Slashdot Mirror
This Is the Way the World Ends
Dave Knott writes "The CBC's weekly science radio show Quirks and Quarks this week features a countdown of the top ten planetary doomsday scenarios. Nine science professors and one science fiction author are asked to give (mostly) realistic hypotheses of the ways in which the planet Earth and its inhabitants can be destroyed. These possibilities for mankind's extinction include super-volcanoes, massive gamma ray bursts, and everybody's favorite, the killer asteroid. Perhaps the most terrifying prediction is the reversal of the Earth's magnetic field (combined with untimely solar activity), a periodic event which is currently 1/4 million years overdue."
Even the most retarded religious fundamentalist understands that dropping a nuclear bomb on someone who has one, or has a country which has one for a friend, isn't such a bright idea.
No, more likely, the world (or more precisely Humanity, the planet would do better without than with us on it) will slip back to feudalism as cheap energy resources wane, and a sizable portion of the earth population will be destroyed by an ugly, multi-decade, low-level world war fueled by bigotry and poverty.
Unless we get nuclear winter, and plants cannot grow anymore- no more food. Or radiation levels become so high that people die before reaching adulthood or cannot reproduce.
The conventional bombs we have to detonate to kill a couple of people are peanuts compared to MIRV missiles with 10 warheads each having 0.5 MT yield. And we have thousands of these.
I know there are lots of humans all over the place, but global thermonuclear war could have enough effect on the biosphere to render it unlivable.
--Coder
because when the earth's magnetic field reached zero temporily (it doesn't actually reached zero, it becomes chaotic, but let's assume), it stops shielding us from solar radiations, meaning cancers, mutations, and general baking of higher level lifeforms on the planet.
It has happened before, but modern humans weren't there to suffer from it. As for other lifeforms, most of them are a lot tougher than we are.
"Overdue" has no anthropomorphic undertone. If the Haley comet shows up one year late next time around, it'll be one year overdue.
As for the Earth's magnetic field reversal, they have occured regularly and very often in the past, so the next one is overdue, period. Same as the Big One in California. It has nothing to do with people promising anything, it's just a matter of probabilities.
... by someone who was both scientist and science fiction author, a little dated now perhaps, but still an excellent read:
A Choice of Catastrophes
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
Do you happen to know which data points we have?
Anyway I think it will just be another year 2000 fiasco, lots of worries and then nothing happens.
Sure it may fuck up all satellites and some communication but so what? It's not the end of the world.
I'm just curious - but why do you care about our survival as a species in an event that may not happen in the foreseeable future?
I mean, this goes beyond caring about yourself, your children, or your children's children. This goes a bit beyond survival instinct.
No, I am not an English major. My posts are subject to typos and incorrect grammar. Do not expect perfection.
I dunno, I don't think a "few" bombs going off would be as devastating as you think. Hell, if a "few" bombs could irradiate the ocean, the ocean would already be dead because that's where most nuclear testing took place.
As for actual damage, even the Tzar Bomba only did damage up to 620 miles away. That's a lot of destructive power, but it'd still take more than a few of them to really fuck things up. After a few hundred miles from the drop zone it was mostly just breaking windows.
I think the biggest threat of nuclear war isn't a few bombs, but the "mutually assured destruction" scenarios where everybody just says "fuck it" and just launches all of their nukes at everybody else. In that case you're looking at thousands of nukes aimed specifically at cities.
Give a disease enough time to find the right combination and it may end up with a lethality high enough to keep the remaining humans so far apart that the possibility of procreation may be very low.
And it may be enough with a disease that causes sterility.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
No, "we" don't have thousands of ten warhead MIRV missiles (that would require a massive booster). Most MIRV missiles are in the range of two to four warheads, and the US only intends to have just over 2000 operational warheads in the near future (with a handful of two warhead MIRV missiles).
Also from the most recent material I have read the threat of a "nuclear winter" was a gross beat up. We have had multiple volcanic events that discharged more particles into the atmosphere than would happen with optimal usage of warheads to cause a "nuclear winter", and in a normal scenario they wouldn't be used optimally for that scenario.
Additionally long time large increases in radioactivity can not happen. Most fall out from a nuclear attack is gone in weeks, what is left is not enough to destroy life. Something like Chernobyl is far more dangerous to the bio-sphere, and the Chernobyl area is still teeming with life.
Global thermonuclear war is not an extinction level event with even the levels of armament at the peak of the Cold War.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
At the very least, humanity as we know it would be completely destroyed.
With the knowledge infrastructure destroyed, and pressing need to work on primary survival needs, it will only take a few generations to completely wipe out hundred year of scientific advance.
And even if a bit of infrastructure and "pockets" of advanced civilization remain, what is the chance that they will be even remotely like our civilization, even if only by their approach to "science" and "progress".
I once read an anecdote, I don't know if this is true, that in the 1700s the British set couples of goats loose in desert islands. The rationale was that castaways who eventually arrived at those islands would have a source of meat and milk. However, when someone visited those islands years later, there wasn't any life at all in the islands, only goat skeletons everywhere. The goats reproduced as long as there was food, and after they had eaten every plant they all died.
One can imagine a similar scenario for humanity. Not that we would eat every plant on earth, but if civilization were destroyed by overpopulation, maybe some plague would kill the survivors. Look at AIDS in Africa to see how lethal is a disease that's left to evolve without control.
Everybody being wiped out is a low-probability scenario, I agree, but not completely impossible.
In reality the governments of Iran and North Korea are made up of rational people who will always act in their countries' long term best interests despite their rhetoric.
What part of North Korea's long term interests are best served by devoting a quarter of the gross domestic product (for comparison, the US spends around 4%) to the military while the population starves to death for lack of food?
They are totally unlike the US government which will screw up and start wars because of the sort term interest of the ruling class and/or a miscalculation and plunge the world into chaos
Are you trolling to trying to be funny? I can't tell.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Proof of it would be the Toba explosion or the cooling from the oil well fires in Kuwait.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
This is unfortunately not true. I have met Christian fundamentalists right here in Alberta Canada who actively promote nuclear war. They honestly believe that a nuclear war is in effect Armageddon and it will bring the second coming where all the righteous will be swept up seconds before the bombs hit.
"Millions of Americans, primarily premillennialist fundamentalist Christians, believe that God has foreordained a global nuclear war as the precursor to the Second Coming of Christ"
http://jhp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/32/4/92 I stole that quote from here
Fire and Ice Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. Robert Frost
My personal favorite end-of-civilization would be the global spread of a hardy airborne virus that causes plants to be unable to photosynthesize. Fin.
Scary thought. Although it'd be an interesting point in history if the same virus caused the human body to be able to photosynthesize, thereby removing the need for food for humans.
As for Sagan himself on the issue, his research seems more speculative rather than concrete. Remember he also predicted that the first Iraq war would lead to global cooling because of the particulate matter generated from the oil fires Saddam threatened to set. Well indeed Saddam did set those fires as he threatened and it had no measurable impact on our climate.
He never predicted "global cooling", even so his predictions were still wrong. In the autumn of 1990, Sagan made his most serious scientific blunder. Short version: Sagan assumed that the soot from the fires could reach stratosphere, which then would endanger food production in Asia. He was wrong about that - however, the ecology of Kuwait was damaged, temperatures going down more than 4 degrees C.
Also, Sagan was only one of 5 people who wrote the paper on Nuclear Winter. A simple oil well fire (no matter how big) simply can't reach the stratosphere, an atomic explosion does - and thousands do to.
There is a newer paper on Nuclear Winter: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006JD008235.shtml
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Give a disease enough time to find the right combination and it may end up with a lethality high enough to keep the remaining humans so far apart that the possibility of procreation may be very low.
That's not the way it works. Not in the messy real world anyway. In the messy real world evolution takes over.
Think about it. What is the incentive for a disease predator to kill off so many humans that it no longer has a food supply? Only people are that stupid. Any bacterium/virus, even a man-made one, once loosed into the real world has three choices:
1)become less lethal over time (measles/chicken pox)
2)establish a stable relationship with another host (influenza/plague)
3)or die off.
The scenario makes for kewel fiction but even in fiction Andromeda evolved.
I was going to post an exerpt, but /. destroys my formatting.
http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/784/
Has anyone else heard such a thing? Or is the local evangelical pastor mixing up his Mayan and Biblical eschatologies?
Possibly. Most people, particularly bible-thumpers, have a problem with rational thinking in general. I am a Christian and I believe in "prophecy" but I know the difference between my faith and my "provable knowledge," and more importantly I know the difference between what our faith really teaches and what the "conventional wisdom" might be.
In other words, and to answer your question, there are several ways to get to 2012 in Christian eschatology. Most of this stems from the "rebirth of Israel" in 1949 and some things Christ said about His return which puts us within a decade or so of some events that will supposedly take 7 years to complete, significant milestones midway, and depending on certain calculations involving the Passover, you can get there. There is no formal connection to the Maya, but I doubt anyone who believes this would listen to you. Once you've heard a pastor talk about how many letters are in the 'Reagan,' UPC barcodes, or that Obama is going to lead a Muslim revolution, you tune out. A Christian business owner I know of once even switched from Unix to Windows because he watched a consultant type 'chmod 666.'
As soon as a Christian begins listening to their local 'inspired' pastor, watching the Discovery/History channel, reading Bible Codes, the "Left Behind" series, and throwing out logic and reason and indulging in magical thinking in general, all hope is lost for them making any sense. I don't know about your inlaws, but the 2012 stuff seems to fall into this category for me.
There IS a "star" that falls in the Revelation to John. It does "poison the waters" and it is called "wormwood." I don't really know what all that means, but it is clear that it is NOT the "end of the world" and there is absolutely NO reason to assume that it will happen in our lifetimes, or in 2012 for that matter. People who say things like that have abandoned reason, which is (according to Wesley) one of the four key paths to working out your personal theology.
Which is NOT to say that believing these (or some of these) prophecies are true is necessarily irrational. If you KNOW you don't have scientific or empirical proof, YET you still believe that God exists and that he spoke to one of us through a dream/hallucination/vision 2000 years ago, AND you find it consistent with other prophecies (Ezekiel, Isaiah) and things that Christ is supposed to have said, that is perfectly sound reasoning. You may be completely wrong in the end, but there is no logical error here. There are risks with assigning probabilities without all the facts, but hey, that's induction. And being human.
When presented with a choice and there is no proof either way (such as 'is there a God') you can either ignore the question, or make your best, inductive guess. Either position is reasonable.
Contrary to popular opinion around here, religious or philosophical beliefs are not necessarily irrational in themselves. Most of my "religious" beliefs are clearly conclusions I've come to WITHOUT conclusive evidence or proof. Knowing - and acknowledging - this is key. Most inductive reasoning (not mathematical induction) is the same, and is not necessarily illogical or without value. Logic and reason are not orthogonal to faith in a creator, or even a savior. Bible codes, Intelligent Design, "bibliolatry", and the circular reasoning rampant in religion (and of all faiths) are all very much mutually exclusive to sound reason.
Personally, I find the Judeo-Christian prophetic tradition to be very interesting, and required reading if you want to understand the faith(s). The book of Daniel is amazing to me (though technically not a prophecy) and is so amazing the writing has been dated to much later than traditionally held because, in part... it "predicts" the future... and that's impossible.
Let the reader decide.
Prophecy doesn't "predict"
Why would a bomb hit a cornfield in Kansas
Trying to hit the missile silos out there?
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman