Something Wicked

By the pricking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes. And no, ladies and gentlemen of Earth, I’m not talking about regicide. I’m talking about what the Mayans called the Coming of the Sixth Age. The Norse called it Ragnarok, and the monotheistic folk tend to call it the Rapture, Armageddon, or Apocalypse. Us secular folk don’t tend to call it anything, primarily because it’s too mind-bogglingly outside of the way we think about ourselves, as humans: no matter what happens to us, the world goes on. The only form of immortality for atheists and agnostics is the kind of immortality that Shakespeare has, the kind that lives on in the words of Macbeth and his witches. Maybe if we move enough people, make a big enough impression on the world, we’ll be remembered when our lives end and give way to the next generation, and the next, ad infinitum. After all, life always marches on, right?

The world is going to end, and soon, at least relatively. Lots of people will try to predict dates. Y2K was supposed to be the end of times, according to some. Obviously we’re still here, so that didn’t quite pan out. Lately, people are talking 2012. In fact, there are reams of books and papers on why 2012 is going to be the specific year. It seems arbitrary, but there are some interesting bits of correlating apocalyptic culture on that year. The Mayans believed December 21, 2012 would be the end of the Fifth Age. A new age would begin, but only after an apocalypse of some sort. In the 70s, writer/philosopher Terrence McKenna analyzed a Chinese text called the I Ching, and (independently from the Mayans) came up with December 22, 2012 as the date for the apocalypse. In addition, a famous journalist by the name of Michael Drosnin has written a book called The Bible Code, based on mathematical analyses of The Bible for predictions about the future. The Bible codes have (supposedly) successfully predicted, among other things, the assassination in Tel Aviv of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, by a man named Amir; and that the Supreme Court would rule against Al Gore in favor of George Bush in 2000. It also predicts that a comet will strike Earth in 2010, and again in 2012.

Know that I’m agnostic, and so you won’t be seeing me (barring a vision from God/Allah/Yahweh) in the street with a cardboard sign, demanding that you repent of all your sins before comets smite us. In fact, I consider myself to be purely scientific in my beliefs. It’s a neat coincidence that the Mayans and the Bible code and Terrence McKenna all give the same date, but far more frightening is the preponderance of potential global disasters with which we, as a species, are beset, and which scientists around the world are studying. I won't say for certain that 2012 is our last year. But there are a myriad of possible life-enders hovering around our little planet, and a lot of them seem to intersect with that fateful year.

From the Cold War to the Pakistan/India conflict to Islamic extremist terrorists to North Korean nuclear weapons testing, our civilization is like an ever accelerating automobile. No matter how much common sense dictates shifting our collective foot to the brake pedal and globally disarming, it seems like there is a never-ending threat of nuclear conflict.

So what's the big deal about nuclear conflict anyway?

Nuclear weapons in the US arsenal today have a yield of up to 1.2 megatons. A megaton explosion is the equivalent explosion of 10¹² grams of TNT, aka 10,000,000,000,000 grams. In other words ten thousand billion grams of TNT. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union tested a type of bomb with a yield of 50 megatons, and a theoretical yield of 100 megatons.

Of course this is scary for most of us who live in population centers, because in the event of nuclear war, odds are good that we're going to be incinerated. But the huge explosive power of nuclear weapons is not what makes them world-enders. It isn't even the radiation, which would result in more deaths than the explosions themselves. It's the smoke. Studies have shown that even a regional-sized nuclear conflict, say between Pakistan and India, involving .03% of the world's nuclear arsenal, would throw enough smoke and crud into the air (from burning cities) to massively deplete the world's ozone, and drop the global temperature by several degrees. Think several degrees isn't that big a deal? It's enough to wreak havok with growing seasons and totally disrupt the world's agriculture. Throw in a 20% global depletion of the ozone layer, and suddenly we're all starving and dying of skin cancer.

That's not the worst of it though. Let's step up the scenario. Instead of Pakistan and India embroiled in nuclear war, say it's the United States and Russia - the world's strongest nuclear super-powers. After the nukes fly on both sides, the burning cities would release, worst case, 150 teragrams of smoke into the atmosphere. Remember, a teragram is 10,000,000,000,000 grams. All of this smoke would rise into the atmosphere, be heated by the sun, and rise into the stratosphere. Here, above the rain clouds, there'd be nothing to wash it out. It would persist for years. With 150 teragrams of smoke, we're talking a 20-30 degree Celsius drop in temperature over agricultural areas. Think winter in summer, and lung-shredding arctic temperatures in the winter. Anyone who managed to survive the bombs and fallout would be living in a brutal ice age.

And before we move on, here's a fun fact. A nuclear reduction treaty in place between Russia and the USA deadlines in the year 2012. There's that year again. But don't worry about political tension revolving around the treaty escalating into full-scale war. I'm sure the reduction will go smoothly all the way through.

Cosmically, our solar system is not stable. It is part of one of the rotating arms of the Milky Way galaxy, which is itself traveling in space. In other words, our entire solar system is traveling at incredible speeds through the universe. Apparently, space is not homogenous. Energy and matter are not evenly distributed throughout the universe. Space outside of the stars and planets is not void, but rather, is filled with areas of lesser and greater energy. Research on the energy levels in the atmospheres of all of the planets in the solar system, as well as the energy level of the sun itself indicates that the entire solar system is moving into a higher energy section of space. The sun is almost entirely gaseous, and as such, is the greatest effected. And whatever effects the sun, effects the Earth.

The sun is not in constant equilibrium, as mankind has believed throughout time. Sunspots, magnetically active parts of the surface of the sun, spew energy and plasma massive distances into the solar system. Large solar flares can cause storms of high energy protons to bombard the Earth, taking out satellites and playing havok with the electronic systems of the Earth, which are based on satellites (unshielded astronauts would be fried if they were exposed). There is some speculation in the scientific community that solar activity is related to storm activity on Earth. When Katrina hit (along with several more, equally intense hurricanes in other parts of the world), the sun was in the midst of a massive series of solar storms. This intense solar activity, by the way, occurred during a solar minimum, a time during which there should be next to no solar flares. The solar maximum for this particular cycle should be around (no joke) 2011 or 2012. The heightened energy is agitating the sun, and we’re almost certainly looking at a record-breaking solar maximum in a few years. At the very least, this will ravage our communications networks (including the military satellites that many nations use for defensive operations). Should be a fun mix with the approaching nuclear reduction deadline.

Next we have another instance of man-made doom approaching: global warming. Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth is all about global warming; in fact, a great deal of eco-friendly movements are addressing global warming. Honestly, if you haven’t heard all about global warming, you need to buy a TV and watch it, or perhaps leave your house from time to time. Since it's everywhere, and given that I have a rather strong opinion about it, I'm going to refrain from harping on it at great length here. But it bears mention that global warming is definitely happening, as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, and trap more of the sun’s energy, warming the Earth. Over the last century, global temperature rose by about 1.3 degrees fahrenheit. If this continues we're in for rising sea levels (good-bye New Orleans), increased extreme weather, shrinkage of rain forests, and growth of deserts. Agricultural output will shrink. In the end, our future is to become another Venus: incredibly hot, and completely uninhabitable. This, folks, is a really stupid way to die.

This is how the dinosaurs went out 65 million years ago. Probably. Though there isn't quite a total consensus, there's strong evidence for the theory that something - probably a comet, or asteroid - was the culprit. Whatever it was, it struck the Earth 65 million years ago, forming the Chicxulub crater. It was probably 3-9 miles wide, and when it hit it would have struck with the force of 100 million 1 megaton hydrogen bombs. It struck the ocean, generating tidal waves thousands of feet high. Pieces of the asteroid and chunks of Earth would have been blown out of the atmosphere, and then fallen back to the Earth, igniting on re-entry and quite literally setting the world aflame. The impact would have been felt globally, stimulating tectonic events around the world. Dust ejected into the atmosphere would have lingered, creating a volcanic winter not unlike the nuclear winter discussed earlier.

The Bible Code predicts that we get hit by one of these in 2010, and another in 2012. As if one wouldn't be enough to annihilate our entire civilization. But I don't believe in the Bible Code. Do you?

We’re not talking “super” in the sense that a grade-schooler who does a super job gets a sticker, either. We’re talking “super” in the sense that Superman is much, much stronger than man. There are a number of super volcanoes around the world, but in the interest of American egocentrism, let’s talk about the American super volcano: the Yellowstone Super Volcano.

The caldera (the regular volcano equivalent of the crater at the top of the mountain) of the Yellowstone volcano is a 1,500 square mile depression in the Western US. That would be 750 times larger than the crater atop Mt. St. Helens. The last time the Yellowstone Volcano erupted, 640,000 years ago, it ejected 8,000 times more ash and lava than Mt. St. Helens. The time before that, 2,000,000 years ago, most of the Western United States was covered in several feet of ash by an even greater eruption. We’re talking about a third of the continental United States, maybe more. We're talking mass die-outs of game and wildlife, and the elimination of agriculture. 

Interestingly, this might solve our global warming problem, as the ash would be propelled miles into the atmosphere, and there form the nuclei for big dark clouds that would completely cover the Earth, drastically reducing the global temperature. We’re definitely talking a nuclear-winter type scenario for the entire world (excepting the people who were already vaporized or buried in volcanic ash by the actual eruption). This happened 75,000 years ago, when a super volcano in Indonesia erupted. It covered most of the Indian sub-continent in ash, and caused an ice age that resulted in the death of over 60% of the global human population.

The Earth is a pretty small place, if you think of things geologically or astronomically. One third the size of a big storm on the planet Jupiter. It seems really big to us, so it can be easy to think that something like a virus could never wipe out the human race. Or even that a single virus could never reach across the globe.

This sort of thinking is wrong. A lot of scientists think that a virus could be the most likely candidate for ending the human race. We've already got some pretty rough ones. 90 years ago a flu pandemic (widely called Spanish Influenza) killed over 50 million people around the world. It hit the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and it even touched remote Pacific islands, and the Arctic. About a third of the entire world population was infected.

50 million deaths around the world, and that's just an influenza virus. There are a number of much nastier viruses out there. Ebola, for instance. Depending on the strain, Ebola can have up to an 89% mortality rate, with those in the final stages of the infection vomiting blood and bleeding from their mouth and nose, while their organs turn to mush. The old Soviet Union weaponized the Marburg virus, which is very similar to Ebola.

Imagine a virus that blended the characteristics of Ebola and Spanish flu, and those 50 million deaths from 1918-1920 would have been more like 200 million. Scale that to the size of the population in the world today and it would mean more than a billion deaths. Enough to topple civilization into anarchy. This is, of course, highly hypothetical. But viruses are infamous for their ability to mutate rapidly. It's what makes them so deadly. This year's flu vaccines will, odds are, not work for next year's. So given the virulence of some of today's bad-boy microbes, and the tendency of mankind to turn everything into a weapon, another Spanish flu could be the least of our worries.

Like playing Russian roulette with six guns simultaneously, our odds are very, very bad. And I hope you've noted how many of these potential world enders seem to have ties to the year 2012. I'm not predicting anything, but nobody likes coincidences.

And here’s a parting gem for you. An article published in Nature regarding studies of fossil records is pretty troubling: every 62-65 million years, Earth experiences a mass extinction, wiping out at least three fourths of the species on the Earth. The last extinction event? Well, that was the impact event that took out the dinosaurs, oh, about 65 million years back.