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*                         CYBERSPACE                         *
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         *
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   *
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* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  *
* Free for online distribution                               *
* All Rights Reserved                                        *
* Direct comments and questions to:                          *
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The world is going to end ... some day. Many Netizens were 
preparing for the end back on August 29, 1997. As I've noted in 
this column before, the movie Terminator 2 claimed Skynet (i.e. 
the Internet) would become self aware on that date and nuke the 
world. Just a few weeks ago more people were hunkering down for 
the end, this time believing the millennium was at hand. A bit 
early? Well, as calculated by James Ussher (yep, that famous 
bishop who used all the "begats" in the Bible to calculate the 
earth to be no more than 6,000 years old), October 23, 1997 
marked the end of the sixth millennium. 

Both days came and went like most others. I think I celebrated 
both days by going grocery shopping. The end of the world is, 
for many, a waiting game. Get a date, sell all worldly 
possessions, and sit on a hillside with a thermos of coffee.

There are those who prefer not to wait for the end of the world 
and seek to move things along. Type A personalities, you know? 
There's an endless, fascinating discussion on how to hasten the 
apocalypse on a newsgroup called alt.destroy.the.earth. 

Most posters (well, not those who think this is yet another 
group to gripe about Microsoft) can be classified into two 
camps: the Destructionalist and the Elitist. The 
Destructionalist believe in the complete destruction of the 
earth. Yes, they will be happy victims of their own twisted 
schemes. The Elitists, on the other hand, just want to wipe out 
that bothersome 99% of humanity: subway commuters who stand 
instead of walk up the left side of an escalator, people at 
cashiers who spend ten minutes in front of you searching for a 
dime so they can get exact change back. Those people.

By far the Destructionalist are the most interesting and 
horrifying. These are people who think on a massive scale, a 
scale undreamed of by Ayn Rand's Howard Roark or even Warner 
Brothers' Wile E. Coyote. The super-geniuses on  
alt.destroy.the.earth contemplate smashing quasars together to 
disrupt the time flow, discuss how Mars could be moved into a 
far more interesting and dangerous orbit, and lobby legislators 
to make Pi equal to  3 (which I can only imagine will result in 
the construction of a lot of very unsafe nuclear plants). 

Ask a Destructionalist "why?" and you'll likely get a simple 
"why not?" Some people look over a field full of birds, 
flowers, and playing children and get inspired to paint a 
picture. Destructionalist think "that's got to go." 

While the chat between the Destructionalist and the Elitists on 
alt.destroy.the.earth is all in good fun, a number of genuinely 
kooky individuals have found the newsgroups a friendly place to 
talk about their real plans for death rays, perpetual motion 
machines, and suitcase-sized earthquake generators. As you can 
imagine alt.destroy.the.earth is a place where kooks of the 
"weird science" variety find themselves cheered on, not jeered.

My all time favorite weird science web page is Bill Beaty's Weird Science 
Homepage. The page's Not your 
average construction project link is particularly 
interesting. Do you suspect there's been a change in the 
household time flow? If so, you can find out how to build a 
time-distortion detector with a handful of parts from Radio 
Shack.

Most weird scientists take their cue from Einstein, who went 
from being an unknown patent clerk to a Nobel laureate, and the 
less well-known Nikola 
Tesla. Tesla is best known for developing alternating-
current. By the time he died in 1943, he left a legacy of some 
700 patents plus a number of rumors that he had plans still on 
the drawing board for terrifying weapons of mass destruction.

    Source: geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs/text

               ( geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs)                   ( geocities.com/lapetitelesson)