Surviving the Future

I have a deeply cynical side but I’m also an optimist by nature. Ms. Collide-a-scape is the fretter in the family. Several months ago, we finally got around to watching the dystopian documentary that made quite a splash in 2009, which NPR accurately characterized:

So this is how the world ends: Not with an action-movie bang, but with a guy sitting in a darkened room, chain-smoking and warning that “things are falling apart.”

Ms. Scape found the movie plausible enough to be sufficiently haunted by it. I, on the other hand, found the chain-smoking guy to be too preposterous to take seriously. After all, remember the last chain-smoking guy who got us all paranoid:

So I’m happy to report that Ms. Scape’s despair has now been tempered after watching this documentary on CNBC last night that was originally released in the Fall.