfly effects galore. Any advances in this area have such huge strategic importance that they are liable to be highly classified and kept as closely guarded state secrets. The uncertainty of predicting the PGS leads one naturally to speculate whether any interested parties might attempt to deliberately induce the flip somehow in order to remove some of the guesswork of passively waiting for the event to occur naturally. One is instantly reminded of Jules Verne’s Nineteenth Century novel The Purchase of the North Pole, or in French, Sans dessus dessous (Topsy-Turvy). In that story the plot revolves around the Baltimore Gun Club purchasing the sovereign rights to the Arctic in order to use the recoil of a huge cannon to remove the tilt of the Earth's axis and make it perpendicular to its orbit, like Jupiter's. We can only guess if the US offer to purchase Greenland in 2020 was similarly part of some clandestine scheme to influence The Flippening by either accelerating or decelerating it by messing with the ice sheet somehow. Life often imitates art, and anything is possible in this upside world! At least the mystery of a growing "dark zone" on Greenland's melting ice sheet has been solved. Some may be relieved to know that it is probably not artificial, others less so. Considering what kind of vehicles or craft may be best for survival, as noted, probably the best option of all would be a well-stocked nuclear submarine. Barring that, an ocean-going surface vessel or raft seems reasonable, assuming it can be pre-located near one of the poles of the PGS. The precise geographic coordinates of a possible PGS are given in the book “St. George and the (Methane) Dragon” (along with some hints about places to avoid). It’s highly doubtful that anyone will have enough advance warning to quickly hop on a jet, commercial or private, and safely zoom to a PGS in time. Likewise, it’s highly unlikely that any well-heeled plutocrats could make a getaway by launching into space at the critical moment (though some may try!). Waiting out The Event in an orbital space station or on some hypothetical lunar base is impractical, because it might take years, or even decades, for The Flippening to come. The sheer uncertainty of the timing dictates that if one plans to outsmart The Event, one has to plan ahead and incorporate the plan into a lifestyle choice, or else waste one’s life waiting for something that never comes. For example, if your plan is to ride out the catastrophe by hiding in a bunker on a mountaintop, then you should be prepared to live there happily in wait for the rest of your life and be comfortable with the fact that nothing at all may happen in your lifetime. That’s what makes seasteading or being a sailing boat liveaboard prepper appealing to some, because it marries a high quality of life with an unparalleled deep immersion in nature, community, plus the chance to hang out at a potential PGS. The caveat is that one has to love the sailing life, which is not to everyone’s taste (though it is far more affordable than many realize, and can even be done on a shoestring, given a little imagination and hard work). Joshua Slocum is one of many bluewater sailors who led the way (both in spirit and practical example). Having access to a boat makes sense because immediately after The Flippening it’s likely that survivors will have to begin potentially long migrations, and immediately make their way rapidly to some refugium or other. Since no one really knows where places of refuge are likely to be in the aftermath, it will probably pay to be flexible and mobile. A seagoing sailing vessel is ideal for that, especially if it has solar-powered desalination equipment aboard (though results may vary in a volcanic winter). Some of the most promising places to live after the disaster may be in the new equatorial regions (which will probably differ from the current Equator). There are also likely to be areas to avoid at all costs, and no-go areas that will be undergoing nightmarish depopulation struggles (such as dying urban centers). Navigating the new reality is likely to be very much a matter of trial-and-error, though there are some obvious rules of thumb. One of them is to avoid being inland at the center of a large continental landmass, because away from the moderating effects of oceans, continents tend to suffer greater temperature extremes. If The Flippening catches you in the middle of a large landmass such as central Russia, for example, you may find yourself caught in blizzards and have to travel through deep snow drifts on foot to get to a more temperate region before the volcanic winter takes hold and sends you the same way as a flash-frozen mammoth. Conversely, people in coastal areas may suffer the ravages of devastating tsunamis. Although most landlubbers don’t know it, a boat is often a great place to be in order to survive a tsunami (assuming one is not too close to shore). Tsunamis are dangerous when they come ashore or crest in shallow waters, but out in the blue ocean a potential monster can often be little more than a gentle swell. Many survival plans that may sound appealing at first glance have to be rejected on closer examination. Chief amongst these is any idea involving getting on a plane or helicopter at the last moment and trying to ride out the catastrophe in the air. Anyone who tries that is likely to be doomed, if not by ingesting volcanic ash into the engines, then by fuel exhaustion before the event is over, or failure to find a suitable landing place during or after the cataclysm. As for lighter-than-air craft, anyone who has a suitable dirigible on hand should give the Extinctionati a call. You might just be the kind of lateral-thinking Steampunk hero or heroine that we most admire and desire (especially your deep pockets)! Surviving a Volcanic Winter Assuming you make it through the actual geographic pole flip, your greatest challenge will likely still lie ahead: surviving the volcanic winter that’s liable to come in its wake. Research suggests that forces from the Earth’s spin spark earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The geological stresses of compression, tension, and shear forces on the Earth’s crust during the flip are liable to cause large earthquakes, which are then likely to lead to volcanic eruptions. Studies of earthquakes which struck Central America in 2012 indicate that seismic events can contribute to the increase in volcanic eruptions for as much as 7 years. The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, and the infamous “Year Without a Summer” which followed, gives a foretaste of how serious this could be. The Year Without a Summer caused food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere. On a brighter note, the invention of the bicycle (due to the lack of oats to feed horses) and the spectacular sunsets in Turner’s paintings are also due to dust in the air in the years after the eruption. Figure 6. Chichester Canal (1828), J. M. W. Turner On the darker side, in June 1816, the "incessant rainfall" forced Mary Shelley to stay shut up indoors to write Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus – an ominous foreshadowing of the global predicament we find our Promethean-selves in right now. However, don’t expect to be too swept up in art, literature and Romanticism during the volcanic winter. After The Flippening, the volcanic winter is liable to include the crop failures and famines expected after nuclear winter, which was rightly feared during the First and Second Cold Wars (the Second currently happening now). One should probably give up on the idea that any kind of agriculture will be possible at all (possibly forever, except for a brief period in the rapid transition between volcanic winter and “Hothouse Earth”). During this period of volcanic winter, everyone will probably be forced into eking out an existence in the mode of Ice Age hunter-gatherers and fisher-folk. That’s why it’s important to tone down the permaculture and veganism this side of The Flippening and to dial up the wilderness conservation. Survivors of the Flippening are likely to be few and far between, and they are not going to thank your for your Hippie sensibilities and sentimental attachment to Mother Earth, dandelions and Universal Peace, but they may be eternally grateful if you ensure that there are a few viable herds of bison, reindeer, caribou, elk and some marine sanctuaries left for hunting and fishing. Domestic farm animals and fish, numerous as they are, will probably mostly be destined to die of exposure or neglect and rot in their CAFOs and fish farms with their feed still in the grain silos. The movie Threads gives a realistic idea of what a volcanic winter could be like in a place like Britain (minus volcanoes, tsunamis and earthquakes, of course – so basically a cakewalk). While on the subject of ionizing radiation, it’s worth mentioning that one of the daily hazards of life during the volcanic winter, and for decades after, will be the disaster areas around former nuclear power plants. Currently there are about 450 operational nuclear power plants around the world. Luckily, the insanity of the 1970s and early 80s is being scaled back in many countries, but China and India are still building these dangerous boondoggles like there’s no tomorrow. If they carry on much longer, they will probably get their wish, because after The Flippening nuclear power plants and nuclear dumps are all potential Fukushimas and Chernobyls. What’s not widely known by the public is that most nuclear power plants have to be connected to the power grid in order to operate safely. They have to have two physically independent transmission circuits, one for the normal operation and one for the emergency onsite power system. Not all power plants have the same design, but in the case of Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011, crucial backup diesel generators were washed away in the tsunami that hit the Japanese coastline. The nuclear industry and regulators were quick to claim that the disaster was “preventable”, but the fact remains, even if the generators had survived they would have needed a steady replenishment of diesel while the power plant remained off-grid. After about 72 hours or so, emergency fuel supplies would have been exhausted, and since it’s unlikely fuel bunkers could have replenished them, due to the surrounding devastation, the disaster itself would have only been delayed but not prevented. When, not “if”, the US grid goes totally down (either from a cyber-attack, coronal mass ejection or an EMP) then it cannot be brought back up again – ever! The grid-down event will cause a cascade of infrastructure dominos to fall and one of those dominos is the mass nuclear meltdown of power plants. Cooling spent fuel rods after the grid goes down is also a major problem. The US, China and India (amongst others) have effectively made themselves no-go areas after The Flippening (and potentially before). It’s worth keeping this in mind when assessing the PGS. Arguably, the only piece of essential electronic equipment survivors of The Flippening will really need is a rugged Geiger counter with some imaginative renewable power source (probably not solar, giving the global dimming during the volcanic winter). That will likely be crucial for selecting safe hunting, fishing and foraging grounds, not to mention uncontaminated water supplies. On the other hand, New Yorkers and others in major urban centers may not be that fussy. However, at least for a short time until things quiet down, they will probably have stiff competition trying to forage for rats and pigeons in Central Park, radiation-levels be damned! Adapting to Hothouse Earth It’s not at all certain how long the volcanic winter post-Flippening will last, but it’s likely to be many years. What follows immediately after that is very rapid heating as the dimming effect of atmospheric aerosols diminishes as particles fall out of the air and the effect of GHG emitted by the volcanic activity kicks in. The heating will last for millennia. In good times, humans emit about 90 times the CO2 of volcanoes. After The Flippening, the hangover from the good times will be added to the massive amounts of CO2 produced during the mass ejections during the cataclysm. This will produce an astonishing amount of global heating due to the Greenhouse effect from our accumulated sins of the past and our punishment from the Greenland ice melt. Will this be survivable? Current atmospheric CO2 levels (at 420 ppm) are already the highest they have ever been in the history of our species. The highest concentration we could probably survive is likely to be around 500-800 ppm. Assuming that The Flippening involves the eruption of about 1000 Pinatubo-sized volcanoes, they would only likely add about 50 Gt of CO2 to the atmosphere. Add about 100 Gt from The Methane Dragon for good measure, and a reasonable estimate could be a final stable CO2 concentration of around 480 ppm (assuming 1 ppm per 2.13 GtC). Scientists assume that would result in a global average temperature rise of around 1.5° and 4.5° C compared to pre-industrial temperatures. If not exactly Arcadia, it’s more or less a walk in the park! However, the CH4 levels are crucial. If the Methane Dragon emits more than about 500 Gt of CH4, then that puts eventual CO2 concentrations (CH4 degrades to CO2 over time) at around 678 ppm or more, which looks just a teensy-weensy bit like game-over. The world is on track to reach 500 ppm by about 2050, so unless The Flippening happens soon, we really are all doomed. The volcanic eruptions likely to be experienced during The Flippening are technically known as “large igneous provinces” (LIPs). Models suggest that global temperatures could have soared by as much as +7 °C at the height of the Siberian eruptions which were key players in the end-Permian extinction. The Permian–Triassic extinction event was in all probability an example of a Flippening due to the Freeze-Thor event cycle about 251.9 million years ago. Most worrying of all, sulfur particles from the eruptions led initially to global cooling, ozone depletion and acid rain, which killed off 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species. Even before The Fippening, the oceans are in a very bad state and getting worse – not surprisingly given that GIC has abused them as merely an unlimited dumping ground, commercial resource and international highway (but what’s a funding request without liberal amounts of David Attenborough-like Hopium!). In our inverted world pre-Flippening, we tend to neglect the fact that all terrestrial life is barely an afterthought - merely peripheral. “Life on Earth” really means sea-life, and all others are merely hangers on. It doesn’t matter how many GMO sheep an economist wants to cram into a CAFO, without a healthy ocean they’ll have nothing to breathe! Yet to most economists who address the issue of Climate change, the health of the oceans are merely “the fishing industry” (and therefore fish farms can easily replace marine life). The oceans absorb about 30% of carbon dioxide. Let’s not forget that the older name for carbon dioxide is “carbonic acid”. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution the acidity of the oceans has increased about 25%. Although The Flippening will curtail any further anthropogenic damage to the oceans, the significant acidification from volcanic eruptions will be added to the damage already done, and things already stand at a tipping point. We are already at an extreme as we approach an extreme event. Prospects are not looking very good for survival, because after making it through the massive population bottleneck of The Flippening, any survivors will be almost completely reliant on the health of marine, riparian and wetland habitats, and those are looking increasingly post-Permian rather than Permian (and the fun has hardly even started yet!). Surviving a Series of Geographic Reversals If the foregoing doesn’t sound quite bad enough, it’s worth noting that geographic pole reversals may come in pairs or in a sporadic series or flurry a few centuries apart. There are some indications that the start of the Older and Younger Dryas (about 1500 years apart) may be some kind of “book ends” that amount to essentially one Freeze-Thor cycle. Although that’s something for future generations to worry about, it’s probably at least a courtesy to them to try to retain some cultural memory as a warning of The Flippening and Freeze-Thor cycles in general (as our ancestors did for us). That said, it’s also worth mentioning that there is no guarantee that the world always flips a neat 180 degrees every time. Many believe that the geographic pole reversal is generally partial, so that it resembles the irregular way that icebergs tumble. Free-floating icebergs change their weight distribution as they melt, which makes them continuously capsize and roll or flip, often with tremendous energy, in much the same way as Earth (i.e. they resemble the ice-melting process and weight redistribution with or without the Dzhanibekov effect). The roll is seldom 180 degrees, but is usually rather chaotic and random in most cases. The conclusion could be that each Earth-flip is an irregular tumble, with a new flip-axis each time. More research is needed in this area, but studying iceberg capsizing could open up an intriguing way of investigating the dynamics of the Freeze-Thor cycle and the Earth-flip. The Desiderata Extinctionati What group structure and personal conduct is best suited to facing the extreme and diverse challenges ahead? Let’s use the all too apropos analogy of a lifeboat (or Ark). First, let’s imagine a lifeboat full of individualists something along the lines of the Life of Pi. Let’s call it the Capitalist or Libertarian strategy. In this scenario, each person (Sovereign individual?) is out for him or herself under the assumption that “the champion wins” and takes home the laurels – in this case, long-term survival. possible strategies, mainly because it fosters a kind of “race to the bottom” and the long-term outcome is probably the least likely to foster the survival of anyone. If everyone has the Ayn Randian mindset of a Silicon Valley tech billionaire cum elite transhumanist, and everyone in the hypothetical lifeboat is in a war of “all against all”, then a tech-enhanced, bioaugmented or naturally gifted Übermensch may emerge from the challenges of The Flippening, but our expectation is that victory will be Pyrrhic and short-lived. Pi will die lonely. In other words, there’s unlikely to be a viable human population or enough habit left to sustain the survivors of this strategy in the wake of their Darwinian/Malthusian competition. We believe that cooperation in some form or other is more conducive to survival than complete defection from the population at large. To be blunt, any of the super-rich who think they can outsmart The Flippening by waiting it out on a space station or on some off-world colony is living in a world of pure fantasy that defies logic and basic space and aviation medicine to name one of countless pitfalls. Likewise, anyone who thinks they can use tech to “upload themselves to silicon” or clone themselves artificially using some secret bunker and a time-delay mechanism (or cryogenic suspension) etc. is quite frankly utterly delusional – dangerously so, if they have substantial means at their disposal. Next, let’s consider a sort of opposite of the previous analogy. Let’s consider a lifeboat with a self-sacrificing collective where individualism is frowned upon, or is nullified because “when everyone is special, no one is special”. We may as well call this cooperative collective the Socialist, Communist or National Socialist ideological strategy – “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. Admittedly, a unified collective is more likely to survive than the first proposal. However, in order to banish individualism and keep the collective unified, it’s probable that cohesion could only be maintained by a power structure of rigid, authoritarian, centralized control. Straight away necessity introduces myriads of self-contradictions. As a salvation narrative it all falls apart in the practical details. Is everyone really equal in the technological Hive Mind, as we barrel forward to The Singularity? If there are only enough rations for some, who decides which passengers get sacrificed? Without enough checks or balances on the power of the central authority, there is nothing to stop a class of self-serving transhumanist elites emerging from the collective. Not everyone can have equal access to personalized gene therapies, human augmentation tech and immortality. This makes the system prone to corruption and instability. The likely outcome is that the collective also splits and fragments under the weight of its own ideological contradictions. The truth that “some are more equal than others” dooms this kind of organizational structure to perpetual risk of falling back into the individualistic organizational structure of the previous example. The center cannot hold. On the other hand, if everyone in the collective is too self-sacrificing, the group runs the risk of needless (or even fetishized) self-destruction. Extreme examples that come to mind are the disastrous cults of The People’s Temple and the Japanese cult of the Kamikaze. At best, this strategy only really works if it's based on a cult leader and a cohort of followers who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of a Queen Bee in an eerily creepy example of human eusociality. The Extinctionati believe that this form of organization is not stable enough to be viable and is not robust enough to survive the challenges posed by The Flippening. Consider the following. One of the downsides of an egalitarian and flat organizational structure is the grim reality that the lifeboat itself may be overcrowded. Stepping out of the analogy for a moment, the reality is that the Earth is vastly overpopulated. No matter how often some people pooh-pooh the coming Malthusian catastrophe, or incorrectly call it “racist”, or claim that infertility and declining populations are the real problem, the truth is that the global population stands at a vastly unsustainable 7.8 billion and is rapidly heading for 10 to 11 billion. Clearly we are in chronic Overshoot. What comes next is “drawdown” of resources leading to habitat destruction and the very real possibility of near-term human extinction. Going back to the analogy of a lifeboat, clearly only a tiny number of passengers can survive, if any. Any would-be survivors have to take into account in their survival strategy that we are all in a rather desperate Parachute debate. Despite what economists and optimistic technophiles insist, Spaceship Earth is finite, outer space and other planets are no-go areas, and so Lifeboat ethics apply. Contrary to popular opinion, we in the Extinctionati believe that it is the richer nations who are at the greatest risk, simply because they have further to fall. Poor and indigenous people are far better equipped to survive after the Collapse of GIC. When the worldwide economy falters, it’s virtually impossible for a New Yorker to turn hunter-gather and start foraging in Central Park, whereas the poorest indigenous people in places like Africa and South America will get almost instant relief as soon as the global financial system collapses, national grids go down, and globalism and Science & Industry end. Crucial to deciding a group structure for long-term survival, is to accept the grim reality of a massive human population bottleneck. If our aim is to make sure that some survive rather than none, then what group structure should be adopted to face this odious predicament? Let’s consider another hypothetical lifeboat that we may as well call “The Secret Cabal Lifeboat”. In this lifeboat a group of rich elites collude in secret to make sure they survive at the expense of all the less clued-in passengers. Let’s assume they are a technical and scientific elite from a Brahmin class who are brought up and indoctrinated into a form of Neo-Platonism centered on the Noble lie. The Cabal is fully in control of the lifeboat, to a far greater extent than most passengers realize, and they are fully cognizant of The Flippening and imminent Collapse, and they work overtime to make sure the rest of the passengers are kept fat, dumb and ignorant or distracted from the coming catastrophe. The art involved here is to cannibalize the passengers and depopulate the lifeboat in a stealthy, coordinated and well-orchestrated manner to make sure that when the boat makes landfall, members of the Cabal will be the only ones left alive and no one will be the wiser about how that happened (or if they know, they are powerless to do anything about it). This strategy is actually quite a sound one, and it has parallels in the true-life horror that inspired Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Of all the conceivable “lifeboat strategies”, this one is probably the best for ensuring that at least some people survive rather than no one. The problem is that the survivors are all more or less sociopaths, if not outright psychopaths. On the other side of the human bottleneck, one assumes they will revert to something like the first lifeboat scenario and begin devouring each other, with equally disastrous and terminal results. In case you missed the point, whether it’s news to you or not, like it or not, we are all in the “Secret Cabal Lifeboat” and there’s precious little anyone can do about it. But two can play at that game. The Extinctionati think that the best organizational structure for our members to survive the challenges that lie ahead is to think of us as a kind of Kantian Whole. In the words of Stuart Kauffman, “Immanuel Kant argued in his Critique of Judgment that in an organized being (such as a living organism), the parts exist for and by means of the whole, and the whole exists for and by means of the parts.” This “Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno” philosophy means that while we are capable of self-sacrifice for the sake of the collective in cases of dire necessity, we still recognize a healthy diversity and individualism at the same time. The idea is to have a kind of Goldilocks median of mutualism that is neither too self-sacrificing, nor too individualistic. “To each according to their need, from each according to their whim”, might be a way of summing it up. We don’t expect the membership of the Extinctionati to ever grow much beyond Dunbar’s number of members. If it ever does, then the organization should probably best split with a loose affiliation maintained between the splinter groups. If a Dunbar’s number of splinter groups ever forms, then the affiliation group should probably split and so on. Given the time constraints before The Flippening, this is unlikely to happen. Ideally the members should be as diverse as possible with as many different and complementary skills, beliefs and strategies. Our intention is to publicize our resources and advertise them along with our capabilities around the world in order to maximize our chances of survival in the face of The Flippening. The idea is to give freely in order to receive freely. As stated, the evidence so far (and getting increasingly stronger) is that apart from Earth, the Universe is entirely “dead”. The challenge for conscious life in the 21st Century is to survive The Great Filter. Humanity 2.0 (of the #TeamHuman variety, rather than the Transhuman monstrosity), if it can pull through and emerge on the other side of The Great Filter, is likely to be a very different type of person to us, with a vastly transformed psychology and attitude to life. In anticipation of what humans will be like in the future (assuming we are not all extinct), The Extinctionati offer Twelve Desiderata which are explained on the Sirius Institute website (in the dropdown menu, top left). They are guidelines we offer for those on the path of the Extinctionati. What Should I Tell the Kids? If they ask, tell them; if they don’t, then don’t. Don’t go out of your way to traumatize them! But don’t hide the truth, either. One thing you should definitely question is your children’s participation in the normal socializing, indoctrination and shaping process of GIC during its death throes. Your kids may not thank you for condemning them to the drudgery of the school system during their final days when they find out how precious little time they actually have left. Ask yourself each day: “If this were my child’s last day on Earth, would I be making them spend their day this way?” Most people tend to blindly and ritually sacrifice their kids on a daily basis based on an optimistic Whiggish justification that somehow, “it’s for their Future.” If you got anything out of this document, it should be that there is no future. Not the kind of future most people dumbly assume, anyway. John Taylor Gatto reminds us that the intent of mass schooling is the product of the Industrial Revolution and the destruction of the Commons in Europe – the very same failed industrial experiment that is now rapidly unwinding. “Traditional education can be seen as sculptural in nature, individual destiny is written somewhere within the human being, awaiting dross to be removed before a true image shines forth. Schooling, on the other hand, seeks a way to make mind and character blank, so others may chisel the destiny thereon,” Gatto, The Underground History of American Education The hidden purpose of schooling is actually to “establish fixed habits of reaction to authority” and to foster conformity (a process teachers euphemistically refer to as “student socialization”). It’s perverse how the public readily condemns their kids to daily incarceration in institutions and then laments how they grow up with all the negative effects of a prison-yard culture. A lot of emphasis is currently put on having kids “associate with their peers”, which is useful in a way if the intent is to prepare them to spend the rest of their lives forced into association with people and personalities they wouldn’t go anywhere near if they had the choice. Most tribal cultures (i.e. cultures we are naturally evolved for) enjoy spontaneous and free association, their members refuse to suffer Assholes, and they vote with their feet if the social environment doesn’t suit them. Although there are no hard and fast rules, in many hunter-gatherer communities (including our pre-industrial society) children would only be expected to play with their peers up to about the age of seven. After that they usually became apprenticed to the ways of the culture and usually spent most of their time in the exclusive company and tutelage of adults. By inclination and evolution, human tribes generally admit children into adulthood, often with an initiation rite, when they reach puberty. Clearly we’ve made a rod for our own backs by sweeping those norms aside in our perverse GIC. The social and medical problems from Youth over-domestication, over-infantilization, over-protection, and over-indulgence by parents, institutions, and corporations, is leading to social issues that will likely spell disaster during Collapse - a disaster within a disaster. All practicalities aside, parents should give serious thought to our hunter-gatherer future. Perhaps they should be asking themselves whether their kids are better served spending their planetary hospice in disease incubation pools, learning about the “three branches of government”, or STEM subjects (all of which are liable to be useless knowledge within iGen’s lifetime), when they could potentially be out in the sunshine and fresh air, hiking in what’s left of the wilderness and learning to fish, hunt, trap and cook outdoors. Perhaps it’s kind to tear kids away from digital devices screaming, when one considers that learning things like celestial navigation may serve them better in the future than “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”. Nautical preppers are warned, if the GPS system is still miraculously operational after The Flippening, then it may still be effectively useless until a navigator can recalibrate the reported geo-coordinates from previously known fixed points. Celestial markers and transits will also need to be rediscovered after a geographic pole shift. In this regard, once again it’s worth looking into bringing up kids on a boat. Although the tentacles of the web spread everywhere with things like Starlink, life afloat makes severing (or at least severely rationing) the digital umbilical chord that much easier. As the System crumbles, and the gears of The Machine start to grind, more and more parents are rediscovering and switching on to the benefits of sea-going parenting. At this point we probably need to address the thorny question, “Should I be planning to have kids now, or is it cruel to deliver babies into the path of what amounts to an existential steamroller?” First, ignore the current mindless “First-world Problem” groupthink and virtue signaling. It’s utterly irrelevant. In spite of what Progressives and Conservatives insist to the contrary, you can safely ignore their projected angst about overpopulation or a calamitous infertility crisis, because your decision to have kids or not will neither “save the Planet” nor condemn it. To put things into perspective, in the nine months it takes to gestate a baby, the world’s population will have a net increase of about 80 million people. That’s about a quarter of the population of America – the world’s third largest country. Your decision to add or refrain from increasing that statistic isn’t going to make a blind bit of difference one way or another. Now Liberals are apt to respond: ‘But that’s irresponsible! What if everyone thought that way?” Well they do, and there’s nothing you can do to change that fact, so get over it! The more important question is whether having kids is the right thing to do if you know they may still be in their youth when they have to face a horrible death in The Flippening. It’s entirely a personal decision. The major tragedy is if you go into the decision blindly, or ignore the future (as is currently the rule in our culture) and don’t weigh up the decision carefully enough. If your decision is made with due consideration and acceptance of the facts, then it’s hard to see how anyone can fault it. After all, for all anyone knows, you may be giving birth to one of the very few survivors of The Flippening. Perhaps your child will be the next Deucalion or Pyrrha, Noah or the next Mitochondrial Eve, and their birth could mean the difference between a repopulated Earth and total extinction. Then again, they may turn out transgender, perhaps have life-long complications with their gender reassignment surgery, and so suffer terribly when GIC Collapse comes and they have no access to hormones or adequate healthcare. So it’s a crapshoot. One thing that should not be overlooked is that, although it may be otherwise in other communities, being a parent in our society does not make you happier. However it would be wise to take into account “life satisfaction”. It’s probably better to make the decision based on the potential child’s point of view. Is it better to have a short life and die, than never to be born at all? Obviously it all depends on the “quality of life”. If you and your children live by Kairos, rather than Chronos (The Clock), it’s possible to pack many lifetimes into just a few short years. The Case for Accelerating The Flippening If our goal is to avoid near-term human extinction, our task must surely be to preserve as much viable habitat and natural ecology as possible to sustain survivors post Collapse. Each day that passes, The Global Industrial Machine adds a net increase of 200,000 people, 100 Mt of CO2 into the atmosphere, a net deforestation loss of 6,753 Ha, and the death of perhaps 24 or more species. We are deep into overshoot and no one seriously expects “the carbon will stay in the ground”. No thinking person, not even the nuttiest Nobel Prize-winning economist, expects that The Machine will be stopped voluntarily. Only the most deluded think that the tech that caused all the problems in the first place can somehow transform planetary cancer into a virtue. As Einstein is often quoted as saying, “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them” – certainly not in the brief time left before the BOE! Peaceful mass-mobilizations are going nowhere. As to Involuntary Emergency Deindustrialization (IED), it currently appears that in a population of almost 8 billion, not even a handful can be found to take up a monkey wrench against The Machine that’s set to exterminate everyone. Considering how fragile it is, quite conceivably, even 500 determined, well-placed lone wolves (#500LoneWolves), operating independently, could bring down the entire global industrial system in a day with far less loss of life than if it is allowed to continue (though whether they could keep it down is another question entirely). In spite of the efforts of groups like Earth First! (EF!), the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), Deep Green Resistance (DGR) and the Sea Shepherd Society, even state security forces are largely baffled as to why, given the dire ecological circumstances, there is currently surprisingly little ecotage going on. The number of attacks is actually going down rather than up. As for an anti-tech revolution along the lines envisaged by Ted Kaczynski, it appears that the cavalry (if it exists at all) has been severely negligent in its tardiness. Given the reality, we are forced to conclude that the only thing that will stop The Machine is when the consequences of exceeding its limits catch up with it (i.e. systemic implosion), or The Flippening brings it to an abrupt and merciful halt. Professor Sid Smith explained the perils of letting things run their course vividly in an essay entitled All the Bunnies in the Meadow Die. There is a common misunderstanding (spread by well-meaning environmentalist Collapse-deniers) that “it is never too late”, “we will always have human agency” and “however bad it gets we can always make it less bad”. The misunderstanding seems to be based on the erroneous idea that planetary destruction is a kind of thermostat or rheostat that we can all dial up or down at will. The reality is that we have already passed the crucial planetary tipping-points and we can no more change the outcome that one can rewind an avalanche after one triggers it. Even a small boy can cause a landslide that no Titan can alter, and that’s pretty much what humanity has done. We vastly underestimated, and continue to underestimate in most quarters, how fragile and unstable the Earth system is. We mistook what amounts to a delicate Fabergé egg for a football. However, the intriguing possibility remains that it might be within the bounds of human agency to deliberately cause The Flippening early. If it has to happen, in many ways, the sooner The Flippening occurs, the better. Our species is roughly in the situation of a dysfunctional family, which is abused by an alcoholic Dad. After exhausting every possible means of intervention, at some point, family members are forced to simply admit that the alcoholic will never reform and the family’s suffering will only stop once the ogre finally drinks himself to death. Once one gives up all hope and reaches that conclusion, it immediately follows that one should encourage the drinking rather than try to prevent it, because the sooner the father drinks himself into oblivion the sooner the family’s agony will end and the sooner everyone (including the alcoholic) will be released from their torment. In the words of Macbeth: If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly: if the assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We’d jump the life to come. The Tragedie of Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 7 (circa. 1603–1607) Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford Accelerating The Flippening essentially involves speeding up the melt of the Greenland Ice sheet and the HKKH. Anyone who has this bent of mind has the benefit of a following wind, just as anyone who wants to encourage an alcoholic to drink themselves to death has the alcoholic themselves as an ally. Almost anything goes, really. The oil industry can be readily encouraged to mine and burn more oil, because the more GHG emitted into the atmosphere, the faster the ice melts and the sooner The Flippening. Of course there are limits. There must notionally be a sweet spot where the rate of GHG emissions matches the optimal rate of ice melt (plus lag) in order to bring on the Earth-flip while efficiently ensuring that no more GHG is emitted than necessary. On the other hand, Green tech and the ESG economy should also be encouraged, since a reduction in atmospheric pollution will diminish Global dimming which will increase average temperatures by an estimated 0.60 C (or more), contributing handsomely to the rate at which the ice melts. Burning fossil fuel is good. Green tech that removes aerosols from the atmosphere is also good. Finally everyone can agree. Everything other than further direct ecological and wild habitat destruction is good. The only initiatives that are not good are things like geoengineering projects, particularly Solar Radiation Management (SRM), because any sulfate aerosols or calcium carbonate particles injected into the upper atmosphere will exacerbate the volcanic winter after The Flippening. Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) projects promise to be generally neutral in outcome, mostly completely ineffectual and harmless. The Extinctionati propose that in order to counter any R&D in SRM, or actual deployment by some rogue billionaire or someone, that we should organize a tit-for-tat counter response by conducting our own corresponding mirror experiments and projects to accelerate the Greenland and HKKH ice melt. A promising proposal in this regard is to spread massive amounts of solar-absorbing hydroxylapatite or soot directly onto the ice, in order to either blanket large areas or to cut gullies into the snowpack in order to carve out chunks of ice like a cutting tool. Deliberate large scale biomass burning could accomplish the same end. Once one loses all hope in GIC, one realizes that the only way out is more or less a Return to Monke. The quickest way to “Return to Monke” is if The Flippening happens. The sooner The Flippening happens, the better chance Monke will have. Accelerationism is the ultimate (┛ಠ_ಠ)┛^^┻━┻. Or maybe (┛ಠ_ಠ)┛^^ 🌍. Objections and Counter-reactions to the Extinctionati Way Is The Flippening literal, or is it merely symbolic or really about some kind of mass psychological flip? Is it some kind of made-up Hyperobject designed as a substitute for Climate change or something, the same way Don’t Look Up used a comet as a more comprehensible existential threat and an obvious metaphor for the less-relatable, but non the less real, systemic one? Our warning about the impending Earth-flip is not something cunningly designed to manipulate you into some kind of social change, nor is it intended to get you to support Conservatism, Liberalism, Environmentalism or serve any other political or religious agenda. The Flippening is a geological fact. Make of it what you will. At this late stage it doesn’t really matter what you do or think. The public has passed the point where protesting against “Climate inaction” makes much sense. Telling you all this is not some devious strategy to manipulate you into rising up, nor is it about “lying flat”. You can do either, or none, and it won’t make the slightest bit of difference to the final outcome. Our intent of warning you is based on the hope that the more people that know and are prepared for the challenges ahead, the more likely it will be that at least some humans survive. As things stand, the situation does not look very promising. Trying to warn people about The Flippening is every bit as hard, or harder, to communicate than it was for the protagonists in “Don’t Look Up” trying to warn people about a planet-killing comet (to no avail). No one really wants to hear about The Flippening, because “fill in the blank ___”! Perhaps Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death can best summarize that blank. An all too common reaction to hearing about The Flippening is, “You just made that up so you could drive a gas-guzzler and carry on flying without caring about your carbon footprint!” - which adequately sums up the brain-fog of the current milieu. No one should expect anyone else to readily let go of their obsessions or give up their fixed ideas. There’s a lesson in the appalling loss of life in the wreck of the SS Central America, where many passengers drowned rather than empty the gold out of their pockets. One should not get too swept up into some fantasy, morality play, but it’s difficult to avoid noticing that The Flippening is a test that is likely to “sort out the sheep from the goats”. Negotiating the “Eye of a Needle” that lies ahead will probably filter out the nastier aspects of human nature, such ego, selfishness and the other Deadly Sins. Deluge, destruction and apocalyptic events are generally recounted as morality tales and punishment for hubris and Promethean fall. If there are any survivors, it’s hard not to anticipate that the trials of any survivors will be a renaissance that will purify them and make them morally and intellectually suitable for a New Earth. Most people intuit that the world is pregnant with radical change. It’s palpable that our GIC and us are at the end of the line. If not outright extinction, then total transformation is coming. The question is, whose version of change will it be? The optimistic Futurologists and Transhumanists have their Rapture of the Nerds and Homo Deus. Klaus Schwab has his rather creepy Great Reset. Totalitarians have their New World Order. New Agers like Eckhart Tolle prophesy a New Earth and Ken Wilbur has his Spiral Dynamics. Monotheists cling to their Apocalypse and Rapture. The list goes on and on. Eschatology-fever is epidemic. It’s hard to avoid noticing that we are obviously at some kind of crossroads. So is The Extinctionati just some kind of Doomsday cult? Well of course it is. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Not all cults are bad. The problem is, almost every group is a cult. Transhumanism is a cult. Christianity itself is just St. Paul’s Doomsday cult. Islam is Mohammed’s Doomsday cult. Even Liberal Humanism and its Enlightenment ideals are really just a cult. GIC itself is just a Millenarian cult. So unless you go it alone, you can’t really avoid joining a cult. The upside to The Extinctionati is that we are fully aware that we are a cult and yet oppose cult-like behavior and teach members how to liberate themselves from cults and groupthink. So perhaps we are a kind of “un-cult”. Our aim is to help people navigate their grief at the end of an amazing Civilization, and to survive and achieve catharsis in its wake. Conclusion So is the world really going to flip like an Etch A Sketch and have a do-over? Yes – both literally and figuratively. Our aim is to achieve a mental state of Ataraxia and a physical state of preparedness as we face the challenges ahead. In the end, our philosophy is as Edgar said: "Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all." - King Lear, Act 5 Scene 2 (circa. 1603–1607) Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford The Ripeness is all. What more could one possibly say? Everything, metaphysical, physical and psychological – all Time, Chronos and Kairos – converges at The Flippening. Just imagine what it will be like seeing the sunrise in the West for the first time! #It’sTime. Good Luck! More at Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Extinctionati/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheGyrateReset/ Website: http://sirius.institute/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTnKeTZFv8BINBfIBWXSODQ Podcasts: https://www.podcasts.com/the-extinctionati Donations: https://liberapay.com/lordhugh/donate https://www.patreon.com/siriusinstitute