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NASA
The apocalyptic "2012" is likely to rock the box office again this weekend (and as disaster flicks go, reviews for this one have been positive). The end of the world ain't happenin' anytime soon, despite the Jim Jones believers in the Mayan calendar theory, but there are real possibilities for the end of mankind, none of which require a tin foil hat. Here are five (courtesy of Foreign Policy magazine):
1) An Asteroid
Hollywood has beaten this one to death (Meteor, Armageddon, Deep Impact) but astronomers say the Earth gets hit by objects from space all the time. They usually burn up in the atmosphere. Bigger objects can get through, leaving small craters and plenty of meteor fragments. A larger impact? 1908, when an event "flattened a 2,000-square-mile area of Siberian forest with an explosion about 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb." Certainly enough to wipe out a major metropolitan area. No one is sure what hit but the educated guess is that it was an object a few dozen meters in diameter.
The scary impact? An object more than a kilometer in diameter --that's around 3,000 feet wide, a sixth of a mile. If it hits land, it can kick up enough dust and sediment to cause environmental damage and crop failures worldwide. If it hits water? See the film, Deep Impact. An object about 10 miles in diameter is thought to have killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That'd probably do us in, too.
Can it happen? Soon, but not now. NASA scientists say an object big enough to wipe out the earth's population happens about twice every million years, so odds are slim. The brainiacs at NASA's Near Earth Objects program have yet to discover anything in space with a shot at hitting us although they calculate that one object, known as 1950 DA, will come close in 2880. Only problem here: There's not a lot of money devoted to identifying near earth objects, so there's no guarantee we'll have much warning time before one hit. A previously unknown seven-meter asteroid passed just 9,000 miles from the earth's surface on Nov. 6 and was detected by NASA only 15 hours before what counts as an entirely too close encounter. Solution: Get Bruce Willis on it.
2) Climate Disaster
From Al Gore's film, Saw IV
Or what we like to call, The Al Gore Scenario.
Climatologists say global temperatures could rise 2-3 degrees by century's end, and that's a conservative estimate. Result: melting polar ice would lead to rising sea levels by as much as 5-10 feet --not good if you live along the coast, and the majority of Americans do.
Conversely, changes in air currents could turn as much as a third of the planet into a desert and more than half the planet would experience drought. The salinization of much of the Earth’s groundwater supply will only make this worse. You think we're fighting over oil? Imagine the geopolitical conflicts over food and water. Not to mention that warmer temperatures could wipe up many of the world's species (not that I'd miss the mosquito or the common housefly).
Can it happen? A recent MIT study found that current carbon trends bear out these worst-case scenarios or even exceed them. Global carbon levels are currently at 380 parts per million compared to 280 before the Industrial Revolution. Most scientists conclude that catastrophic effects will begin to be felt once those levels pass 450. If the Earth reaches 800-1000 parts per million, as the worst-case scenarios predict, who knows. While recent research by the National Oceanographic and Aeronautics Administration suggests that many of the effects of climate change are already irreversible, the worst, potentially civilization-ending outcomes could be mitigated by a substantial reduction in carbon emissions.
Of course, there are lots of people who think global warming is a hoax, but you wonder how many of them believe in things like the Mayan calendar theory or Revelations.
3) Nuclear War
Going out with a bang
Whoops! (TheBulletin.org)
So, outside of Dr. Strangelove, can the world go out with a blast? The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created that famous "Doomsday Clock" in 1947 to convey how close humanity is to "catastrophic destruction." Those damned liberals! Closest we came: 2 minutes to midnight after the first hydrogen bomb tests in 1953. Furthest we've been: 17 minutes till after the end of the Cold War but the clock has been steadily ticking forward and with happy campers like North Korea, kooks like Iran's president and longtime tensions between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, the clock stands at 5 minutes to midnight. And that's not to mention if those al-Qaeda types manage to overthrow the Pakistani government and get their hands on that country's 60 nuclear warheads. But they want to return the world to the Sixth Century back when they used sun dials. Don't they know that's a backyard ornament?
Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Reenactment
4) Plague
Something about a menstrual cycle
Run for your lives, it's the swine flu!
Civilization has been hammered by viral plagues many times. Everyone loves to tell you that the Black Death killed more off more than half of Europe's population in the Middle Ages, but then, they didn't have cable. And the flu pandemic of 1918 wiped out an estimated 50 million people, nearly 3 percent of the world's population. Nearly every flu virus is a derivation of that one, and because of globalization, diseases today spread even faster. Just imagine the dude with ebola flying from the Congo to Washington, D-C. We recommend his first stop be the Capitol Building and that he do a lot of coughing.
Of course, the more rapid spread of a virus has been match by more rapid and greatly improved treatment of diseases. We've come a long way since 1918. Still, as the population grows and humans move into previously unoccupied areas, the risk of exposure to previously unknown pathogens increases. Viruses mutate. Scientists are always playing catch-up. Each year's new flu shot is based on an educated guess of what kind of viral infection will make its way around the globe. Fortunately, the scientist are good guessers, but still, with exponential population growth, more than 40 new viruses have emerged since the 1970s, including ebola and HIV. Oh, and then there's the extra fun of biological weapons experimentation, just to make things more complicated. Oh, and don't forget the ultimate plague: Cable news.
5) The unknown
These are the speculative theories based on common knowledge, statistical data and laws of probability. A super volcano might erupt and create enough ashen dust in the atmosphere to drastically alter the Earth's climate. Or a giant solar flare could strike, breaking the Earth's magnetic field and igniting a global fireball.
From the film "Knowing," a massive solar flare strikes the Earth
How a solar flare works
Overpopulation could cause shortages in food and water supplies and who knows what yet-to-be developed technolgies await us with their unknown consequences. Or we could elect Sarah Palin president.
A list of Hollywood disaster films, going back to the 1950s. Hollywood, of course, is also known for making its share of films that have been disasters.
So how likely is it the world will end before you finish catching up with all of those Mad Men episodes you've TiVO-ed? You've probably got more time than that. Astronomers estimate that in about 5-8 billion years, the sun will exhaust the last of its hydrogen into helium and will balloon up into a red giant hundreds of times its current size. Even if the Earth isn't dragged into that oven, you can kiss its atmosphere and oceans goodbye --they'll have been boiled away.
The planet is billions of years old, that is, unless you believe in fiction. Humans have only been around for 200,000 of those 4-to-6-billion years, an infinitesimal percentage. The chances of us being around for the real end of the world are pretty slim.
Get back to me on December 22, 2012. But don't be surprised if the Four Horsemen send their regrets.
Back to the Stone Age!
End of the World compilation
Comments
"Can it happen? Soon, but not now. NASA scientists say an object big enough to wipe out the earth's population happens about twice every million years, so odds are slim."
False and misleading: all asteroid impact events are completely aperiodic and random both in their occasion and magnitude. Any size asteroid can strike Earth at any time... tomorrow. The 1/2 million year interval here is not an 'about' but rather an 'averaged' relative frequency of randomly occurring events.
"The brainiacs at NASA's Near Earth Objects program have yet to discover anything in space with a shot at hitting us"
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence... All that is required to constitute the unmitigated threat and risk of one asteroid impact of any size at any time is the mere possibility of just one undiscovered asteroid anywhere in the solar system.
Only Fear defines Necessity. If we want more money from government to deal with this threat we have to scare them better.
DonQ
DonQ says: "Only Fear defines Necessity. If we want more money from government to deal with this threat we have to scare them better."
That sounds a lot like the Republican brand of politics. :) How about this: Human beings don't do things that need doing until they have to, and often, by then it's much more expensive, or it's too late.
Thanks for your clarification.
"That sounds a lot like the Republican brand of politics. :)"
Republican... don't be silly. Fear is pretty much a nonpartisan universal compulsion and sociopolitical sales tool. After all, no Democrat has ever achieved public office w/o at least mongering a fear of Republicans, da/nyet?
"How about this: Human beings don't do things that need doing until they have to, and often, by then it's much more expensive, or it's too late."
My first response would be to offer our standing military and national disaster relief and fire and police departments and hospitals and insurance indemnifying everything everything under the sun as argument... but these are old, old lessons.
When you consider many more recent and new problems perhaps we have yet to learn to address the pitfall and threat that the smarter we get the easier it is to fool ourselves.
DonQ says: "...don't be silly..."
I stand corrected. Probably should have said, "That sounds a lot like the Republican brand of politics TODAY." It will soon be the Democrats turn. And all of it is silly.
I appreciate your thoughtful observations.
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