Colin Sheridan: Asteroids, AI, and austerity — how do we cope with a world in chaos?

Asteroids, AI, and apocalypse — are we all living through history, or just overwhelmed by it?

Calculations have shown a 3.1% chance of the 2024 YR4 asteroid scoring a direct hit on planet Earth by the end of 2032.

“I have lived in important places,” wrote Patrick Kavanagh, “Times when great events were decided.”

The poem from which that line comes from is Epic, a Leaving Cert staple back in the 1990s. Its ubiquity in Soundings, I feel, drastically devalued its genius. An incredible poem from an incredible poet, its closing sentences are among the best written by any Irish poet, and that’s saying something:

That was the year of the Munich bother

Which Was more important? 

I inclined To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin

Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind

He said: I made the Iliad from such A local row. 

Gods make their own importance.

You could bookend every piece of political and pop culture commentary for the last (and next) hundreds of years with “Gods make their own importance,” and you’d be on the money.

Recently, however, it’s the opening line “I have lived in important places/Times when great events were decided” that grabs me.

Do we all feel this way, all the time? What moved Kavanagh — a man who never travelled further than a brief stint in London — to ruminate on such high-falutin matters as the Iliad and “the Munich bother”? (The “bother” in question was the Munich Conference in 1938 which saw Germany, Italy, Great Britain, and France sign an agreement which saw Czechoslovakia surrender its border regions and defences to Nazi Germany).

Was his life experience — up to the point of publishing Epic in 1951 — any more tumultuous than mine, say, over a similar period?

I thought about this week when I heard the news that there's an asteroid headed towards Earth, and the chances of it hitting are increasing with every Google search.

You may have lived in important places, Paddy K, but did you have a flipping space rock to contend with? Calculations have shown a 3.1% chance of the 2024 YR4 asteroid scoring a direct hit on planet Earth by the end of 2032. That was on Thursday. Along with my blood pressure, the percentage has probably risen since then.

Just our luck. Like, it feels like there's been a lot going on lately, and now this. You live through the 80s in Ireland, wearing your older sisters' hand-me-down clothes. You watch the first Gulf War from behind the couch, petrified by the sight of patriot missiles hurtling through the green-lit sky.

A sculpture of the poet Patrick Kavanagh whose opening line to his poem, Epic, 'I have lived in important places/Times when great events were decided' has grabbed my attention.

You endure consecutive decades of Mayo losing All-Irelands in the cruellest, most calamitous ways imaginable.

You watch September 11 unfold from the college bar, completely ignorant to the fact that one day would land you in Afghanistan 14 years later, missing your first child's first birthday.

You survive frosted tips, bootcut jeans, Boyzone, Six, B*Witched, Ireland's decline as a force at Eurovision. 

Austerity comes — and while it never really leaves — you emerge into adulthood owning a car and a home (well, not really owning either, but you get the point). You witness the fall of the American empire in real-time. The Old World Order disintegrates while you cut the grass. 

A global pandemic separates you from loved ones. The world becomes so goddam small but never feels so big and unbreachable. The virus passes, but the paranoia remains. You will never sneeze in public again.

Artificial intelligence. Sex robots. Global warming. Irish people are considered good-looking. The pace of change and entropy can sometimes seem overwhelming.

And now, this. A big hunk of space junk the size of a football pitch, flying through space, headed for Earth. Not as big as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, but not insignificant, either. 

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Take that, Kavanagh! Yourself and your Spanish flu and two World Wars (and a revolution, a war of independence, a civil war, and a disintegrating world order, the birth of air travel and the computer…).

The good news is that scientists say that the asteroid, which they can currently see, will disappear out of view soon and not reappear until 2028. This I am happy about. This level of existential avoidance I can live with. I’ll have my poem ready by then. I already have my first line:

“I have lived in importanter places.”