As is was, so it is, and so it will be again (Part 1)

And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war.
-- Revelation 19:11

Apocalypse. Armageddon. Götterdämmerung. Doomsday. The end of days.

The end was just the beginning.

From a long-forgotten unknown past, the comet returned to greet the Sun.

It approached the Earth, passing hideously close by as we watched in awe, but it did not hit.

We passed through the tail of the comet, and the debris of enormous size plummeted the Moon, as well as our naked planet.

We had sent missiles to eliminate the threat, but the debris only split them into slightly smaller pieces, resulting in even more widespread destruction.

We watched helplessly as it hailed down on the northern ice sheets, supermelting the glacial ice, initiating vast floods that the world hadn't seen in the last 13,000 years.

The masses of fresh water reached the ocean, quickly diluting the salty sea until the ocean currents came to a bleak standstill.

Usher in the new ice age. Not by global warming. Not by any human intervention at all.

As the Earth cooled down, numerous species went extinct, and the question of human overpopulation, which troubled so many minds in earlier times, was flipped on its head, and we wondered how we were going to maintain a population at all.

In those earlier times of great prosperity, most had paid no mind at all to any of the perils of tomorrow.

The leaders in politics and business were busy marching on their fields of battle, preoccupied with the petty monetization of the souls of beneath them.

Many of those souls followed in the futile hope of climbing the golden ladder of success and earning a space at a table never intended for them.

The most vulgar of the population simply stared at their flickering screens---void of any thought at all---mesmerized by satire that caricaturized their lives at their own cost.

However, a few had heeded the warnings and built storehouses deep within the mountains---tools, technology, and knowledge in every known format; samples of flora and fauna; seeds and DNA sequences; everything necessary to survive a cataclysmic disaster and possibly rebuild a civilization.

Following the initial floods, earthquakes, and tsunamis, the subsequent famines and nuclear crises took their turn in rapidly wiping out the most populated areas of the Earth.

Without fresh water, electricity, supermarkets, and leaders to guide them, people were helpless and fell prey to predators of every kind.

Yes, at the first sign of trouble, those beloved leaders promptly vanished with their privileged entourages, going their respective ways into reinforced bunkers deep below the Earth's crust, as well as into every kind of self-contained ship above and below the water or into the air and beyond.

There was a relatively short time of civil chaos, but after a few hundred years, human activity had become very quiet on planet Earth---so quiet in fact, that one might think that humans had become extinct altogether.

(...to be continued)