More of God’s Favorite Punch Lines
• “Liquor? I hardly knew her!”
• “Because he was stuck to the chicken!”
• “I have a wife and kids!”
• “I want to live! I want to liiive!”
When the mountain falls, the ensuing wave will initially reach heights of more than 2,000 feet, but would likely settle out to a paltry 100 when it hits land… in New York, in Boston, in Florida—the entire eastern seaboard of the United States actually, as well as parts of Brazil, the Caribbean, and Canada. At that point, the wave would be moving at a speed of nearly 700 mph (that’s nearly the speed of sound) and with enough force to uproot entire cities like weeds, drag broken skyscrapers miles inland, and generally just erase life like God spilled a bottle of Wite-Out on the Western Hemisphere. The wave would travel nearly thirty miles inland, completely submerging the major population centers of the United States before dragging all debris—human or otherwise—out to sea when it’s drawn back. A weakened but still devastating wave would hit across the entire Atlantic seaboard, but the brunt of the impact is squarely on American soil.
The resulting death toll and damage would be devastating to billions of people, and the lasting economic impact would completely destroy the modern way of life, effectively sending everybody not drowned or crushed by waylaid cities directly back to the Stone Age. The new bodies of standing water, millions of corpses, and unsanitary conditions would most likely wipe out the rest of the survivors with disease, but these are Americans we’re talking about here, goddamn it, and there’s just no way they’ll be totally wiped out by one little son-of-a-bitch wave!
And that’s good, because thanks to the rippling effect, there are going to be ten more right behind it.
8. HYPERCANE
GLOBAL WARMING and climate change can cause any number of problems—from food shortages to drought to inclement weather—but they do not always work in such subtle, gradual ways. Changes in the environment don’t always function like a cancer, killing you slowly over a long period of time. Sometimes the environment just loses its damn mind, and that’s when an event called a hypercane can occur. If the normal consequences of a shifting climate are akin to a metaphorical disease infecting the world, a hypercane’s consequences are a metaphorical Bruce Willis: That is to say, if global warming might kill humanity slowly over a period of generations, a hypercane is going to tie a fire hose around the world’s neck and then throw it off an exploding skyscraper.
A hypercane is a hurricane on a global scale. With winds up to supersonic speeds, a hypercane doesn’t just dismantle and destroy what it touches—it utterly disintegrates it. They can be the size of a continent, the conditions that spawn them could also render them self-sustaining, and their long-term effects are beyond disastrous. In short, it’s like a hurricane on death Viagra: In every way it is bigger, stronger, and longer lasting than the worst hurricane you’ve ever seen.
Though it’s a long shot that a hypercane will ever naturally occur again (many theorize that hypercanes have been present for, if not responsible for, some major past extinctions), if it ever does happen, it will be what scientists refer to as a “planet killer”—which, incidentally, is one of the reasons scientists don’t get invited to many parties. I’m not saying that these scientists are exaggerating the threat; it’s just that there are more sensitive ways to deliver terrible news. Doctors dealing with terminal patients don’t break the traumatic news that a patient has cancer by telling them it’s “like the atom bomb of diseases;” they don’t tell AIDS patients that they have the disease equivalent of “a gun shooting you from the inside out;” and they don’t explain leukemia to terminal children by telling them that it’s “like the bogeyman lives inside your bones.” So scientists are a little tactless, sure, but unfortunately that doesn’t make their predictions any less true. While a compassionate soul would tell you that, in the event of a hypercane, we’d all go out peacefully in our sleep, dreaming of past loves and warm summer days, my mother taught me that honesty is the best policy. And in keeping with that philosophy, I should tell you it’s far more likely that not only would your skin be sheared off by a supersonic wind, but also it would afterward become a deadly storm-borne projectile that would probably continue on to impale your entire family.
More Horrible Ways to Explain Diseases:
Parkinson’s: Like poppin’ and lockin’ in hell.
Alzheimer’s: Like having tiny zombies feeding on your brain.
Herpes: Sex pimples.
It’s not like we didn’t have any warning, though, as 2008 was one of the most devastating hurricane seasons on record. Massively destructive individual hurricanes like Katrina and Rita in 2005 don’t even rank among the ten most powerful storms of all time. But you certainly can’t just dismiss this disturbing trend of increasingly stronger storms on the basis that they haven’t yet produced the strongest ones ever recorded—that’s like telling yourself that the ravenous pack of wolves following you for the past fifteen minutes are nothing to worry about because you saw a much bigger lion on Animal Planet that one time. It’s the strength of the overall weather systems that matters; since that is increasing, that can mean some very, very bad things down the line.
Helpful Advice
If you don’t like the idea of your own skin being used to dismember your loved ones, try some of the following: tips, in the event of a hypercane.
1. Don’t have a family.
2. Don’t have skin.
3. Those are your only options.
A hypercane can form when a significant expanse of water reaches a temperature of about 120 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about 25 degrees higher than the highest ocean temperature ever recorded. But just because we haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Some theories hold that a hypercane was partially responsible for the extinction period that wiped out the dinosaurs. The meteor impact at Chicxulub in what is now the Gulf of Mexico would’ve started it all, but the resulting superheated ocean could have spawned a long-lasting hypercane that would have ravaged the Earth for weeks on end. The really scary part about the formation of hypercanes is that, much like the world’s scariest bag of Lay’s Potato Chips, you can’t have just one: Any stretch of ocean superheated enough to spawn one hypercane would stay at that temperature long enough to spawn several more—so even though one is quite enough to kill the world just fine, it’s brought all of its friends along… just in case.
Other Bad Things Down the Line
• Increased tidal activity
• More rogue waves
• Super-cell storm systems
• Twisters
• Complete disbanding of yacht clubs
A hypercane could vary anywhere from a measly ten miles in diameter to the size of an entire continent, but in the patronizing words of your ex-wife, “size doesn’t matter, honey, it’s how you use it,” because even the smallest hypercane would have the same planet-killing effects as a continent-sized storm. A hypercane has winds of over five hundred miles an hour—more than enough to rip the skin from your body, not just to dismantle a house but to completely disintegrate it, and to send entire cities hurtling through the air like a normal hurricane would send trees. For a better idea of how devastating this event would be, think of it like this: A hypercane moves the very air around you at about the speed of a typical airliner. So the odds of surviving a hypercane would be about the same as surviving on a planet where the entire atmosphere—the very air itself—consisted solely of jumbo jets traveling at top speed. Clearly, your basement ain’t gonna help much when you’re trying to breathe in airplanes.
As an added bonus, a hypercane would also have a plume rising twenty miles right up into space. So if you ever dreamed of being an astronaut—now’s your chance! You’ll most likely be some form of jelly when you achieve that dream, but hey, we all make sacrifices for our goals, right? That plume is the truly worrying part: It would raise water, dirt, debris, and
of course the obligatory trailer parks twenty miles straight up into the stratosphere. For those of you coming from public schools, that’s like the bottom of space! This sudden influx of matter in the upper atmosphere would punch a hole right through the ozone layer and scatter everything formerly safe on the ground into orbit. On the plus side, suborbital trailer parks sound marginally more livable than normal trailer parks, but on the downside, the debris would then act as a superpollutant, blocking out the sun, poisoning the air, and triggering even further planetary devastation. The water and dust molecules introduced to this fragile area would also block the atmosphere’s ability to absorb harmful ultraviolet light. So hey, if you do manage to survive the actual hypercane with the power of clean living and intense prayer, you still get terminal space cancer if you ever see the sun again. Jesus, it’s like it not only wants to kill you, but also plans to take away everything good about your life if it can’t. The hypercane sounds so epically awful that it would have been equally at home in either science fiction or as a Care Bears villain—just out to steal joy away from the world.
Tips to Survive a Hurricane
• Stay away from glass.
• Seek shelter in a basement or small room.
• Have an emergency kit prepared.
Tips to Survive a Hypercane
• Don’t.
And just when you thought it was over—well, it’s quite possibly never going to be over. Because the extremely low barometric pressure inside a hypercane also gives it a nearly indefinite lifespan. For example, look skyward: See that giant spot on Jupiter, commonly called The Eye? The one that’s been there for thousands of years? Technically, that’s a hypercane. And if the conditions are exactly right, a self-sustaining infinite hypercane is also theoretically possible right here on Earth.
But hey, it’s not so bad. After all, the hypercane takes a lot to be triggered: It needs a large expanse of water rapidly heated to well over 100 degrees to form. Anything capable of achieving something like that is pretty unlikely to occur. It would take another form of serious disaster, like a worldwide rise in temperature (a “Global Warming,” if you will) or an asteroid impact like Apophis (see chapter 12) or an underwater supervolcano (see chapter 6) like on La Palma (see chapter 7)… to… shit.
Put on your screamin’ shoes, looks like we’re going hypercane shopping.
NANOTECH THREATS
Great leaps in human technological advancement are often initiated by the rise of a single, new, unforeseen field of invention. The forging of metals brought us solidly into the age of construction; the printing press brought us into the age of literacy; and the modern factory system brought us into the industrial revolution. The next big leap in technological advancement is, according to all sources, just over the horizon: nanotechnology. If industrialization made consumer products easier, cheaper, and more readily available, nanotech is going to make consumerism practically rain from the sky. Nanoparticles, the term for inert, nonmachine molecules reduced to the nanoscale, could theoretically do anything from eliminating cancer to creating self-mending clothes, while nanobots, the more complicated microscopic machines, could rearrange the building blocks of matter itself, essentially creating something out of nothing. It’s going to be like having a million tiny robot butlers at your beck and call who live inside your body, and whose only desire in life is to fetch you as much awesome as you can hold.
This is the world of nanotech, and it’ll be the best thing that ever happened to you… if it doesn’t kill you first.
9. GREEN GOO
COMPUTERS ARE reaching their saturation point in our everyday life—cell phones, iPods, digital cameras. They’re getting more ubiquitous by the day and smaller by the minute. They provide most anything, from serious applications like military command and genome sequencing to the more trivial tasks like supplying online journals or easy access to obscure fetish porn. And it’s no wonder they’re so omnipresent; what other device could fill all those niches at once? What else could simultaneously function as an efficient soldier, run complex laboratory data, allow you to express your innermost feelings, and show you people fucking in cartoon coyote suits? Computers have thoroughly inundated modern life, so why not take it a step further and inundate your life, quite literally?
Well, nanobiotechnology—the term for nanotechnology applied to biological systems—proposes to do exactly that… and a lot sooner than you may think. You see, scientists are already implementing the first wave of human-altering nanomachines, and they expect to have the first legal, commercial applications available within the next decade. But the technology may be moving faster than we’re able to fully understand it, and some issues that are already cropping up are, to put it politely, so terrifying that the fear shit you take will inexplicably shit itself in terror.
This effect is similar to the theory of “trickle-down economics,” except that instead of hoping that the superrich accidentally drizzle money over the poor like monetary salad dressing, in this case it’s human-augmenting robots trickling into the ecosystem through waste by-products. Basically you’re pooping superpowers into the swamp.
The “Green Goo” scenario is a theory stating that the true danger of nanotechnology lies not within the mites themselves, but in the creatures they modify. Much like the concerns surrounding genetically modified foods, the idea here is that any introduced trait that turns out to be beneficial will enter the gene flow and start to carry over naturally. It addresses such concerns as what might happen to an ecosystem if a strain of nanobots or nanoparticles accidentally improves, even marginally, something like the eyesight or immune system of a top predator. Furthermore, what could happen to the predator if its prey suddenly possesses, say, heightened endurance? These sorts of scenarios can’t be fully tested in labs, because they deal expressly with nonlaboratory conditions taking place solely in wild ecosystems. And the effect is cumulative, so what may start with a harmless frog leaping just an inch higher could well end up with a sky eternally darkened by sinister patrols of helicopter sharks.
And as usual, it all starts very small, and with only the best of intentions: Researchers at the University of California have recently developed nanomites equipped with small doses of chemotherapy drugs. These simple nanobots actively target cancer that is attempting to spread, and then attach to a protein found on cancerous blood vessels that supplies tumors with their oxygen and other nutrients. They then inject their payload of drugs into the vessels, which causes them to deny the tumors sustenance, thus preventing the cancer from metastasizing and spreading to other organs, which is really what kills most cancer patients. The drugs don’t eliminate the tumor; they just contain the cancer and starve it until somebody can come along and kill it. To put it more succinctly: They function like a million tiny Auschwitzes… inside your blood.
This development is important because the cancer drug used—doxorubicin—is also a highly toxic poison, one that causes fatal heart attacks in a significant portion of the people it’s administered to. But the nanobots are able to administer the drug so precisely that the amount needed for treatment is drastically reduced, and the side effects are almost nonexistent. It’s a technology that could save your life one day, and a damn good reason to have these things inside your blood and be quite happy about it. Just try to avoid thinking about the submolecular genocide raging inside your veins. And I wouldn’t mention the fact that the poisonous robots living inside your blood are the only thing keeping you alive, if I were you. (There are nice, padded places the police tend to bring you to if you say things like that out loud.) Oh, and definitely don’t dwell on the somewhat worrying prospect that if too many of these poisonous-drug-administering nanomachines were introduced into your body, just waiting for the cue to activate, you’d be basically walking around pre-murdered, just waiting for somebody to take a whack at the robot-filled poison piñata that is your body. So that Auschwitz-in-the-blood analogy from earlier still holds true. It’s just that this time, you’
re the one in the showers.
Historical Tradeoffs That May Not Have Been Worth It
• Indians swapping Manhattan for beads
• The Chinese allowing British occupation in exchange for opium trade
• Curing cancer by injecting poisonous robots
But hey, don’t start getting freaked out yet! This wasn’t even the part intended to scare you; it was just an example of some of the wonderful things that nanotechnology can do for you (in this case, injectable anticancer Nazi robots).
It’s very unlikely that the burgeoning field of nanobiotechnology will be reserved solely for medical uses. There’s a pretty standard, preestablished pattern of dissemination in place for new technology. At first, new tech is always reserved for serious uses, but before long it’s so commonplace that you have it everywhere. Take the internet, for example: It was exclusively a military network just over forty years ago, and now half the line at Starbucks is tapping into said former military network to check out grammatically impaired cats while waiting for their Grande Frappucino. So sure, nanobiotech is just for cancer treatment now, but maybe tomorrow it’s a flu vaccine and maybe a week from now it’s a pain reliever, or a subdermal sunblock, or maintenance-free contact lenses. But if it’s that commonplace, then why not go further? Why not a customizable, morphing tattoo? Or a permanent cell phone in your ear? How about a remote control installed in your brain? The potential uses are tempting, and the appeal is easy to see.
Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody Page 6
