But it won't be from germ warfare, runaway nanobots, or shifting magnetic poles. A skeptical guide to Doomsday.
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By Gregg Easterbrook
Omigod, Earth's core is about to explode, destroying the planet and everything on it! That is, unless a gigantic asteroid strikes first. Or an advanced physics experiment goes haywire, negating space-time in a runaway chain reaction. Or the sun's distant companion star, Nemesis, sends an untimely barrage of comets our way. Or ...
Not long ago, such cosmic thrills, chills, and spills were confined to comic books, sci-fi movies, and the Book of Revelation. Lately, though, they've seeped into a broader arena, filling not only late-night talk radio, where such topics don't seem particularly out of place, but also earnest TV documentaries, slick mass-market magazines, newspapers, and a growing number of purportedly nonfiction books. Everywhere you turn, pundits are predicting biblical-scale disaster. In many scenarios, mankind is the culprit, unleashing atmospheric carbon dioxide, genetically engineered organisms, or runaway nanobots to exact a bitter revenge for scientific meddling. But even if human deployment of technology proves benign, Mother Nature will assert her primacy through virulent pathogens, killer asteroids, marauding comets, exploding supernovas, and other such happenstances of mass destruction.
Fringe thinking? Hardly. Sober PhDs are behind these thoughts. Citing the hazard of genetically engineered viruses, eminent astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has said, "I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years." Martin Rees, the knighted British astronomer, agrees; he gives us a 50-50 chance. Serious thinkers such as Pulitzer Prize winner Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague, and Bill Joy, who wrote Wired's own 2000 article "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," warn of techno-calamity. Stephen Petranek, editor in chief of the science monthly Discover, crisscrosses the world lecturing on "15 Major Risks to the World and Life as We Know It." University of Maryland arms-control scholar John Steinbruner is lobbying organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the World Medical Association to establish an international review board with the power to ban research into the Pandora's box of biomedicine.
If we're talking about doomsday - the end of human civilization - many scenarios simply don't measure up. A single nuclear bomb ignited by terrorists, for example, would be awful beyond words, but life would go on. People and machines might converge in ways that you and I would find ghastly, but from the standpoint of the future, they would probably represent an adaptation. Environmental collapse might make parts of the globe unpleasant, but considering that the biosphere has survived ice ages, it wouldn't be the final curtain. Depression, which has become 10 times more prevalent in Western nations in the postwar era, might grow so widespread that vast numbers of people would refuse to get out of bed, a possibility that Petranek suggested in a doomsday talk at the Technology Entertainment Design conference in 2002. But Marcel Proust, as miserable as he was, wrote Remembrance of Things Past while lying in bed.
Of course, some worries are truly worrisome. Nuclear war might extinguish humanity, or at least bring an end to industrial civilization. The fact that tensions among the US, Russia, and China are low right now is no guarantee they'll remain so. Beyond the superpowers, India and Pakistan have demonstrated nuclear capability; North Korea either has or soon will have it; Japan may go nuclear if North Korea does; Iran and other countries could join the club before long. Radiation-spewing bombs raining from the sky would, no doubt, be cataclysmic. If you're in the mood to keep yourself up at night, nuclear war remains a good subject to ponder. But reversal of the planet's magnetic field?
At a time of global unease, worst-case scenarios have a certain appeal, not unlike reality TV. And it's only natural to focus on danger; if nature hadn't programmed human beings to be wary, the species might not have gotten this far. But a little perspective is in order. Let's review the various doomsday theories, from least threatening to most. If the end is inevitable, at least there won't be any surprises.
1. Laws of probability!
Standing at the Berlin Wall in 1969, Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott III used a statistical formula to predict that the barrier would last 2.66 to 24 more years. It lasted 20. Later, Gott applied the same equation to humanity and calculated, with 95 percent certainty, that it would last 205,000 to 8 million more years. His paper on the subject made it into the august British scientific journal Nature.
Basically, Gott's formula (you will be spared the details) combines a series of estimates, then treats the result as though it was precise. Speculations about the far future have about as much chance of being spot-on as next week's weather forecast. But Gott's academic reputation won't suffer; if humanity still exists in 8.1 million years, it will be a little late to revoke his tenure.
2. Chemical weapons!
Spooky-sounding, sure. And dangerous. But bombs and bullets are dangerous, too. In actual use, chemical weapons have proven no more deadly, pound for pound, than conventional explosives. In World War I, the British and German armies expended 1 ton of chemical agents per enemy fatality.
Are modern nerve agents like sarin superdeadly in a way World War I mustard gas was not? When the Aum Shinrikyo cult attacked Tokyo's subway system with that substance in 1995 - the subway being an enclosed area, ideal for chemicals - 12 people died. That was 12 too many, but a conventional bomb the same size as the cult's canisters, detonated on a packed subway, would have killed more.
During this winter's duct tape scare, I heard a Washington, DC, radio talk-show host sternly lecture listeners to flee if "a huge cloud of poison gas" were slowly floating across the city. Noxious clouds of death may float across movie screens, but no military in the real world can create them. Wind rapidly disperses nerve agents, and sunlight breaks them down. Outdoors, a severe chemical attack likely would be confined to a few city blocks.
Some chemical incidents have been horrifyingly deadly. In 1994, when a Union Carbide plant accidentally loosed a cloud of methyl isocyanate over Bhopal, India, 8,000 people died, some of them 20 miles from the site. But the source was an industrial complex, and it spewed gas for an extended period of time, something no bomb or aircraft could do. Another heinous event, Iraq's poison gas attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, killed an estimated 5,000. However, the slaughter involved dozens of Iraqi aircraft flying repeated sorties over an undefended city. Had they dropped conventional bombs, the toll might have been equally high.
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It's all too much for me.
I might just go lay down for a while.