The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

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I’m speaking here as a writer of fiction, and of course many of the hypotheses and theories and ideas and suggestions that I will put forward may horrify a scientific audience. But they’re to be seen from a fictional point of view. My subject is The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which were Famine, Plague, War, and Death...

Portentous and purposeful as the priest advancing on a dying man to administer the Last Rites, so the four caballeros by their solid presence indicate that Time has been called for that particular biologic or sociological experiment. Closing time, gentlemen... dinosaurs bellow piteously, Famine saddles up his cayuse and gallops through swamplands leaving a dustbowl behind him... and the outmoded dinosaurs subside into museum skeletons, gaped at by human spectators. And the day of the spectators will come too.

At the present time, the situation of course with regards to the Four Horsemen is much more complicated than it was before man appeared on the scene, there the most important Horseman was probably Famine. At the present time, the subject of the experiment, in this case the human species, can to some extent control the conditions of the experiment, but this isn’t such an advantage as one would think since they cannot control themselves. The human creature has demonstrated through the centuries a stubborn disinclination to control himself. However, if I may indulge in whimsy, had we been dinosaurs we might have built great dams to preserve supplies of water and protect our way of life and we might have hunted down the despicable mammals as the egg-sucking rats they were. Some have advanced theories that the mammals ate the dinosaurs’ eggs and undermined them that way though many other factors were at work in the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

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