The views expressed in this Opinion article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Narcity Media.
Hello. I’m writing this from the future with help from a voice-enabled AI assistant because, like many Canadians, I scorched my retina on the solar eclipse.
Don’t worry. It was totally worth it, because not only did I get to see some cool space sh*t, but I didn’t have to see all the seemingly ridiculous events that I'd been warned about beforehand. Oh, if only we’d heeded all those hysterical eclipse headlines!
The date is April 9 if we’re using your calendar, but in this horrifying post-apocalyptic (ecliptalyptic?) future, we just call it E-Day Plus One — one day since the total solar eclipse.
You see, in this future (that is hopefully just made up), all of the wild theories about the eclipse have come true. This natural phenomenon — which happens on different parts of the globe every year — has utterly destroyed our society and confused the natural world.
The moon briefly covered the sun on April 8 and in that moment, thousands of Toronto kids tore their eyes off their phones and looked up. They kept looking up through the whole eclipse, and when the sun emerged again it fried their eyes, leaving them blind.
But hey, that’s on their parents, right? Toronto-area school boards declared April 8 a P.A. day for exactly that reason. Teachers didn’t teach kids about proper eclipse safety, but at least they can’t be sued for kids going blind on their watch.
Meanwhile it was chaos in the air and on land. Birds fell out of the sky, airline pilots went blind, traffic collisions piled up throughout the city and thousands of dogs now need their own seeing-eye dogs after looking up at the sun.
Oh, and don’t look now, but a whole bunch of pregnant women were exposed to the eclipse and will soon give birth to babies with odd birthmarks.
One of my friends made the trip to be in the path of totality on E-Day, and I'm pretty sure she'll never make it back through the chaos. If only she'd listened. If only we'd all listened to the warnings!
In my case, I was one of the many unlucky people who ended up with counterfeit eclipse glasses. I really should’ve looked for a high-quality set of ISO-approved paper-and-plastic shades, instead of falling for a knock-off thing made of the exact same material. Curse my bad judgment!
Luckily I wasn't at Ground Zero for the E-Day catastrophe. The city formerly known as Niagara Falls is no more, despite declaring a state of emergency ahead of the eclipse. Tourists descended on the city like ants swarming over a discarded ice cream cone while Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" played on repeat. By the end of the day, the city was a smoking crater littered with empty bottles of special edition "eclipse wines" from nearby Niagara-on-the-Lake.
What could we have done differently?
Surely there were more ridiculous warnings we could have shared, and more obscure angles we could have explored. Do cellphones work during the eclipse? Should we have banned TikTok along the path of totality, just in case? And why didn't we cancel work? Surely we deserved a day off for such a potentially disastrous celestial event.
But perhaps society will be OK. Perhaps this grim future I live in will not come to pass, and instead the eclipse will come and go as a brief moment of shared wonder across parts of Canada and the United States.
You'll stand outside, look up with your eclipse glasses on and say "Huh! That's cool," as the moon rolls over the sun. You'll stare at that ring of fire in the sky and, for a brief moment, you'll feel like a lucky little bug in a gigantic and indifferent universe, because you got a chance to glimpse something much bigger than yourself. It is a once-in-a-lifetime event, after all, and humans have been inventing myths for millennia just to explain it.
Or perhaps it'll just be cloudy. Life will go on either way, just as it has after so many solar eclipses in the past.
So enjoy the eclipse on April 8, or don't; but don't worry about this terrible made-up future that I've described. You're going to be just fine.
This article's right-hand cover image was used for illustrative purposes only.
