A fishy tale

Do you enjoy a good sushi meal, some seared Ahi tuna, or just a nice salmon? Or, perhaps you would like a Maine lobster or some jumbo shrimp? Eat up quickly folks, you've only got 42 more years. All the seafood will be gone from the world's oceans by 2048.

The world will run out of seafood by 2048 if steep declines in marine species continue at current rates, according to a study released today by an international group of ecologists and economists.

The paper, published in the journal Science, concludes that overfishing, pollution, and other environmental factors are wiping out important species across the globe, hampering the ocean's ability to produce seafood, filter nutrients and resist the spread of disease.

One of the big questions that confronts those who speculate about "intelligent life" elsewhere in the universe is whether it will be almost impossible to find because it kills itself off before it has been around very long (cosmically speaking, of course). When I first started to read about this stuff back in the '50s and '60s, the fear was that intelligent life would inevitably develop instruments of war and destroy itself in a nuclear conflagration. That's still possible, of course, but it seems almost as likely that we'll simply destroy the earth's ability to sustain us and die off from pestilence and famine. I certainly don't envy my grandkids the lives we're about to leave them.

And, no, this is not the same thing as the "Rapture." We won't make it to the "Rapture" at the rate we're going.