Imagine that it’s the end of the world. No, not the end of the world as we know it, but the actual end of the world. You can make the cause anything you want – global warming, nuclear war, alien invasion, meteor impact, or what have you. If you could escape with only one thing, what would it be?

Now there are lots of possibilities. I’ll leave out other people, because they really aren’t things. And while the scholarly side of me might want to take a book or a CD-ROM with an entire library of scholarly and religious texts, I think I would settle for something much more simple in the end.

Yeah, that’s right – my dog. Or at least a dog, if Apolitical Pooch weren’t able to accompany my Darling Democrat and I. After all, a dog is such an important source of love and companionship, as well as link to the very first creatures domesticated by humanity millennia ago – because it is believed that canines were the first animals that mankind brought into that special relationship at the dawn of time.

Now there is a neat new game out there, Tabula Rasa. I’m not going to give you a long description, but it is about human beings fighting against an alien enemy, trying to preserve humanity and civilization. I’ll let you check out the details. But its developer is going to be making a journey to the International Space Station soon, and he is taking with him some DNA samples and messages from human beings. You may even be one of those DNA samples, if you follow the instructions for entering the contest at Operation Immortality.

Operation Immortality: Leave your mark. Save Humanity.

Think about it – you could help preserve some small bit of humanity against the end of the world. That is serious stuff.