Mass Extinction and ... Flying Cars!

What's Strange about this clip?

 

(fair use)

 

This programme about the future appeared on my TV last night, and it touched on an issue close to my heart: the future viability of life on Earth.  

 

The first 3 minutes 45 seconds delivers some of the stark evidence for what we are doing and projections for where we are heading.  There's no emotion on display, but that's fine - we can't be emotional all the time and there's room for dispassionate analysis as well as appeals to the heart.  But then something strange happens at 3:48 - the presenter Hannah Fry introduces the next subject with an incredibly chirpy "Flying Cars! There - I've said it".

Watching this one is left thinking:

 

Either I'm mad or everyone else is.  We've just been told that the average population decline across all species between 1970 and 2020 will be 67%.   And after dedicating three and bit minutes to that we're now talking about flying cars!  I'm worried we won't have enough to eat!

The presenters are not to blame here - the choice to follow one VT by another was an editorial choice, and a strange one.  It's hard to imagine any producer allowing a piece on the holocaust, say, to be followed 3 seconds later by something fun and quirky.  In fact even if the earlier story was about just one person's suffering you'd normally expect a more gentle handover, out of respect.  So what's going on?

It's possible some stories are just too big to take as seriously as they should.  So we confuse the hell out of viewers by telling them they're all going to die, their civilization is going to collapse, and mass extinction will ensue unless something changes right now, but we say it in a vanilla tone and then move on to the next subject as if it were no big deal.

To be fair to the BBC, this programme was made in 2017, and in 2021 the climate crisis gets entire shows to itself.  But this type of thing still happens all the time, and I for one question my sanity every time it does.