by Alok Jha
THE
DOOMSDAY
HANDBOOK
THE
DOOMSDAY
HANDBOOK
50 Ways to the End of the World
Alok Jha
New York • London
© 2011 by Alok Jha
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CONTENTS
Introduction
PEOPLE
Mass Extinction
Global Pandemic
The Doomsday Machine
Mutually Assured Destruction
Terrorism
Death by Euphoria
Overpopulation
Population Death Spiral
TECH
Cyberwar
Biotech Disaster
Nanotech Disaster
Artificial Superintelligence
ENVIRONMENT
Transhumanism
Death of the Bees
Invasive Species
Desert Earth
Global Food Crisis
Water Wars
Resource Depletion
Rising Sea Levels
The Gulf Stream Shuts Down
Snowball Earth
Chemical Pollution
Ozone Destruction
Asteroid Impact
Mega Tsunami
Supervolcano
Oxygen Depletion
Geomagnetic Reversal
Superstorms
SPACE
Sun Storms
Polar Shift
Lethal Space Dust
Runaway Black Hole
Gamma Rays from Space
Vacuum Decay
Solar Collision
Scientists Create a Black Hole
Hostile Extraterrestrials
Death of the Sun
Galactic Collision
The End of Time
Strangelets
GENETICS
Genetic Superhumans
Dysgenics
Organic Cell Disintegration
It’s All a Dream
Information Extinction
Environmental Collapse
Unknown Unknowns
Index
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
* * *
The End is nigh. Or, at least, our fascination with stories about The End is. Human history is stuffed full of doomsday tales and calamitous ends to the world as we know it. Prophets, sages and storytellers have told of fire and brimstone raining down from the sky, huge waves washing over the land and flooding everything out of existence or the hand of an unseen power that winks it all to nothing. Whatever the mechanism, The End is always the same: horrors befall our planet; everyone dies; our world becomes a wasteland, barren.
* * *
Often allied to the world’s great religions, The End (or “judgment day”) is usually a deity’s way of cleansing our planet, to allow a fresh race of people who are morally purer to repopulate the resulting blank slate. Perhaps there is too much sin or debauchery and the time has come to start over. In this tradition, the most recent example is the belief that an ancient Mayan calendar has predicted the end of the world in 2012. It is safe to say that there is no credible evidence why that particular year should be any more dangerous than the ones preceding it.
These stories of fire and ash make good tales and do a decent job of stirring up the requisite fear and jeopardy. But made-up doomsday tales pale into nothing, creatively speaking, when contrasted with the poetry of what is actually possible. Look through the lens of science, and The End becomes much more interesting.
Start with the classics that could so easily destroy all life as we know it and without much that we can do about it: a huge asteroid hits the Earth, super-sized volcanoes unleash global blackouts, storms envelop the oceans and kill everything on the planet.
Our species has the unique ability in the history of life on Earth as the first that can remake our world. But we can also destroy it. All too real are the humancaused threats borne of climate change, excess pollution, depletion of natural resources and the madness of nuclear weapons. We tinker with our genes and atoms at our own peril—nanotechnology, synthetic biology and genetic modification offer much potential in giving us better food to eat, safer drugs and a cleaner world. But they could also go wrong if misused.
The connected society we have created has brought us huge benefits in terms of trade, access to knowledge and education. But these same interconnections can spread viruses (human and computer) ever faster. A skilled terrorist cell (or intelligent machine) could compromise power systems, steal or delete financial data and wreck supply chains, all of which are crucial for the modern world to function. A failure in a digital system in the United States can spread to China or Australia in seconds.
We think we live in a safe part of the galaxy at least. But our solar system is not necessarily the haven we think, especially for a delicate planet with life. Just because it is quiet now, doesn’t mean we won’t pass through showers of debris that could wreck the planets. That a rogue white dwarf might not smash through the Sun and knock all the planets into deep space. Or that a rogue black hole will not wander past and rip everything into ribbons of atoms before engulfing it all with its inexorable gravity. Or what if we really do run into aliens and they turn out to be hostile?
We live (and always have lived) in the shadow of possible annihilation and, ironically, that shadow gets ever darker and longer the more light we shed on to knowing about our universe. You can only know that the world could pop out of existence in a bout of vacuum decay if you know about quantum particles and the big bang. We are beginning to understand that what we conceive of as “time” might one day disappear from our universe, giving us no sense of movement or direction. And let us hope never to run into a clump of the deadly strangelet matter anywhere in the universe. This is a substance nominally so very close to being made of the same stuff that makes up everything we see around us. Yet it is, instead, something coldly destructive of our way of life.
Have heart, though. Whichever scientific approach you take to trying to get to The End, you can be assured that only a small handful of them actually mean the end of the Earth itself. The end of the world, our world of humans, is relatively easy to countenance. Our planet, however, will be just fine after the demise of humans or its many millions of other species of life. That is, of course, until the Sun eventually explodes to several times its own size in a few billion years and swallows the Earth whole.
Mass Extinction
* * *
There is a disturbing secret about the fortune of life on Earth. It sits in the background as we marvel about the diversity of organisms we see around us today; about how some chemical
s in a warm pond started to replicate billions of years ago and evolved, slowly, into trilobites, dinosaurs, trees, snails, grass, monkeys, mushrooms and humans. That secret is death.
* * *
In the stunning 3.5-billion-year history of life on Earth, of the 4 billion species that are thought to have ever existed, 99 percent are extinct. On our planet, extinction is the norm. Throughout history, plants and animals have come and gone as the climate and the environment have changed around them. Some thrived in cold, others only in hot and humid. Species have appeared and disappeared as their suitability for their niches has waxed and waned, all of it inextricably linked to the fortunes and conditions of our shared planet.
Five times in the past 500 million years, though, the steady rate of attrition has reached unassailable heights. Something, no one knows for sure what, turned the Earth into exactly the wrong planet for life, and at those points, most of the world’s plants and animals disappeared. During each mass extinction, more than 75 percent of living species died off in the geological blink of an eye.
Since the end of the last mass extinction, 65 million years ago, things have been relatively quiet. Extinctions have continued, but only at the normal, background rate. Evidence from ecologists and conservationists in recent decades, however, is pointing toward an inevitable conclusion for the 21st century: that the Earth is getting ready for another of its periodic catastrophic destructions of life. The sixth mass extinction is upon us, and the twist this time is that we know exactly what is causing it.
The five big ones
In 1982, David M. Raup of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and Jack Sepkoski of the department of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago published a study in the journal Science. They had been looking at the rate and deposition of thousands of families of marine fossils from the past 500 million years and noticed a distinct set of periods when extinction rates among the life forms seemed unusually high. Later work confirmed Raup and Sepkoski’s conclusions that there had been some event or series of events that had caused catastrophic loss of life on Earth at several distinct points.
Because of the timescales and uncertainties in the numbers of animals involved, big extinctions in the past are not measured only by the numbers of species that disappeared, but also by genera (the taxonomic category that contains several related species) and families (the category that contains several related genera).
The oldest mass extinction identified by Sepkoski and Raup started around 450 million years ago as glaciers were forming on the Earth, locking up water and causing sea levels everywhere to drop. This Ordovician-Silurian event lasted around 10 million years and caused the death of a quarter of marine families and 60 percent of water-based genera. The hardest-hit species included brachiopods, eel-like conodonts, and trilobites.
The late Devonian mass extinction came next, a 25-million-year-long event that started around 375 million years ago, and in which around 19 percent of all families, 50 percent of all genera and 70 percent of all species died out. During this time, insects and plants and the first early versions of amphibians were living on land—the extinction gave them all a setback.
After that came the big one: the Permian-Triassic event. Starting around 250 million years ago, it is widely known to be the Earth’s worst mass extinction event, killing 95 percent of species living at the time, 84 percent of marine genera and an estimated 70 percent of land species, including plants and vertebrates. A third of the world’s insects also perished, marking the only mass extinction of this order of life. The loss of life was so catastrophic that paleontologists call this period the “Great Dying.” On land, the mammal-like reptiles were wiped out, and it took the vertebrates tens of millions of years to bounce back. What caused this event is disputed—some argue that it was due to a comet or asteroid impact, though no tell-tale crater has ever been found.
* * *
YEARS TO MASS EXTINCTION
Amphibians 242
Mammals 334
Birds 537
If all threatened species die out in 100 years
* * *
In comparison to the Great Dying, the final two events seem less impressive, though each one had its own important influences on how life subsequently evolved on Earth.
The End-Triassic event began 214 million years ago and lasted 10 million years, possibly caused by lava flows erupting from somewhere in the mid-Atlantic region. This led to the opening of the Atlantic Ocean, and would also have caused deadly global warming, wiping out 22 percent of marine families and 52 percent of genera. On land, this event left the dinosaurs with little competition.
And then there is the mass extinction that most people might have a passing knowledge of, the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Occurring around 65 million years ago, the Cretaceous-Tertiary event killed off 16 percent of marine families, 47 percent of marine genera and 18 percent of land vertebrate families. The probable reason was a large asteroid impact on the Yucatan Peninsula and beneath the Gulf of Mexico, which threw dust into the air and blocked out the Sun, causing large animals to die over the next few million years due to lack of food. Afterward, mammals and birds emerged as the dominant forms of life.
The sixth mass extinction
These days, we are used to extinction. Newspaper headlines are filled with stories about animals and plants big and small dying out or disappearing. And the rate seems to be getting ever quicker: we know that tens of thousands of species die out every year, many of them not properly cataloged by humans. We have fished the oceans empty and cleared and hunted through so much forest that our closest animal cousins, the great apes, are endangered in the wild. We are outcompeting every animal and plant on the planet by taking up an ever-increasing amount of land and energy. Our rising population (estimates suggest that we will increase from our present 6 billion or so to 9 billion by the middle of the century) means that competition will only get more intense, and it is animals rather than humans that will suffer most.
To work out how current extinction rates of species compare to those in the Earth’s mass-extinction history, Anthony D. Barnosky, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, collected together data on species that were under threat or endangered.
Writing in Nature in March 2011, Barnosky described how scientists were increasingly recognizing modern extinctions of species and populations. “Documented numbers are likely to be serious underestimates, because most species have not yet been formally described. Such observations suggest that humans are now causing the sixth mass extinction through co-opting resources, fragmenting habitats, introducing non-native species, spreading pathogens, killing species directly, and changing global climate.”
Setting a relatively high bar for what he counted as a mass extinction, in other words where more than 75 percent of all species per group of life form were lost, Barnosky calculated that the Earth would reach its next extreme, the sixth mass extinction, in just a few centuries. “How many more years would it take for current extinction rates to produce species losses equivalent to Big Five magnitudes? The answer is that if all ‘threatened’ species became extinct within a century, and that rate then continued unabated, terrestrial amphibian, bird and mammal extinction would reach Big Five magnitudes in 240 to 540 years (241.7 years for amphibians, 536.6 years for birds, 334.4 years for mammals),” he wrote.
* * *
The predicted rapid rise in the Earth’s temperature due to man-made climate change could halve the number of species on the planet.
* * *
If extinction were limited to only the “critically endangered” species over the next century, and those extinction rates continued, the time until 75 percent of species were lost per group would be 890 years for amphibians, 2,265 years for birds and 1,519 years for mammals. At the slower end of Barnosky’s calculations, the range of extinction times for amphibians is around 4,500 years, just over 11,300 years for birds and 7,500 years for mammals. “This emphasizes that
current extinction rates are higher than those that caused Big Five extinctions in geological time; they could be severe enough to carry extinction magnitudes to the Big Five benchmark in as little as three centuries.”
A separate analysis by scientists at the University of York and the University of Leeds examined the relationship between climate and biodiversity over the past 520 million years and uncovered an association between the two. When the Earth’s temperatures are in a “greenhouse” climate phase, they found that extinction rates are relatively high. Conversely, during cooler “icehouse” conditions, biodiversity increases.
Their results, published in 2007 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that the predicted rapid rise in the Earth’s temperature due to man-made climate change could halve the number of species on the planet. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global temperatures could increase by as much as 6°C by the end of the century.
Could the sixth mass extinction be avoided?
Unlikely. “Recovery of biodiversity will not occur on any time-frame meaningful to people,” says Barnosky. “Evolution of new species typically takes at least hundreds of thousands of years, and recovery from mass extinction episodes probably occurs on timescales encompassing millions of years.”
Past mass extinctions have been caused by major environmental events—shifting sea levels, asteroid impacts or rapid temperature changes. This time, however, animals and plants have something far more formidable and insurmountable to deal with as they die in numbers never seen before on Earth: us.
