Dhe nature of the apocalypse makes everything else secondary. When the world ends, the world ends, and rightly so. In the third installment of the series, Extrapolations, the world may only be on its way to the apocalypse, but the situation is bad enough that an epoch-making success in another matter seems irrelevant: humanity has conquered cancer, it is said casually, but now she has to ramp up rubber boot production as quickly as possible, because the water is already up to her calves, but figuratively up to her neck.
The fact that there could soon be a remedy against the disease, which is often referred to as the scourge of humanity, is actually not entirely unrealistic; solutions could be just around the corner in the exponentially accelerating science. Climate change, on the other hand, is an overall fact that was brought to our attention again this week in all its complexity with a meta-study. Against this roller coaster ride of high hopes and gloomy forecasts, “Extrapolations” can be seen as an attempt to bring a bit of narrative structure to the data situation.
2.3 degrees aren’t that bad
The series, conceived by Scott Z. Burns, distributes “extrapolations” over the entire 21st century lying ahead of us. Each of the eight episodes ventures a little further into a foreseeable future, with each of the first three episodes dealing with different facets of the projected. The first factor is of course the temperature per se, the global average, the famous 1.5 degrees, which is probably no longer tenable. In the first episode of “Extrapolations”, a big capitalist manages to persuade people that 2.3 degrees doesn’t have to be that bad after all, as long as you can turn to a digital assistant called Alpha for the problems that arise from it, who then book a holiday in a holiday camp in the Arctic instead of in the Mediterranean as in the past. Episode 2 is about the extent of species extinction, and Episode 3 is about the rise in sea levels.
“Extrapolations” is an anthological series, the episodes are interwoven, but also stand for themselves and form dramatic units with their own arcs of tension. This becomes particularly clear in the artful third episode, which has set an ambitious context. A young woman in Florida named Alana preparing for her bat mitzvah in the year 2047 asks some generationally obvious questions about the relationship between human contribution and divine silence. While some of the “technology-open” solutions that politicians like to talk about seem as if they are intended to give a deus ex machina a rather fantastic possibility of access, it is of course clear that humanity will have to pay for what it takes for itself since it’s just breaking in. And humanity is not ideally equipped for this task: “We suck, don’t we?” Alana sums up her own findings. However, Burns then cleverly turns this episode theologically in a direction in which the mandate to act appears realistic again, and at the same time heroically on a generic scale with small steps.
The latent inclination towards the sublime
Climate change has to be broken down to the level of the individual all the time, when there is no more collective process. The God of Moses and Abraham (and the God of Rabbi Zucker, one of the main characters in “Extrapolations”) becomes a horizon for those mediation steps between the huge whole and the tiny individual, which, however, also remains emission-relevant the whole time.
In the second episode, the latent tendency towards the sublime, which all serious extrapolating scenarios have, is projected onto a species that has little competition in terms of evolutionary respectability: a scientist is talking to a wood lady. As it turns out, she’s the last humpback whale specimen in the vast expanses of an increasingly inhospitable ocean. Burns always delights in exhibiting remarkable achievements that he extrapolates to humanity for the next decade or so.
The fact that we could soon have an automatic translation program for whale language, but still be too stupid to save the planet from overheating, has something to do with Burns’ unleashed platform capitalism, which he then had to foist his series on himself. This is also one of the conditions of an (albeit creeping) apocalypse: there is no outside of it.
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