Joe Kitchen | Can Facebook save us from the end of the world? – News24

With all the natural disasters and what appears to be World War Three breaking out, the search is on for other hospitable planets. Joe Kitchen writes that there is an option that is much closer to home than we think.

These last two weeks have not been a good time for planet Earth.

Starting on 18 February last week, gale-force winds started rocking the United Kingdom and Europe. We all saw the devastation on YouTube. Trees crashing down on cars, church steeples being destroyed, thousands of people left destitute after their roofs blew off and power supplies failed.

In the days following, more natural calamities spread across the globe:

And as if that was not bad enough, the Third World War started on Thursday, when Russia invaded Ukraine!

Sketch of Vladimir Putin (Joe Kitchen)

It's as if everything and everybody suddenly went completely crazy.

Perhaps it's a good thing the James Webb telescope has finally been assembled, and now we are ready to start hunting for other hospitable planets in outer space.

No-one is hunting for aliens anymore

Yes, that's actually HOW bad things are. Nobody's hunting for aliens anymore. We want to find out if there is a place we can flee to when life on Earth becomes unbearable.

I'm not quite sure if Mars is an option - much as I love arid desert landscapes like the south of Namibia or the desolate stretches of the Great Karoo. I don't think I'm quite ready yet to accept Elon Musks' offer of a one-way ticket to the Red Planet. I simply can't imagine spending five minutes in that hellhole, never mind the rest of my life!

But, hey, there IS another solution. And it's right under our noses!

A perfect world is already available.

A world with no disease, or accidents, or war, or climate change.

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A world where you can hide out with your friends and just never leave. A world where, every morning, you can get up and look your best and never pick up weight, never have a bad hair day, not ever.

No need to get on any spaceship. No need to travel light years into the great beyond.

All you need is a pair of headphones, your special goggles, and Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse is all yours!

Sketch of Mark Zuckerberg (Joe Kitchen)

Well, Zuckerberg said it's on its way. It's getting better all the time, he promised. He sounds pretty sure of himself, despite his dropping share prices. It should be ready sometime next week, if one can believe him.

Virtual Utopia

The virtual Utopia. The ultimate getaway. The La-La Land we have all been dreaming about.

I'm not quite convinced, though.

Okay, okay, agreed, all these wonderful new technologies will have their uses. It will do great things for education. There's a myriad of creative possibilities. We will all have our virtual office spaces, and we'll end up saving a hell of a lot of petrol. The only people who won't be able to work from cyberspace will, of course, be people like plumbers, farmers and pharmacists, because those guys will somehow have to keep us alive while the rest of us gallivant around in the new Facebook, and completely lose touch with...

With what? Fresh air? Sunshine? The singing of real birds outside a real window on a real morning?

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There's a little movie in my head, like a short video-clip. It's a future fantasy of what life might be like one day, years from now

Imagine a world where just about everyone is online -all the time.

People are no longer able to distinguish fantasy from reality. Commercial breaks and flickering imagery punctuate your daily existence. You, and millions of other people, have become prisoners of cyberspace. You never touch base with everyday life as people used to know it. It's been years since you've opened a car door to open a farm gate on a gravel road.

Everything is fake. Sex has been reduced to holographic videogames. Love and emotions are nothing more than a series of amazingly designed emoji's.

Until, one day, one person decides to remove his headphones

And, out of the blue, he experiences the most astonishing peace of mind.

Imagine you are this person. You have taken off your IT gear. You get up. You walk outside. You smell the sea. There are no cars, no traffic, no fumes. Everything is eerily quiet.

"It's amaaaazing!" you think. "Where am I? This is the best website I ever discovered!"

Rediscovering our humanity

Is this how humanity will rediscover the world in the distant future?

After years of being cooped up in dingy little rooms wearing nothing but T-shirts and tracksuit pants (except for the plumbers, farmers and pharmacists, of course), will we one day wake up to find out that nothing we had experienced had even been remotely real?

In a way, I kind of like this idea. Maybe we should give Mark Zuckerberg some credit! If he can create a false reality, perhaps we should allow everyone to take all their crap over there. All the hostility, the drama, the war, the wastage, the neuroses, the ego stuff, the collective insanity.

Yes, please! Go away, everyone! Take all your problems, go away, and leave us alone to enjoy our planet by ourselves! I want to stay here with the plumbers and the farmers and the pharmacists!

We want to be able to burrow our toes in the sand, walk our dogs, and never ever again will we have to worry about stuff like getting enough "likes", avoiding trolls, and having enough data.

Our lives will no longer depend on a constant energy supply to charge our batteries!

We will have this whole, wonderful, free website to ourselves.

What a life!

- Joe Kitchen is a South African musician, singer, songwriter and writer who sometimes goes by the name of Koos Kombuis, Andr Letoit and/or Andr le Roux du Toit.

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Joe Kitchen | Can Facebook save us from the end of the world? - News24