My Predictions for 2013

So, now that 2012 has bitten the dust, and the Mayan apocalypse didn’t quite come off, what’s going to happen in the big, bad, wonderful new year ahead of us?

Don’t bother about all that’s going to happen in the world of geopolitics or high finance. It does not matter who wins the next election. It does not matter if you don’t get that raise. It does not matter if the sky falls on your head tomorrow. Because it isn't going to.

Don’t even bother about your personal life. You aren’t going to have one.

Why am I saying that?

This is the reason: at this very moment, while you’re reading this, alien warriors from the Xglfth system in the Andromeda galaxy are on the way to attack earth, riding UFOs shaped like huge red glowing seagulls. In a few days they’ll arrive in the skies of earth, and quickly and efficiently eradicate all human life with the sole exception of politicians, fashion critics, celebrities and professional sportspeople...in other words, they will destroy anyone who is of any use at all.

This they will do with a clear conscience, because the Prime Directive of the Xgflth people goes:

“Do not exterminate another race, for genocide is a sin; but if they collapse under the weight of their own incompetence, that is all right with you.”

Since the collapse of human civilisation will be inevitable, and shortly followed by the extinction of the race, the earth will be ripe for takeover by another dominant species. Which will it be? Which???

On land, it’s going to be the naked mole rat.

Behold the New King in Town

From their homelands under the African savannah, these rampaging rodents will bite, gouge and burrow their way across land and under ocean until, in a matter of mere months, they swarm across all the continents of the globe. Being long-lived, they will have the time to make individual progress in the sciences and arts. Being social animals, they will be able to pool their resources and construct gigantic subterranean cities. And, because they don’t need anything like as much food as bigger mammals like...a certain recently-extinct hairless ape, for instance...they don’t have to ruin the world with agriculture.

And they will have their gods. In the casinos of the world, the lines of fruit machines will lie unattended, their bells and lights forlornly awaiting the gamblers who will never come. Instead will come the swarms of naked mole rats, who will dig them into the ground, and make temples around them, in honour of the Great God Who Blinks and Jangles. 

Take off thy shoes, for thou standeth on Holy Ground

This religion will last unchallenged until certain base heretics will seek to shift their allegiance to Coke dispensing machines, which, they will dare pretend, are every bit as good as the Great God Who Blinks and Jangles.

The Evil One

And that will be the start of the Great Mole Rat Crusades, which will so shake the foundations of the Naked Mole Rat civilisation that it will totter and almost fall. Only the advent of the Great Enlightened Rattva Herself - who will invent a new, unified religion without gods - will save the mole rat from going the way of the human, the Stellar's Sea Cow, and the dodo.

In the meantime, the oceans will be ruled by the swarms of vicious, intelligent Humboldt squid, with their vast brains and ripping beaks.

And they will worship Great Cthulhu. Who worships nobody except himself.

This is Great Cthulhu:

Don't worry, you won't be alive for him to eat you.

Happy New Year.