FOR many years, clever people with tall foreheads and mad hair have explained that mankind, almost certainly, will not be wiped out by nuclear weapons or some kind of giant meteorite.
But they’ve said we could very easily all be killed by something we can’t even see: A virus.
The figures bear this out, because the number of people killed so far by atomic weapons is a few thousand. The number killed by a meteorite is one. And the number killed by some kind of plague is in the millions and millions.
The Black Death, for example, killed 50million people.
And that was in the 14th century, when the population of the whole world was only about 50million and seven.
Strangely, however, we seem to be terribly blasé whenever a new virus works its way into the human food chain.
When bird flu was first identified we listened to the doom on television.
And then went into the shed to feed the budgies. Until it was time for a nice chicken sandwich.
Aids? Well, we all watched poor old Freddie Mercury die then we booked a hooker and crossed our fingers.
More recently, Ebola broke out of the bat cave it calls home and began to run amok in West Africa.
Ebola is the Worst Thing In The World.
It liquefies your internal organs and as your relatives lean over your baggy, soggy body to say their goodbyes, you have a fit and explode, showering them with infected goo.
So they too end up going the same way.
And were we bothered? Not really.
