I am constantly amazed at how difficult we humans try to make life. How we stumble around looking for things that keep us on edge or scare us. Maybe it has to do with all of those dreams that we share. The dreams that are part of our collective subconscious. The dreams that were programed into humanity a hundred million years ago when we were fearful little animals scurrying around in the great primeval. The most current one that caught my attention was a website that explained all about how the Yellowstone Volcano is soon to erupt and the world will be plunged back into that dark time.

This thought is really more than a few years old. How it began I do not really know. But some time ago the pseudoscientific idea that Yellowstone was soon to erupt came into being. I was first made aware of this impending doom by an old friend of mine, who had heard about it on a late night radio show. As proof they, the proponents, offered the fact that the roads in Yellowstone National Park were all closed. This was in the middle of February and no mention was made that it was off tourist season. But still, if the roads were closed, it must mean something.

Then, this past year there was a "dramatization" of what could happen if the ancient volcano did become active. There, of course was no real scientific basis for the TV movie, only conjecture and alarm. But, that seems to be the norm for life nowadays. Some wild hypothesis marginally based on scientific research then grabbed a hold of by human imagination and extrapolated into reality that unschooled humans latch onto and construe as fact. But, Yellowstone blows up every X thousands of years and it's overdue! It must be going to happen soon.

The real truth is that we know little about Yellowstone. Just as we really know little about this planet and it's geologic forces. What makes it worse is that there are so many people who know nothing about anything. They trust the knowledge of people who know less and do not care to know anything beyond that which supports their ideas of cataclysm. Maybe those ideas of the end of life are directly related to those long ago times, when a predator would abruptly and horrendously end a life. Maybe it has to do with an individual's egotism. Where; If I die, then all else is also gone.

In any case, This all is just silly supposition and a sort of bizarre desire to transmute the biblical end times into a pseudoscientific scenario of the world blowing-up and an end to humanity. I could continue to rail on about how this is just so much crap. I could even point out and direct you to the appropriate places, where you could do your own research on the explosion of Yellowstone. But why? If you already have those tendencies you will not believe any real science data that is presented. And if you are a rational individual you will already know that it will not happen as we believe it will or may ever happen in humanities life time.

Michael Sherer