And then, there are those who frantically try to bring about the end of times themselves. To fulfill the Apocalypse out of some religious scripture, or simply, to get attention. But could a terrorist actually do it? Probably not. However, an enterprising terrorist could always try out one of the following ideas, bringing about a disaster of truly apocalyptic proportions.
1. Paint a pole
Difficulty: Hard
Needed: A big amount of dirt
Find a way to blacken the ice of one of the poles (the South pole is best). Cover it with dirt, soot or charcoal. Tainting it black with ordinary paint might take a little longer. A black pole doesn’t reflect sunlight but absorbs warmth -- and melts. The result: climate change, sea level rise, inundations and much annoyment for your enemies.
2. Design a disease
Difficulty: Very hard
Needed: A well-equipped laboratory, biology training
Build a biotech lab in some obscure country and hire some bad guy scientists who share your evil ideas. Now, piece together a version of Ebola that spreads through air. Design a new, upgraded version of the flu, or AIDS. Alter the camel pox virus so that it infects humans. You’ll find all the basics you need to know in the scientific journals and textbooks.
Now comes the tough part. The best way to spread your disease, is to infect yourself and visit the public transportation facilities of the cities you wish to attack. Cough, sneeze and snort at will. Touch every handle and doorknob you encounter with your virus-laden hands. You will see: it’s gonna be fun.
An even more evil way to spread your doomsday disease around, is by letting animals do it for you. This takes a little extra research. Find out what animals carry your germ, preferably animals that don't go ill themselves. Most diseases have such a ‘carrier animal’: SARS, for example, gets carried around from human to human by common house cats.
A carrier animal will make your virus all the more successful, because it will be very hard to detect and even harder to contain the outbreak. Another upshot is that you survive the attack yourself. You might want to stick around to witness the misery you’re causing.
3. Detonate a disaster
Difficulty: Medium
Needed: An atomic bomb
Give a terrorist an atomic bomb or a huge amount of explosives, and he will immediately run off to blow up Washington DC. Dumb, of course. There might be better targets.
A well-chosen spot on the Western Arctic ice sheet might accelerate the melting of the pole. This should give you four to six meters of worldwide sea level rise, inundating many vital areas in Europe and the US.
A big enough boom in Yellowstone Park might awaken the now dormant supervolcano under the park, turning half of the US into an ash-covered no man’ s land and bringing ice age to Europe.
Blowing up the already unstable volcanic island of La Palma could prompt a mega-tsunami, which would slosh cities like New York City, Boston and Miami to kingdom come.
A massive explosion on the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico could trigger a vast methane gas eruption, warming up the world’s climate and -- with some luck -- causing a huge firestorm over the US.
And the really good part is: you will find no guards on ocean floors, pole caps and volcanic islands.
4. Smash the dollar
Difficulty: Medium
Needed: A large amount of money, a PhD in economy
Forget the Twin Towers, attack the US dollar instead. Become a stock broker, and infiltrate the stock markets. Now, organize a coordinated attack, Al Qaeda-style, on the US dollar. With some luck, you'll see the dollar die before the day is over, bankrupting the US and leaving it in economic shambles.
Know: every second, the US loans 18,000 dollars from abroad. The US national debt has passed the eight trillion dollar mark already. That's 8,000,000,000,000 dollar! The reason is that US citizens and the US government spend more money than they make. So, they're living on borrowed stuff.
This leaves the US dollar very, very vulnerable. One good punch, and the buck might fall over. So, sell a vast amount of dollars, preferably in a coordinated attack from multiple places. This should cause the dollar to take an evil plunge. Other stock brokers and banks should respond and sell their dollars, too. The dollar will plummet even further. Within days or even hours, dollar notes will have become worthless scraps of paper. Americans abroad will find they can no longer pay their bills. Oil producing countries will switch their currency from the dollar to the yen or the euro. Trade will grind to a halt. There may be riots, or wars, or both. You'll have fun!
In the end, the US will be alone in the world, a poor and bankrupt country with high unemployment, no fossil fuels and in need of almost everything. Things will never be the way they were. The yen or the euro will have replaced the dollar as the world's main currency - just like the dollar dethroned the English pound in the 1920s.
5. Crush a current
Difficulty: Hard
Needed: Several ships, plenty of salt
It’s a bit of a long shot, but with some luck you may be able to plunge the Western world into an ice age. Now, wouldn’t you just love that?
The only thing you need to do, is disrupting the North Atlantic Current. This ocean current brings warmth from the tropics to Europe and the US. Without it, temperatures would be up to 10 degrees lower, disrupting agriculture and wreaking havoc with the economy of the civilized world. They would hate your guts for it, those westerners.
Already, the North Atlantic Current is weakening. And the best part is: some scientists believe that the current could break down relatively easy. Perhaps you may be able to kill the current yourself!
So, warm up the sea water near Greenland with atomic bombs. Load some ships with salt and sink them in the Atlantic. This should make the sea water locally denser and heavier, putting a 'plug' on the current. Blowing up some well-chosen glaciers on or near the South Pole might do the trick, too.
We warn you: it is all very speculative. But failed crops, severe winters and millions of pissed-off westerners could be your reward.
6. Bring in the plagues
Difficulty: Easy
Needed: A library membership, plane tickets
If you’re a terrorist with a small budget, you could always try to unleash an agricultural plague of apocalyptic proportions.
Already, there are many pests around, causing billions of dollars of damage. Locusts, rabbits, parasites, fungi, worms and insects often become a plague when they’re introduced to a place where they're not supposed to be. The critters encounter no natural enemies, multiply wildly, and become a plague. That’s why Australia and New-Zealand have their rabbit problem and the US has its boll weavil.
So, study agricultural diseases. Track down some obscure Asian fungus or insect, and bring it over. Smuggle some sinister bird disease to the country you like to attack, and introduce it to its chicken farms. Bring in foot-and-mouth disease, or mad cow disease. Introduce weird weeds, exotic moths, sex-crazy rodents, hungry beetles and obscure insects. It might take a while before your Apocalypse kicks in. But boy, will it be some mess.
7. Shortcut a state
Difficulty: Hard
Needed: Explosives, wire, a high-altitude airplane
Can't afford an atomic bomb? Don't panic. There's always 'the poor man's atomic bomb'. That's a device called an 'electromagnetic pulse weapon', or simply e-bomb.
E-bombs are quite easy to make. Just take a big 'sausage' of explosives, wrap coil around it, and put a magnetic field to the coil. Should you decide to detonate your e-bomb high up in the atmosphere, you should shortcut every piece of electric equipment below you. The bigger the bomb, the bigger the damage. It'll be fun.
There's a fuel supply that is costless, unlimited and that gives off no pollution at all when you use it. There's just one minor problem. When you try to use it, you may accidentally blow up part of the Universe.
It will be over before anyone can say `sorry'. In a laboratory somewhere, someone tries to get hold of a weird and completely new, exotic type of energy. But boy, the experiment goes out of hand. Suddenly, there's a BIG explosion. And then there's nothing -- our planet, the sun, all planets in our solar system and even some stars surrounding our solar system have been blown to smithereens.
And explaining what went wrong isn't even simple. We're talking quantum physics here: the physics of the vanishingly small building blocks that make up all matter in the Universe.
In quantum physics, everything is totally different from daily life. Quantum particles can be in two places at the same time, and can behave both like waves and particles. In fact, when you hear a quantum physicist say `particles', don't think of little, round balls. Quantum `particles' are better compared with tones of music: they're definitely there, but you can't see them or catch them.
One of the most mind-boggling properties of quantum particles is that they come into existence out of nowhere. Suck every molecule of air out of a bottle, making it completely vacuum -- and quantum particles will still be there. They pop up in pairs out of nowhere. And within a tiny fraction of a second, they merge together and -- zzzip! -- they're gone.
It is precisely this odd `quantum vacuum' that may one day open the door to a very new source of energy. Suppose you're able to snatch some of those out-of-nowhere particles away. Admittedly, you'll have to be REALLY fast. But if you do succeed, you'll have harvested particles out of nowhere. And since matter and energy are basically the same stuff (according to Einstein's E=mc2), you'll have energy out of nowhere!
The advantages would be unimaginable. Here's an energy source that never runs out, is everywhere around, is extremely cheap, and causes no pollution whatsoever.
But then again, there is a small, but alarming risk. There may be simply energy too much. Mining the quantum vacuum might bring about an unstoppable chain reaction, releasing an ever increasing amount of energy. In fact, no-one knows how much energy will be released: calculations done by physicists give answers anywhere between zero and infinity.
Obviously, too much energy would mean trouble. The explosion could be huge enough to blow apart our entire solar system and everything around it. And of course, infinite energy would bring about infinite destruction, bombing not just a handful of stars, but everything in the entire Universe.
Gladly, no present-day scientist is capable of mining the quantum vacuum. On the other hand: one day, there will be. And that day may arrive sooner than you think: some estimate around 2020 science will be ready. Let's hope physicists finally have their calculations straightened out by then.
So it's `wait and see'. And talking about `seeing': as the famous science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once pointed out, whenever you see an unexplained burst of energy coming from the cosmos (and there are a lot of them), it may be some alien civilization, blowing itself to kingdom come while experimenting with the quantum vacuum...
What’s furry, has claws and triggers the end of the world? You guessed it. It’s your trusted, feline friend: your cat. And cats are not the only animals causing problems. Rabbits do it. Frogs do. Yes, even the cute Giant Panda is helping to blow the world to kingdom come. Sit back -- and shiver!
If you felt sorry for the dinosaurs, consider this. At this very moment, we’re in the middle of a period of mass extinction that’s actually WORSE than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. You read that right. More species go extinct at this very moment than during the last days of the dinosaur!
You see, it took the dinosaurs thousands of years to die out altogether. Today, the speed of extinction is higher -- much higher. Each day, an estimated seventy species go bust. That’s seventy species! Gone. Not to be seen ever again. A few centuries more, and half of all species will no longer be here. Thanks to the meteor impact called 'mankind'.
Now, that IS a problem. In nature, everything is linked to everything else. Everything that lives relies on other living things. And the really bad news is, of course, that we are also part of nature. What would we eat if it wasn’t for our crops and livestock? Shoes? And what would we breathe?
It would take a library to explain what exactly is happening to the animals and the plants on our planet. For now, some brief highlights will do, just to show you how serious and weird matters really are. So enter the cats, the frogs, the snails, the insects - the whole zoo.
File # 1:
The Case of Osama Bin Leopard
Remember Afghanistan? In 2002, the US army used cluster bombs and oxygen sucking fuel bombs to rid the Afghan caves of Al Qaida bad guys. Unfortunately, someone else was hiding there too. That was the snow leopard, one of the rarest animals on the planet.
Just picture it. Osama's bearded boys, holding hands with the mighty snow leopard in some cave. Then: BOOM! BURN! CHOKE! Bye-bye boys. And bye-bye snow leopard.
But while there are plenty of bearded boys left on the planet, the same cannot be said of the leopard. The animal has probably gone extinct in Afghanistan by now -- a by-product of war. Few people know of it. And even fewer seem to care. The mighty predator of the mountains happened to be a stand in the way in a silly human war over religion, power and such. At this moment, there are an estimated 5,000 snow leopards left on the planet. That could be too little for survival.
File # 2:
The Case of the Evil Cat
As I write this, Molly the cat is on my lap, having a nap. Lizzy, my other cat, is outside, chasing birds, or picking a fight with another cat. You see, my next door neighbor has two cats as well. The neighbors on the other side have three cats, the neighbors after that have five. In the street where I live, there are more cats than people!
And that is a problem. All those cats catch lots of birds and mice and rats and butterflies. Biologically speaking, cats are eating a huge hole in the food chain. No, seriously! According to several alarming reports, this is exactly what is happening in countries like the United Kingdom, Sweden and my own country, Holland. Bird species are vanishing, mouse subspecies are going extinct. All because of Molly, and Lizzy, and the other many billions of domestic cats that inhabit the planet today.
Where would that all lead? A planet, exclusively inhabited by cats and people? Hmmm. Just take a guess. My cat Molly has left my lap now. Probably off to catch another mouse.
File # 3:
The Case Of The "Cute" Panda
Humans are a friendly species. We like animals. That’s why we can’t stand it the Bonobo monkey and the Giant Panda are about to go extinct. No way we’ll let the beautiful lion, the cute chimpanzee or the impressive elephant go extinct! We build another natural reserve.
But hold it. In fact, the species we adore are only a slight minority. Who cares for snails, insects, snakes, lice, or spiders? These species are in trouble, too. But they’re not cute enough. Humans simply don’t like them. We’ll let them go extinct, and won’t miss a night’s sleep over it.
‘Survival of the cutest’, is the word for that. Biologists use it sometimes when they argue that we’re protecting the wrong species. On our lists of ‘endangered species’, there are plenty of beautiful and furry and funny animals. But no snails, cockroaches or flees. Not to mention the microbes, that are by far the most important species on Earth.
File # 4:
The Case of the Dead Frog
It is a mystery. Everywhere in the world, frogs are dying. There seems to be no specific reason for it. Everywhere around, they’re just kicking the bucket, for no apparent reason. There you have it: the frog problem.
It could be pollution. It could be the hole in the ozone layer. It could be a fungus. It could be acid rain. It could be all these things combined.
Whatever the reason, biologists are very worried. Apart from the fact that a frogless world would be a rather empty place, the frog problem could be some kind of warning. Frogs are known to be quite vulnerable. So who’s next? Us?
File # 5:
Invasion Of The Killer Rabbits
The dingo did it. So did the rabbit. They invaded a place where nature never meant them to be.
Well, `invaded’ isn’t the right word, really. Humans brought them over, of course. The Dutch brought their cats to Australia. The British took foxes and dogs to New Zealand. The mighty Vikings introduced the cute rabbit in Scotland. The gypsies took the gypsy moth to the US. And now, there’s trouble all over the place. Down under, there aren’t suppose to be any predators. In the US, there aren’t suppose to be any gypsy moths. Nature just didn’t expect it.
So disaster strikes. In the US, about a fourth of the agricultural gross national product is lost each year to foreign plant pests such as the dreaded boll weevil (from Mexico) and the leafy spurge (brought by Europeans). In New Zealand, Australia, Scotland and many other countries, zillions of rabbits drive the locals insane, digging about like crazy.
Not to mention those evil, evil cats again. In New Zealand and Australia, the cats gobble up rare birds and mammals. Such as the poor, innocent kiwi bird. For crying out loud, the poor thing doesn’t even has wings! Evolution thought that without cats, there was no need for wings. But evolution got it wrong.
It isn’t a nice thing to say, but the real problem is mankind. Humans are in the habit of messing up everything they do everywhere they go all of the time.
They are a harmful species, these humans -- almost as harmful as cats.
Isn't that appalling? This morning, all matter on our planet suddenly changed into a very different kind of stuff. The changes are quite radical. For one thing, our bodies have just ceased to exist.
This time, the trouble didn't come from some colossal piece of rock slamming into our planet, or from some divinity deciding to end our world. No, the danger was so small we didn't even see it coming. We're talking quarks here: the tiny building blocks that make up protons and neutrons.
Quarks come in different `flavors'. There's `up' quarks, and `down' quarks, and `strange' quarks. The nuclei of atoms are made of just the right mix of just the right quarks. Matter ultimately is made of `up' and `down' quarks.
But other mixtures are possible too. In the first moments after the Big Bang, there also was stuff made of `up', `down' and `strange' quarks. It was a completely different kind of stuff than what we're used to. Appropriately, scientists call it strange matter.
But as the universe expanded, strange matter vanished -- although some chunks of strange matter (called `S-curves') may still be out there somewhere. One thing's for sure, though: no human has ever actually spotted a single speck of strange matter.
Oh, but that can change. In recent years, quantum physicists have tried hard to imitate the earliest moments of the Universe. That sounds more difficult than it is: the only thing you have to do, basically, is to slam two particles at tremendous speed head-on into each other. And that's exactly what they do at huge particle accelerators such as those at CERN in Geneva or the `Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider' (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.
You already feel what showed up this morning. Strange matter, my friend. LOTS of it.
In a particle accelerator experiment, a tiny bit of strange matter suddenly popped into existence. Against all expectation, it had a negative charge. The next moment, it engaged into a chain reaction theoretical physicists call `Ice-9 Type Transition'.
Sure, the lump of strange matter that showed up was incredibly small. But that changed within moments, as the `strangelet' began gobbling up all positively charged atomic nuclei it encountered, forming more strange matter. The blob grew and grew, eating the accelerator, the building around it, and the town around the building. It turned everything it encountered into more atom-eating strange matter. It was ice-9 at its best. Within seconds, our entire planet including everything on it became a strange matter planet.
Does that, er... matter? Oh man, you just don't wanna know. All conventional atoms ceased to exist this morning. And in case you forgot, everything we know of, including us, is made of atoms. What's worse, strange matter particles are equally charged, making them want to go away from each other as far as possible, like the equally charged sides of a magnet. Simply put, all matter on the planet has fallen apart this morning. The world went boom, or whatever the sound was.
Well alright, I'll admit it. Of course, nothing really happened today. I wouldn't be writing this if it had. But could it happen tomorrow? Or next week, next year?
Here's some reassurance: strange matter is so unstable, it simply wouldn't have time to consume nearby atoms. What's more, strange matter probably has a positive charge. And positively charged strangelets aren't very dangerous. They would have an appetite for electrons, sure, but this wouldn't bring about a chain reaction. The strangelet would simply snatch away a few electrons from surrounding atoms, and that would be it.
Would, probably, perhaps. Actually, no one knows for sure. As I already mentioned, no human being has ever studied a chunk of strangeness. And if scientific history has made one thing clear, it should be that reality often defies theory. As the Russian theorist Lev Landau once put it: `Cosmologists are often wrong, but never in doubt.'
Strange, don't you think?
Lucky you. You survived a nuclear war! Well, don't be too glad. What happens after it is so gruesome, you'll wish you had died on the spot.
Today, it all goes out of hand. The East-West conflict revived. China waged war on Japan. The Muslim nations joined forces against the USA. Or someone simply made a mistake -- whatever, it doesn't really matter. The only thing that does matter right now is that the inconceivable has happened. There's nuclear war. And now, the SBM's, ICBM's and SLBM's cross the sky, like oddly shaped, featherless birds of destruction.
All hell breaks loose. There's eye-popping flashes of light everywhere and ear-ripping bangs as the bombs go off. Cities evaporate. Infrastructures crumble. Everywhere, huge mushroom-shaped clouds tower up into the sky. All electricity goes out because of electro-magnetic effects. And of course, many die: according to even the mildest scenario's, hundreds of millions die instantaneously as the nukes go boom.
But you -- you survive all that. Better take shelter: for the next days, it will rain highly radioactive fall-out particles only. For almost three days and three nights in a row, it will rain radioactivity in a region several hundreds of kilometers around each impact site. And to be honest: it's best you stayed indoors for a whole year, patiently waiting until radioactivity levels finally begin to drop.
But wait, there's more trouble. As the mushroom clouds begin to fade, the REAL consequences of nuclear war become apparent. From the explosion sites, huge amounts of evaporated stuff, smoke and soot rise up into the sky. It's quite different from the usual smoke columns that come from fires. The intense heat from the nuclear impact sites pushes the debris straight into the highest parts of the atmosphere, the so-called stratosphere. There, it slowly starts to disperse, covering ever bigger portions of the world. But what's worse -- the soot blocks the Sun.
Within days, a weird and unprecedented climate shift sets in. Total darkness covers everything. Temperatures drop rapidly. And chances are the soot blanket that prevents the Sun from shining spreads across the globe, transforming even the Latin Americas, Asia and Africa into chilly shadow worlds. There you have it: the infamous, dreaded Nuclear Winter.
Within weeks, it's minus 23 to 30 degrees Celsius everywhere. Do you live near the shore? Consider yourself lucky: since oceans cool so slowly, temperatures near the sea will drop `only' some five to ten degrees. But there is a downside: because of the big temperature differences between the sea and the inland, unimaginable storms and hurricanes will harass the coastal areas.
Big Winter: After a nuclear war, dust and soot may blanket the Earth
Oh, and that's just the beginning of your Winter out of Hell. Slowly, particle-by-particle, the soot will begin to fall back to the Earth. The results are not what you call pleasant. When it rains, the rain consists of burning sulphuric acid. And when it doesn't rain, the wind blows huge amounts of tiny particles of radioactive dust into your face. There's not enough radioactivity there to kill you. But it won't do you much good either.
Meanwhile, you're not the only one having a hard time. Plants, living on sunlight and warmth, will die within weeks. Animals, relying on both plants and warmth, die too. Other animals perish because all water is frozen. After a couple of months, there won't be any birds anymore. And what's worse, the animals with the biggest chance to survive are not exactly what you call good company in the pitch-black darkness: insects, rats, flies and cockroaches. They have a great time, having all those dead bodies to feast on and no birds to hunt them down.
Oh, and talking of dead bodies: there will be outbreaks of all kinds of diseases. The radioactivity will speed up the mutation rate of viruses and bacteria tremendously. There will be outbreaks of all kinds of diseases, while it is more than likely all kinds of new diseases will pop up too. By the way, the radioactivity boosts the mutation rate of your own DNA as well -- which in effect means you'll develop all kinds of cancers and give birth to gruesomely malformed babies.
By now, you may start to wish those mean, black clouds that block the sun would bugger off. And eventually, they will. Depending on how many bombs exploded during the nuclear war, it will roughly take several months to a year before the sky starts clearing up again. But when it does, the end of all endurance is still not in sight.
One particularly nasty problem is that the soot from the impact sites has wiped out most of the ozone layer by chemical reactions. And without the ozone layer, we're exposed to the malignant ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. The UV-radiation kills the plants that may still be there, and causes more cancers and even sores and burns among humans. For years and years to come, you'll have to take shelter when the Sun shines.
And for the long term? The prospects are grim. With society disrupted, the food chain torn apart and humanity diminished, we'll be lucky if we're `only' thrown back into the Stone Age. A lot of species will become extinct. We may very well be one of them.
But wait a minute. Nuclear war, is that still possible? The answer is a plain and clear `yes'. Sure, the Russians and the West more or less like each other now. But the world is still armed to the bone with some 50,000 nuclear warheads. Although there's no finger on the trigger right now, the trigger is still within reach -- and the gun is fully loaded. And of course it doesn't really help more and more countries got nukes. India and Pakistan have at their disposal about a hundred nukes; thousands of nuclear weapons are spread over the many unstable countries that once made up the Soviet Union.
There's one reassurance, however. In principle, since its discovery in the 1980s, everybody knows what a Nuclear Winter is. You'd expect the world leaders to keep that in mind. The biggest nuclear weapons threat facing us right now is a small-scale nuclear war -- or a nuclear bomb attack by terrorists. But although that's awful enough, a small-scale nuclear war isn't enough to trigger a full-scale Nuclear Winter.
But then again, as history demonstrates, things can get out of hand really fast. One moment there's peace, and the next moment, there's war. So better go find those good old `Ban the bomb'-buttons of yours again! WARNING: We get a lot of mail from readers who got very scared after reading the scenario outlined below. Please bear in mind the events described here are still hypothetical. And if you scare easy - perhaps you should consider NOT reading this. - the editor
We’re in for a surprise. A few tens of years more, and our climate might suddenly go totally berserk. For starters, it would turn our planet into a lifeless, super hot oven, much like the planet Venus. Welcome to the ghastly phenomenon dubbed ‘the runaway greenhouse effect’. And the really scary part is: we might be heading straight towards it.
Phew! Aren’t we lucky? In the 1990s, they predicted we would get climate warming. The poles were about to melt, they said. Entire countries would get flooded. Huge hurricanes would sweep across the globe. Millions would die. Well: they had it all wrong. It’s the 21st century now -- and little has happened so far.
But then, suddenly, it all changes. From one month to the next, the climate of the world goes wild. Temperatures jump. The ice caps of the poles crumble, pushing the sea levels up. The snow caps on the mountain tops melt, turning even the tiniest rivulet into a roaring body of water. Cities are flooded, countries washed away. Tornadoes and hurricanes push across the globe. Harvests fail. Economies crumble. Tropical diseases like malaria and dengue push northwards. Forests turn into deserts. And of course, millions of people perish during all the mayhem.
Wet Feet: When we think of global warming, we tend to think of floods. But that's only a minor inconvenience. Chances are the greenhouse effect "unleashes catastrophic and irreversible changes to key planetary processes", as the IPCC puts it.
And if you thought that was bad: you haven’t seen nothing yet. Within a few decades, the situation goes totally out of hand. Temperatures just keep on rising, faster and faster. And as they do, more and more water on Earth begins to evaporate. The sea level begins to drop again. If you’re one of those poor souls who had his country or city flooded when the ice caps melted, you might be glad to find the sea retreating. But don’t put that flag out yet. What you’re witnessing, is the end of the world. Nothing more, nothing less.
Here’s how it goes. As the temperatures rise, more water evaporates. But as more water evaporates, our atmosphere gets thicker -- causing the temperatures to rise even more. And as the temperatures rise even more, even more water evaporates. And as even more water evaporates... You've got it: there’s a chain reaction going on. The dreaded ‘runaway greenhouse effect’ has just kicked in.
Governments and scientists will desperately look for a way to turn the tide. But they won’t find one. There’s just no way you can stop something as mighty as the Earth’s climate. Although our politicians might still mumble some reassuring words to prevent a general panic, deep within they will realize how bad the situation really is. A few years more, and our planet will no longer be habitable. All life is about to vanish from the planet formerly known as Earth. There is no escape, not even a remote possibility things will improve.
The best evidence for that is hovering in the night sky: the planet Venus. For many years, scientists wondered why Venus has an atmosphere so hot that lead and tin actually melt in it. Only in the late 1990s they realized that Venus too has undergone the runaway greenhouse effect. Its atmosphere is so dense, incoming solar heat cannot escape from it.
Exactly that, my friends, is what is happening on our planet. Earth is about to join Venus. We’re about to literally fry to death.
Bad Omen: The planet Venus has an atmosphere over 90 times thicker than Earth's. And it's bloody hot out there: about 750 degrees Celsius. Still, exactly the same could happen to our own planet if the Runaway Greenhouse Effect kicks in.
By now, temperatures on Earth start getting really uncomfortable. Everywhere you look, there’s this dense, watery fog -- it’s water vapor, as you might have guessed. Where there used to be rivers, only dry gullies are left, carving through the barren landscape. And where the oceans used to be, only some lakes remain -- and they get smaller each day.
It’s hard to tell how exactly humanity will die in the end. Perhaps we won’t be able to stand the heat anymore, and literally find ourselves cooked to death by the ever increasing temperatures. Perhaps we’ll suffocate, as our once fresh atmosphere turns into a dense brew of carbon dioxide, water vapor and methane. Perhaps we’ll survive all that, clinging to our gas masks and our airconditioning -- and in the end starve to death because all plants and animals are gone.
One thing is absolutely certain, though: it will be some gruesome, hellish end. After a few years or decades, our planet has become a deserted fog planet, with an atmosphere so hot that lead and tin actually melt in it. Life will be no longer possible -- except perhaps for a handful of soil bacteria that are able to withstand all the nastiness.
The Runaway Greenhouse: The facts
Of course, we could have known what was coming. Ever since the 1990s, there were some climatologists warning for it. But their calculations were laughed away, ill understood by the general public or ignored by the politicians in charge of things. The climatologists were dubbed pessimists. Even though their computer models told otherwise.
As late as 2001, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) formally warned that the greenhouse effect could ‘unleash catastrophic and irreversible changes to key planetary processes that make the world habitable.’ In 2005, a British government research council repeated the warning. And added the effect could kick in as soon as 2015.
The runaway greenhouse effect works quite simple, really. First, you should realize why we have an atmosphere in the first place. That’s because there’s a lot of water vapor and carbon dioxide in the air. There’s nothing wrong with that. The carbon dioxide and the water vapor serve as a ‘blanket’: they prevent some of the incoming heat from the sun from flying off again into space.
Killer Fog: The atmosphere will turn the planet into a shadowy fog world, as the atmosphere fills itself with water vapor.
At least, that’s how things went until one day, six billion humans came around. Mankind literally pumps trillions of tons of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
No big deal, so far. Calculations show that this massive amount of extra greenhouse gas will only push up the Earth’s temperatures a few degrees. Besides, about one quarter of all the methane and the carbon dioxide is cleaned up by nature each year.
But around 2015, that could suddenly change. The climate warming could pass a critical threshold. The ice caps of the poles could melt. This would set free billions of tons of extra carbon dioxide: the ice caps are full of tiny bubbles of trapped ancient air with a lot of carbon dioxide in them. This suddenly gives an extra push to the greenhouse effect.
Also, the warming could unleash carbon dioxide that is trapped in sea sediments, in the permafrost of Greenland and in the soil. And worse: the warming could set free the trillions of tons of methane that are stashed away below the ocean's floor and in the permafrost. At the same time, nature could get ‘saturated’ with carbon. Of course, plants and soil organisms will still breathe carbon dioxide. But there will be too much of it.
And in the end, the water vapor kicks in. While it gets hotter, oceans and rivers start to evaporate. This would make the atmosphere denser and hotter, pushing up the evaporation, making it hotter... And so on.
Then you would have it: an environmentalists nightmare. The greenhouse effect will go wild. And wilder still -- until we live on a planet with an atmosphere so hot that lead and tin actually... You can fill in those words yourself by now, right?
So: abandon all hope?
To be honest, of all end of world scenarios outlined on this site, we at Exit Mundi find the one with the runaway greenhouse effect particularly scary. Of course, there’s the problem with meteors, and the risk of robots taking over. But the greenhouse effect is happening today, as we speak. It seems to be only a matter of time before we can begin to melt that lead and tin.
On the other hand: climate is a difficult beast. If we’ve learned one thing over the past few decades, it is that no one can really predict how the climate will change on us. For example: there’s a good chance the greenhouse effect unleashes not a runaway chain reaction -- but an ice age, as reported elsewhere on this site.
Also, Earth survived intense heat before. 50 Million years ago, the North Pole had no ice, but a subtropical climate. And before that, in the era of the dinosaurs, CO2-levels were about four to six times higher than today. Back then, sea temperature was up to 40 degrees Celsius, and many continents were flooded. It was really a greenhouse world - and it didn't went out of hand.
On the other hand, even if there's a remote possibility it DOES go out of hand, there’s plenty of need to worry. We don’t know about you, but we at Exit Mundi prefer neither the ice age, nor the super hot Venus-like atmosphere. We like things the way they are.
So if you read this and you happen to be one of those top dogs in charge of things: hey, it’s only one atmosphere we have here, PLEASE be a little careful with it!
And you think the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs was quite something? Well -- it was peanuts, really. Some hundreds of millions of years earlier, a volcano did a much more thorough killing. And the bad thing is: the next supervolcano is about to go boom.
Think of every species of plant and animal you can think of. Now, imagine that nine out of then of them are no longer there. Not much left, right? Still, this is exactly what happened 248 millions of years ago, when the world was struck by the biggest natural disaster known in history. During the Permian-Triassic extinction, 90 to 95 percent of all species died out.
No-one really knows what sparked off the event. But according to the leading theory, the killer didn't come from outer space -- but from below, from underneath what is now Siberia. There, a disproportional big volcano popped up. It spewed out enough lava and gas to blow up the planet's climate and reset evolution.
Now there's volcanoes and VOLCANOES. In 1783, the Laki volcano in Iceland erupted, belching up almost five cubic kilometers of super hot lava. Nine thousand people perished on the spot, eighty percent of all livestock was killed, a quarter of Iceland's population was killed in the aftermath, and dust blocking the Sun pushed down temperatures several degrees on the entire northern hemisphere. Now, that's what a geologist would call a small volcano, a pimple popping open, really.
How different it was 65 million years earlier, when a volcano made a mess of what is now India. For several centuries in a row, the volcano pumped up something like 400,000 cubic kilometers of molten rock -- the Iceland eruption 100,000 times over! Some scientists still blame the volcano, and not the comet, for the extinction of the dino's.
Obviously, supervolcanoes can be, well, a little problematic. Ordinary volcanoes just pinch a tunnel in the Earth's crust. But a supervolcano is a completely different thing. A supervolcano is what happens when pressure builds up in an underground lake of magma. A supervolcano is much like a high-pressure balloon full of lava exploding. When it erupts, it really ERUPTS.
- 'Well... Fancied it would be worse than this'
(Cartoon copyright Exit Mundi/Matthias Giessen)
So, we'd run away, right? Hmm. If only it was that easy. An even bigger problem than the lava itself is the ash. 64,000 Years ago, a supervolcano made a mess of what is now the US. Of the current 50 states, 21 were covered with a layer of ash, at some places was over twenty meters thick!
Well, who cares, you might think - we'd just dust it away. But it isn't that simple. Volcanic ash is not like the ash you find on the barbecue: it is made of tiny pieces of rock. If it falls on your roof, your house can collapse under it's weight. If it gets into contact with cars or airplanes, they will break down or crash. Even worse, if you inhale it, the ash will mix with the liquids in your lungs and form a cement-like substance. You'll literally drown in conrete!
So you'd take a boat to another continent, right? Wrong. Apart from lava, volcanoes spew out a deadly brew of toxic chemicals. There are sulphurous gases that turn all rainfall into a blistering downpour of pure sulphuric acid for years to come. There are all kinds of chlorine-bearing compounds, that break down enough of the ozone layer to turn the Sun into a real killer. There's carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that not only nibbles at the ozone layer, but also causes long-term global warming. And last but not least, there's soot. A super eruption will darken the Sun, and gradually push the Earth into nuclear winter. For many years, or even centuries, we will have to survive in darkness and cold.
Ok, we may be smart enough to escape from the lava and the ash, dodge the acid rains, survive the nuclear winter and protect ourselves against the killer solar radiation afterwards. But plants and animals definitely are not. We'd find ourselves in an increasingly empty world, as one species after another goes extinct. In the end, even the toughest survivalist would starve to death.
Ash attack! - A supervolcano would turn an entire continent into a poisoned, ash covered shadow world (still taken from 'Supervolcano' by the BBC)
In fact, 74,000 years ago, humanity almost did. In those days, a supervolcano erupted in Toba, Sumatra. Quite a lot of scientists believe this is what pushed humanity to the brink of extinction: it is a well-established fact that in those days, humanity suddenly was reduced to a slim total of some ten thousands of men.
Alright -- but that was a long time ago, you might argue. Well, here's some bad news. Geologists agree that another supervolcano will definitely show up sometime somewhere in the future. It's a bit inconvenient no one knows where it will happen -- or when.
But that's not even the worst part. If you still want to have a good night's sleep tonight, better stop reading here. For actually, the next Magmageddon is due to arrive any day now.
At this very moment, a well-known supervolcano broods its ugly plans right under beautiful Yellowstone Park. On average, the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts once every 600,000 years - but the last time it erupted was 640,000 years ago. Oh, and by the way: in parts of Yellowstone Park, the ground has gone up seventy centimeters during the last century. Also, a lake has flooded,
A consequence of some innocent magma flowing from one place to another? No one really knows. It seems the stage is set for a very nasty surprise.
Look around. See that world out there? Well, it is about to change - forever. Think of wars, famine, diseases and worldwide turmoil. That’s what’s coming down, as we pass a nasty spike in the statistics called the ‘Oil Peak’. In fact, we may just have passed it already.
They call it ‘Economic Hiroshima’. And frankly, that’s an understatement, suggesting just a local catastrophe that will be gone soon. Well: not this Hiroshima. It will last many decades and change our world forever. An it will not only affect the city of Hiroshima. The impending crisis could throw the entire globe back into the Middle Ages.
And in fact, that’s not even the main reason why the Oil Crash is one of the ugliest scenarios you’ll find on this site.
The real bad thing is that the Oil Crash is going to happen. Period. Left-wing and right-wing; conservative and progressive; scientists and politicians: ALL agree that the crisis is inevitable. In fact, the Oil Crash may have begun already. As we write this, the US has conquered the oil well called Iraq and the oil price is at an all time high of over 40 dollars per barrel. This looks bad, folks...
So Depressing: During the Great Depression of the 1930s, many middle-class families were forced to abandon their homes and live in slums.
It isn’t hard to explain what the trouble is all about. The 'Oil Peak' is the point where the world’s oil supplies are exactly half used up. Yes, I felt some relief when I heard that for the first time, too. Apparently, after all these decades of industries and cars, we’ve still got half of all our oil supplies left! Put precisely: we started out with an estimated total of about 2 trillion barrels. And in 2003, some 900 billion of it had been used.
But there's a downside. When an oil well is half empty, you’ll have to go through an increasing amount of trouble to pump the last bit up. Think of it like eating yogurt out of a carton. At first, you’ll have no trouble to bring out spoonfuls of yogurt at all. But after a while, you’ll carefully have to maneuver your spoon around along the sides and corners of the carton to bring the last bit out. In oil wells, it goes the same way.
So when half of all oil in the world is up, the price per barrel will begin to rise. The prices will steadily go up, with about 1,5 to 3 percent a year. But meanwhile, world demand for oil is on the rise, too. Currently, the entire world consumes about 75 million barrels a day -- or 25 billion barrels per year. But in ten years time, demand is expected to rise by more than two thirds, to 135 million barrels a day.
Obviously, there's a gap here. We’ll have an oil crisis. According to some estimates, the price of a barrel of oil will increase, don’t look now, five- to six-fold in only a few years time, to prices up to 200 dollars per barrel! This will unleash a worldwide economic crisis beyond imagination, making the Great Depression of the 1930s look like a fun time.
Peak-a-boo: The Oil Peak according to a recent prognosis of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. Note that the US, Russian and European oil supplies have 'peaked' already years ago. After 2008, the global crisis kicks in.
The real problem, of course, is that our society is addicted to cheap, abundant oil. Our cars, airplanes and ships run on oil. Our electricity is generated in oil-fueled power plants. The stuff you buy in the stores is brought there by trucks that run on oil. In the end, literally everything is to some degree ‘made’ of oil!
So when oil gets expensive, so does our world. Even seemingly innocent things like socks, drinking water and bread will become very expensive. Factories and businesses will go bankrupt. Unemployment will explode, pushing up the state deficit and deepening the crisis even more. Banks will shut down, thereby killing the savings of their clients. In the end, the Oil Peak will send massive shockwaves through the world’s economies.
If you’re an American, your problems are even worse. The US economy is particularly vulnerable to oil problems, not just because the US consumes so much oil, but also because the oil trade worldwide goes in dollars. Consequently, when the oil trade hampers, the US economy takes the punches.
But you don’t want to live in one of the developing countries, either. South-America and Africa are very vulnerable to an oil crisis too, because their economies are weak as they are already. The Peak Oil will trigger an instant and sharp crisis in the Third World, causing even more wars, famines and deaths.
Wind stuff
Bad Bank: A policeman guards a bank against looting. In the 1930s, many banks went bankrupt, destroying the savings of many families.
So if it’s all that bad, we’d just turn to some other kind of energy, right? We’ll have wind mills, and solar cells, and everything will be cool again, you say. Well -- actually, that won’t work. The problem is that at the moment, there just are no real alternatives!
Take wind energy. Wind is obviously stuff that doesn’t contain a lot of energy -- just compare slamming your head into a bit of wind with slamming it into a concrete wall. And what’s more: to build wind mills, you’ll have to weld steel, drive all kinds of stuff and engineers around in trucks and cars, build factories and make thousands of components. In the end, it costs more energy (oil) to actually build a windmill, than a windmill will ever generate during its entire lifetime!
Roughly the same goes for other so-called ‘alternatives’, like solar cells, hydrogen energy, biomass energy and what-have-you (for the details, check the Q&A below). They all cost more energy (oil) than they produce! The only realistic alternatives are gas and nuclear power. But gas runs out too, and it doesn’t help that we are closing down many of our nuclear power plants.
Nuclear fusion, perhaps? Indeed, that would be a clean, good alternative to oil. But the problem here is, the technology just isn’t ready yet. We need to do more research. After all, you don’t want to risk blowing up part of the planet in an all-too-hastily done fusion experiment. "You wanted energy? Here, have some!"
And of course, even when it comes to alternatives, we’ve still got this world here that is hooked on oil. Our cars run on gasoline, not on electricity. So we need to replace all of our cars and rebuild and rewire most of our society first, before we can use nuclear fusion or nuclear power. And that takes a lot of, uhm... the black stuff.
The cavalry and we
But hold it now, you say: we’ve faced oil crises before, haven’t we? Indeed, in 1973 and 1979, the flow of oil hampered too, plunging the world economy into crisis instantaneously. But back then, it was all easy. Venezuela just pushed up their oil production a bit -- and presto, cheap oil was back again. This time, it is all different. Once we’ve passed the Oil Peak, there will be no cavalry to help us out. Every oil producing country faces the same problem. We’ll have to go cold turkey on our oil addiction. That's just the way it is.
The Future? - The Great Depression was nothing compared to the crisis to come.
By now, you probably see how immensely complicated and big the problem really is. And we have only given you the broader picture. We haven’t detailed the wars and turmoil the Oil Peak will inevitably unleash. We haven’t elaborated on the fact that all the experts agree we won’t find any new oil fields.
The question is not if, but rather WHEN the crisis will strike. The ever-optimistic oil industry says it will last until approximately 2020 -- giving us some head start, to test those nuclear fusion stations and replace our cars. But most economists think we will reach the Oil Peak sometime over the next few years -- before 2010. The leading Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) calculates 2008 will be the year.
But in fact, there are some disturbing signs the crisis has begun already. Obviously, the oil price is in trouble -- just read the newspapers. It goes up and down, and up and down, like a rollercoaster. This is exactly what the experts predict would happen right before Peak Oil.
Oh, but surely, there has to be SOME way out? A comforting punch-line, or a soothing, concluding remark? Actually, even we at Exit Mundi are at a loss. Looks like we have to brace ourselves and face the Big One this time. We’ll see death and destruction, and see our world change forever. Can’t say we’re looking forward to it, either.
And even then, we’d have to have some luck. There’s a particularly nasty glitch in the theories even the economists don’t know about. For in fact, the biggest risk we’re facing is not even the Oil Crisis itself -- but rather, the invention of some kind of new energy source!
Say we all stop using oil tomorrow. That would mean that suddenly, we will stop putting huge amounts of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. Now, this is probably not a good idea. Over the years, we’ve got huge amounts of green plants, plankton and algae on our planet, courtesy to the greenhouse effect. If we suddenly stop producing greenhouse gases, these plants and algae will suck all of the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
This will kickstart an instant, all-out Ice Age, as our planet is robbed from its protective carbon dioxide ‘coat’. The Earth would freeze over. It would turn into a huge snowball.
Now, who wants to have an Ice Age without any heating to keep us warm?
Economic Hiroshima in Graphics
We find economic figures just as boring as you probably find them - but if there have ever been a few graphics you should have a look at, it are these!
Years from Peak Oil: This graphic displays per country the estimated years before reaching their Peak Oil. Note that the US peaked 20 years ago already, and that even Iraq's supply will peak in 30 years time.
Running on empty: The expected demand for oil, gas and other energy resources. We'll need ever more oil, while nuclear power loses terrain. 'Non-hydro renewables' is a difficult way of saying wind energy, solar energy, biomass energy and other stuff like that.
Here at Exit Mundi, hardly a day goes by without e-mails concerning the Oil Peak Problem. Here are some of your proposals and questions - and our answers.
Ok, so we'd build lots of wind turbines, right?
No, bad idea.
As we explained above, windmills are in fact very energy-inefficient. It has been estimated that if you wanted to replace all of the UK's energy for wind, you'd have to build a vast, kilometers wide park of windmills that literally surrounds the island!
More technically, the problem is that the power a wind mill generates is proportionate to the third power of the wind speed. That's quite a mouthful, but simply put, it means that when the wind speed halves (say, from 6 Beaufort to 3 Beaufort), the power goes down not by 1/2, but by 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2. That's an amazing 88 percent less power! And you can't simply build a better wind mill. The 'power curve' is a physical property of wind. It is just how wind works!
The consequences of this are dramatic. A good, modern wind turbine only really generates electricity between wind forces 4 and 7/8. Less wind, and the mill will hardly generate any power at all (because of the power curve). Go above it, and the power will get so big, the wind turbine will have to shut down, to prevent damage.
The bottom line is this. On average, a wind mill only generates something like 16 percent of the power it should produce! So when you see a wind mill that has a tag "One megaWatt" on it, it only does so under ideal circumstances. On average, it only produces 160 thousand Watt. (Source: Dutch research, in: J.J. Halkema, "Windmolens, feiten en fictie")
I see, no windmills. Hydrogen, then? Little chance.
Hydrogen indeed a cheap, clean source of energy. But there's a catch: you can't find it anywhere on Earth. You will have to make it first, by splitting up water (H2O) into hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2). And that costs you... yes, energy.
This makes hydrogen nothing more than a modern battery. You invest energy in making it, and after a while, you tap energy from it again. But like every battery, it won't magically give off more energy than you put into it in the first place.
And that's not everything. You will have to store your hydrogen somewhere. This means you will have to compress it into a high-pressure tank. Those tanks are heavy, and the compressing costs you... energy.
So if you add things up, hydrogen costs energy. It doesn't generate it.
But why the fuss over hydrogen powered cars then? The basic idea behind it is that you use wind or solar energy to create the hydrogen. This would give you a clean source of fuel. But as we explained already, that trick doesn't work.
It has been estimated that oil would have to become twice (!) as expensive, before the hydrogen economy would begin to pay off.
Ok, ok... But hold it, you said 'solar energy'. Isn't that an option? Right now, it isn't.
Solar cells aren't just good enough. At the moment, you need the area roughly the size of six ping pong tables to power a car. And of course, you need daylight to power up your batteries.
And: what goes for wind mills also goes for solar cells. It costs lots of energy to make them. And energy is oil.
I've heard of a stuff called 'orimulsion'. There seem to be vast quantities of it. And it's almost the same as oil. Is that going to work? No, not quite.
Orimulsion is another fossil fuel, made of bitumen. And indeed, there's an estimated supply of it of about 1,2 trillion barrels. Even better: you can quite easily turn it into petrol, and use it to generate electricity.
But that was the sunny side. In the 1980s and 1990s, several power plants tried orimulsion. But they were shut down, because refining and burning orimulsion is very, very dirty. Orimulsion contains up to 2,9 percent sulphur. This ends up as sulphuric acid in the atmosphere. That gives you HUGE problems, like global warming, acid rain, dangerous smog and global dimming. No wonder orimulsion has been nicknamed "the world's dirtiest fuel"! You really don't want to use it.
Hey, I've got an idea! Why not go back to using coal? Hitler's Third Reich ran on coal entirely, was it not? True.
Indeed, the estimated supply of coal is 2 trillion tons. And yes, you can wrench oil out of coal. In fact, as we speak, about 23 percent of all energy of the world comes from coal.
But the down side to this is that coal will run out eventually, too. Some say it will last 18 years, others say longer. And that's not all. We'd have to adapt many of our factories and power plants and refineries, which would require HUGE investments. And then, coal is another very dirty fossil fuel. It chokes up the atmosphere even more than oil does.
How about 'heavy oil', tar sands? Useless.
Most of the world's oil is 'dirty' - it is mixed up with clay, sand and other stuff you cannot burn. And indeed, you can purify oil out of it. But: out of one truckload full of tar sands, you will get only about half a barrel of oil. That's not exactly what we would call 'making a profit'. In fact, since trucks and drilling machines run on oil too, you'd have to work really hard to actually 'gain' oil. This definitely won't bring back the cheap oil.
So, we'd go back to good old nuclear energy, right? That will only ease the pain temporarily.
Indeed, nuclear power plants offer a steady, very reliable and relatively clean energy source. Ok, the downside is that every now and then, nuclear power plants tend to go kaboom, like they did in Harrisburg and Chernobyl. And then, there's the waste: radioactive mud, not to be touched for several hundreds of years. But perhaps, we're going to have to take problems like these for granted.
The bigger problem is that nuclear power plants run on very special stuff. You will need to collect enough of the rare element Uranium, and carefully select the 0,7% of it that is Uranium-235 (the rest is another isotope, Uranium-238, which is useless). Or you could use Plutonium-239, an even rarer element.
What's more, Uranium and Plutonium will be up in the end.
And how about that other nuke thing, 'nuclear fusion'? That might help -- but it doesn't exist yet.
In 'common' nuclear energy, you split an atom and tap the energy. In nuclear fusion, you squeeze atoms together to make new ones, and tap the energy. That's exactly what happens inside the Sun.
Indeed, fusion energy is much cleaner than ordinary nuclear fission energy. But there's a downside, too: every now and then, you'd have to replace your entire factory, because it has become radioactive. Nuclear fusion turns factories into radioactive waste.
And did we mention the technology doesn't exist yet?
Now here’s something different: what if we all killed ourselves? We agree: after all we’ve been through as a species, mass suicide would be a ridiculous way to go. But oddly, suicide could also be the inevitable, most logical outcome of evolution...
Mass suicide. Oh, come on! What on Earth would we do that for?
Well: somewhere in the distant future, we might come to the conclusion that it’s the best thing to do. The only thing that makes sense. We would decide to kill ourselves -- and do it. We'd kill ourselves collectively, to the last man. We wouldn’t even leave a suicide note. After all, who would read it?
Of course, it won’t happen tomorrow. First, a lot of dramatic changes will take place to our species. Right now, we’re not too keen on dying. In fact, we hate it when we die!
But most scientists expect that over time, this will change. Slowly, we will defy death. We will beat disease after disease, and live longer and longer. We will fool the Grim Reaper with anti-ageing chemicals and fantastic, new cures.
And in the end, we will beat Death. We will need all our technological know-how to do it. In the long run, we will replace our entire bodies by technology. Already, we replace our teeth and the occasional limb that has gone missing with artificial stuff. In the near future, science expects to invent replacements for our organs. A little later, and we will be able to replace our brain by computer technology. Really! Already, some futures researchers expect that by the year 2050, we will be able to upload our mind into a computer! We will become machines -- and be immortal.
Trust us: it’s gonna be fun. When our minds have become pieces of software, we will be able to copy ourselves! We will be able to upload ourselves to... well, whatever we like. We will go out in space, in the shape of a conscious space ship. Or in the form of a purple cloud of thinking smoke particles. No, seriously! Respected scientists like Freeman Dyson and Carl Sagan already wrote about this in the 1970s.
And we will interact with each other, big time. With our biological bodies gone, we will no longer need MSN, Hyves or Myspace to get in touch with each other. Rather, our minds will start to... well, blend, actually. We will become one consciousness. Some researchers have dubbed this The Singularity, as we detail elsewhere on this site.
Ok, that sounds pretty vague -- but hey, it’s no reason to kill yourself! Well: there is this one crucial detail. Once we’re immortal, we’ll be booooooored!
To us simple, mortal humans this may be a bit hard to grasp. But once we’ve reached Perfection and Singularity and Oneness and all that blah blah, we will have no goal in life. Yes, we will go out and discover the Universe. But after a while, we will have seen it all. With our mortal bodies gone, we will have all the time of the Universe. We will know every corner of the Universe and say: so what? Why search any further? To an intelligent cloud of smoke particles, searching every corner of the Universe will make as much sense as examining every blade of grass on Earth makes to us.
So there you have it. You’ve become a God-like purple space cloud, but now you find that it is soooooo depressing.
And in fact, it’s even worse than that. Once we will become machines, our processing speed will increase hugely. Simply put, we will think bloody fast. Within a split second, we will realize that our existence, literally, has become useless. A split second later, we will realize it’s best if we didn’t exist.
Brothers, Kill Thyself - In the Japanese cult movie Suicide Club (2002), people commit mass suicide. In reality, mass suicide could be the natural outcome of evolution.
To a Purple God Cloud suicide will be as self-evident as tossing away a used scrap of paper. As logical as getting off a train that has reached its final destination. And the final destination is what we will have reached: the endpoint of evolution.
Even harder to comprehend, the God Cloud won’t have any special feelings about it. When we think of suicide, we immediately think of terrible things with high buildings and shotguns. But when you're a Purple Cloud, it’s all very different. Conscious clouds don’t feel pain and have no reason to be afraid, least of all of death.
If you’re immortal, dying might seem like a fun thing to do! It will be as challenging as it is for us not to die.
So, there we go. After a long period of contemplation -- say, an entire millisecond -- we will realize we have become useless. Right there on the spot, we will kill ourselves.
And hey, you’re doing it again! You picture a purple cloud, desperately weeping, throwing itself in front of a speeding train. But it won’t be like that at all. Rather, we will terminate ourselves in some way yet beyond our imagination. We will step out of the Universe, fold ourselves up, switch ourselves off -- something like that. In a split second after we’ve reached immortality and Oneness and all that, we will be gone. Click. Puff. Exit.
The Games Alternative?
So -- is that it? Is suicide the inevitable outcome of evolution? Well, actually: there is at least one other way out. But this route is so strange and so disturbing, that it will blow your mind. For your own sake, we ask you: if you’re mentally unstable or if you have a history of psychiatric disorders, please don’t read any further. It’s at your own risk.
For what else is there to do if you’re a Super Bored Super Human? What do you do when you’re bored? Indeed: you distract yourself. You play a video game, go out, or watch TV.
Exactly this is what a superhuman intelligence may do as well. But of course, it will seek distraction in a superhuman way: it will create a new Universe, break down its intelligence into bits, and seed the new Universe with the spores of its Presence. Basically, such a ‘game’ will be a Universe that is destined to bring forth life and intelligence.
But wait a minute... Isn’t that exactly the kind of Universe we’re living in?
As we outline elsewhere on this site, it is. Scientists have noticed for long that our Universe looks chillingly artificial. The way its parameters are set, and the way it is functioning suggest that something or someone has tinkered with it. Everything we see and feel and experience - it could be an illusion! We may be part of a kind of Sims Game, played by some kind of Superhuman intelligence...
It would get weird when we reach Superhumanity again. We’d ask ourselves: "Ok, what’s it gonna be? Another game of Universe? Or should we kill ourselves now?"
It’s about the weirdest apocalypse you could think of. One day, our planet may become completely overgrown with… food. And the problem is: it could happen a lot sooner than you held possible.
It will be some end. Suddenly, there will be grain everywhere. Grain in the countryside. Grain on the beaches. Grain shooting up along every road. In your backyard: grain. Popping up from the cracks in sidewalks: more grain. Everywhere you look and everywhere you go – grain, grain, grain. Now if that isn’t a green revolution, what is?
Of course, there’ll be plenty to eat. But there’s a drawback: bread will also be the only thing around. The grain will overrun all other crops. Agriculture will be disrupted. Forests and grasslands will be demolished. Slowly, the entire food chain breaks down, as the face of the planet turns into an endless field of waving grain.
Governments will speak of the `Grain Problem’ and cook up plans to push the grain back. But the grain won’t listen. Suddenly, mankind finds itself in trouble. Diseases emerge, people go blind or develop brittle bones -- all because of the one-sidedness of their diet.
And then there are the side-effects. Every now and then, suffocating grain dust tempests sweep over the planet. Incredible grain field fires occasionally burn down a country or two. Entire continents dry up, as the grain sips up all the water. The atmosphere, having to deal with the grain dust, the smoke from the grain fires and the lack of water, will get messed up. There may be an Ice Age, or even a kind of Nuclear Winter. It isn’t very hard to see what it all boils down to. Humanity is thrown back into the Stone Age – well, `Grain Age’ is a more accurate word. So next time you have a slice of bread, just remember: one day, bread could do us all in.
Sounds far-fetched? Sorry, but it isn’t – not at all. The grain we’re dealing with here isn’t just the next species of grain. We’re talking Super Grain here; grain that is genetically modified. Already, there are hundreds of genetically modified (GM) crops around. The idea is quite simple. Genes define the properties of everything that grows and lives. So in genetic engineering, what you basically do, is take a crop, add a gene here, take out a gene there – and there you have it: a new species of grain, with some handy new properties.
Genetic engineering is quite cool, really. You can make Super Maize that’s resistant to certain diseases, so you don’t have to spray all those polluting pesticides over them. You can create a new brand of Super Rice that’s nutritious enough to feed even the poorest country. Heck, you can even piece together a Super Apple that protects your teeth from rotting. Or a Super Potato that survives frost. A Super Tomato that grows in salt water. If you think that sounds too weird to be true, don’t look now: all these crops already exist today!
Of course, governments and genetic companies are cautious. You just DON’T want your new breed of Super Crop to accidentally mix up with the common stuff. Genes pass from one generation to the next. So if you mix up genetically modified crops with common crops, in no time you’ll only have the GM species left – GM crops having a huge evolutionary advantage over the ordinary stuff.
Still, this `leaking’ of GM crops into normal nature is exactly what is happening as we speak. In China, where there’s little government control over GM farming, the so-called Golden Rice is rapidly replacing common rice. At the moment we write this (March 2002), 5,5 million farmers worldwide grow GM crops. In only four years time, the amount of farmland occupied by GM crops has doubled, from 25 million hectares of farmland in 1998 to more than 50 million hectares in 2002. That’s an area the size of Italy!
Corn killers: Experimental GM crop fields are regularly demolished by protesters. But there's a catch: on at least two occasions, the protestors helped the GM plants escape into nature, accidentally taking the seeds with them on their clothes and shoes.
Meanwhile, in the West, every now and then an accident happens. In Canada, genetically altered oilseed rape `escaped’ from the test fields into the countryside. Right now, Super Oilseed Rape is shooting up everywhere in Canada. And in Mexico, genetically altered Super Maize suddenly showed up in November 2001. This really baffled everyone – Mexico has banned all GM farming years ago!
So, it only seems reasonable to conclude that one day, most crops on the planet will be genetically tinkered with in one way or the other. OK, so what, you may ask. As long as it tastes good, there’s no need to worry, right?
Well – there are these disturbing risks. One day soon, we may create a true Super Crop that is utterly resistant to disease and pollution, and is able to grow in literally every environment. A crop like that might take over the countryside in no time – and start haunting us. Your beloved new crop will turn out a pain in the ***, an ineradicable Super Weed. No deterrent will kill it, no climate will stop it. There you have it: the Grain Problem. And of course, we said `grain’ only for arguments sake. It could be soy, or maize, or rice. Or raspberries, tomatoes, cucumber or lychees -- whatever you can think of.
Oh, and of course it would be rather inconvenient if of all crops the Super Crop that conquers the world turns out to be... cotton. What would we have to eat? Cotton cookies, perhaps?
And wait: what about `Contraceptive Corn’? In early 2002, the San Diego-based biotech company Epicyte developed a new breed of GM corn that can be used as a contraceptive. The corn kills the sperm cells of men that eat it, rendering them infertile. Well, you just DON’T want a crop like that to conquer the world. Humanity would be, er… ******. Within one or two generations, our species would no longer be there.
Paris, 2050?
And then there’s the remote but rather unpleasant possibility that a GM crop suddenly brings forth some kind of new killer virus or bacterium. No, really! Toying around with a plant’s genes may accidentally `awaken’ an inactive, old virus that lays buried deep within the plant’s DNA. Just picture that: cheerfully, you go out to harvest your brand new GM crop, but when you get back, your skin has suddenly turned blue with pink dots, due to some incredibly weird and exotic new disease.
Just imagine what a bummer that would be. Finally, we’ve created a crop that is so totally perfect that you can grow it anywhere you like. Well – except you can’t eat it, it’s growing all over the place, and it makes you ill or infertile. It would be the biggest joke in history. And, probably, the last.
Please, don't go insane now. Of all the apocalypses on this site, the one you’re about to read is probably the most mind-boggling of them all. For what will eternity look like? Think of a place where everything has ceased to exist, where golden parkings pop out of nowhere, Napoleon Bonaparte comes back to life and the Twin Towers resurrect themselves. Still, this incredible place is exactly where we are heading, physicists expect.
Empty your mind. We’re about to take a BIG leap into the future. Not just a lousy few billions of years, but 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years!
One ‘googol’ years, is the official word for that number. It’s the current age of the Universe, one billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion times over. Squeeze the entire history of our Universe into the thickness of a dollar bill, and one googol years would give you a pile of money that reaches one hundred quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion light years high. It wouldn’t even fit in our Universe.
One googol years. That’s truly staggering. Beyond anything a human can comprehend.
First, let’s fast-forward to the not-so-awfully-far future. For the coming billions of years, scientists predict quite a ride. The Sun will explode, the Milky Way will slam into another galaxy. The Cosmos might collapse, or get torn apart -- scientists can’t seem to decide yet which is more likely. And even if the Universe doesn’t do that, we’re destined to face a weird and horrible crisis, which involves us spending our lifetime as sleeping robots.
The problem is that the Universe gets bigger and cooler. Ever since the Big Bang, it expands, much like an expanding ball of fire after an explosion. Right now, the Universe is still young. It has these cute stars and twinkling galaxies. But in the long run, that will change. Slowly but inevitably, the Universe will empty itself.
Big Nothing: Eventually, the Universe will become a dark, sterile place
First, the galaxies will fly out of sight, beyond the horizon of what we can possibly see. Next, the stars in our own galaxy will burn out, one after the other. The only thing that will remain, is a dull graveyard of cold planets, dead suns and black holes. In about one hundred trillion years, the Milky Way will go black, astronomers expect.
And eventually, even this graveyard decays. One after the other, the dead stars and planets are eaten by black holes, or kicked out of the Milky Way by collisions. Astronomers expect that in one hundred to one thousand billion billion years, our galaxy has dissolved completely.
Time goes on. After a while (more trillions of years) something else will kick in. You’ll notice that even the very stuff nature is made of, isn’t stable. A proton, the particle you’ll find in the core of atoms, has an average lifetime of 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years. Wait long enough, and it will suddenly vanish. Poof, gone. The same goes for light particles, the so-called ‘photons’. They’re expected to last a few zero’s longer, but in the end, they too will kick the bucket, one after the other. Isn’t that just bizarre? The light will go out, literally.
The last thing that survives, are the black holes. But in the end, they too will vanish. They will evaporate in a puff of radiation.
So there we are, at our unimaginable one googol years. Finally, the Universe is totally and utterly empty. You won’t see any light or spot any planet -- in fact, you won’t even find the tiniest speck of dust. The Universe has sterilized itself. All there is left, is emptiness, and darkness. Total oblivion. And worst of all: there’s nothing we can do to stop it. We can build fancy machines or futuristic devices all we like -- but in the end, they’ll all get kicked out of existence, when the matter they are made of simply vanishes.
So there you have it: infinity. Booooring, we must add.
But don’t sob. There’s an upside.
As the quadrillions of years pass by, something very odd should happen. In eternity, even the rarest events get a chance to occur. Weird, bizarre phenomena that only happen once in a zillion years or so, become quite normal.
For example: the nothingness should yield a few surprises. Already, physicists know that in a vacuum, there are sometimes tiny little energy ‘blobs’. Little, random fluctuations of the so-called ‘quantum vacuum’. Out of nowhere, tiny particles pop in and out of existence. But theory predicts that on very, VERY rare occasions, the fluctuations should be a bit larger. Out of nowhere, an entire atom might appear! Or hey, the vacuum may even spit out a few of them!
Think of it like the static on TV. Wait long enough, and out of the random fuzz, a recognizable image might materialize. Wait REALLY long, and one day a complete episode of The Bold And The Beautiful should accidentally show up!
In the vastness of eternity, even things that are almost impossible become real. Like the sudden appearance of, say, a light green buste of Napoleon Bonaparte.
In the Universe, this should give some really surprising results. With eternity at hand, the vacuum should begin to yield all kinds of objects. Incoherent lumps of random garbage, most of the time. But on very, very rare occasions, you’ll see other objects popping into existence. The Eiffel tower. A purple camel. A golden parking garage filled with chocolate Cadillacs. Napoleon Bonaparte sitting next to Mike Tyson on top of a stack of comic books. As the googols of years pass by, it’s all there.
In the VERY, VERY, VERY long run, the vacuum will even belch up complete planets, and beautiful stars, burning and all. Theoretically the vacuum should even churn out a complete solar system one day, identical to ours, with a planet Earth inhabited by people. "In an infinite amount of time, one day, I will reappear", as physicist Katherine Freese of Michigan University once put it. "An crazy thought, but true."
One day the black nothingness should even produce a new Big Bang. Admittedly, we’ll have wait really long for it to happen. Researchers of the University of Chicago once tried to calculate it. And according to their best estimates, it should happen somewhere over the next 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years. That’s a one with 1056 zero’s. You can count them, if you like.