A review by holly_keimig
The Day It Finally Happens: Alien Contact, Dinosaur Parks, Immortal Humans--And Other Possible Phenomena by Mike Pearl

4.0

This is one of those books that caught my eye at work and at the library and I knew I'd enjoy reading it. I like thought experiments like these and really enjoyed Randall Munroe's "What If" book so I felt fairly confident this would be enjoyable as well. Reading the introduction further confirmed it when Pearl writes "I’m not a statistician or a physicist. In fact, I’m terrible at math, but I do like to predict the future, and I’ve made a job of it. I just approach it a little differently because my main qualification is a paralyzing fear of things that are going to happen. My fear comes from an anxiety disorder - a very common mental illness. It’s a mixed blessing for someone who works as an explanatory journalist: it fills my head with ideas, but I hate the ideas." Since this has been a year full of anxiety and dread, it was almost strangely comforting to read about even crazier things that weren't happening (yet at least!). Pearl writes about the Day the Internet Goes Down, The Day the Next Supervolcano Erupts, The Day the Last Slave Goes Free, and the Day The Last Cemetery Runs of of Space, among other topics. Some were a bit tedious, but most were incredibly interesting to think about. Everything was well-researched, thought-out, and short enough to be bite-sized but still meaty enough to make you want more. I highly recommend this to other anxious readers who want to feel marginally better about most of the topics and a bit more scared about things they weren't even aware of before.

p.235-Day of the Dead-cultural issues and space issues are causing problems.