The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design

by Wendy Northcutt

  After the initial blast, Bob picked himself up and—reacting as the trained and experienced firefighter he was—grabbed a fire extinguisher and put out the flames. Only then did he realize that his polyester shirt had melted to his now thoroughly burned chest. He refused his wife’s assistance and, despite his inebriated state, drove himself to the local hospital.

  Bob lost most of the skin on his chest and most of the hair on his head. He also spent several days in the burn unit, and was ultimately tossed out of the local volunteer fire department.

  Reference: George Leavell, Personal Account

  PERSONAL ACCOUNT: BULLET-BRAIN

  CA. 1950S, SOMEWHERE UNDER THE SEA

  My grandfather served for ages in the Royal Navy, and he related this story to me about his time aboard a rivet-hulled diesel-electric submarine. Two men, the ship’s petty officer and an ordinary seaman, were drinking in the mess wardroom. Having cheerfully consumed all the available alcohol (presumably above and beyond the daily ration of rum), the seaman asked the petty officer to do him a favor. He wanted a bullet shot through his hat.

  Because a breach in the hull could be deadly to the entire crew, and because a ricocheting bullet would be dangerous to the crew in such close quarters even if it did not puncture the hull, firearms are locked up aboard ship. Nevertheless, the petty officer honored his friend’s request, retrieved a 9 mm Beretta from his locker, and in an alcoholic haze opened fire on the hat, which was still on his friend’s head.

  * * *

  At depth, a submarine hull is under pressure, but the atmosphere inside is not. That’s why the crew doesn’t suffer from the “bends” as the submarine submerges and surfaces. This pressure difference makes a breach in the hull very dangerous. If the hull is under ten atmospheres of pressure (at one hundred meters) a breach could fill 90 percent of the interior with water.

  * * *

  Despite the amount of alcohol consumed, he was pretty much bang on target. Ignoring the ricocheting bullet and the screams as the rest of the crew ducked, the ordinary seaman removed his hat and examined the bullet hole that had pierced it just an inch from his head. “Too far away,” he said. “I want it closer in. Have another shot.” Famous last words. The next bullet creased him along his skull, and hurled him to the floor, bleeding and unconscious.

  Both men were tossed out of the Royal Navy.

  My grandfather recently told this story to his table during one of those seamen’s dinner-and-dance parties, and was shocked when one man eyed him coldly and informed him that it had been his uncle on the receiving end of the bullet!

  Reference: Joshua Sinyor, Personal Account

  PERSONAL ACCOUNT: BLACKCATS IN THE PANTS

  FOURTH OF JULY, SOMEWHERE IN AMERICA

  Some say persistence is a virtue, and in science that is often the case. Great scientists frequently push the edge in their experiments, extending their hypothesis as they prove each successive point. When tests are performed with firecrackers, though, there is the chance that going to extremes can lead to an amateur scientist’s untimely removal from the gene pool.

  Two young men, “Einstein” and “Teller,” were at a friend’s house celebrating Independence Day with a little food, a little booze, and many fireworks. Einstein was startled to discover a pack of firecrackers exploding at his feet and looked up to see Teller laughing, lighter still in hand. Einstein yelled, “You’re stupid to throw explosives so close to a human being!”

  “Firecrackers can’t hurt you,” said Teller, and to prove his point, he unwrapped another pack, lit its fuse, and dropped it at his own feet. As the firecrackers were popping, he said, “See, no damage!”

  They argued and drank and argued and drank. Teller was convinced that his hypothesis was correct: Firecrackers could not hurt people. Einstein remained skeptical. Finally, Teller lit another pack, pulled the elastic band of his boxers forward, and dropped the pack down his underpants.

  Before the firecrackers even started exploding, Teller began screaming as the fuse burned his skin. As they began to blow up, he screamed even louder and ran into the house.

  Teller took himself to the hospital, and returned with burn ointment and the instruction to lay off work for a week. He refused to reveal the exact results of his experiment to Einstein, except to say that “both the twigs and berries” had been burned. The doctor warned him that his ability to reproduce was thereafter in question.

  Reference: Personal Account

  CHAPTER 6

  Explosion/Fire

  Pyrotechnics aren’t just for professionals; amateurs frequently find the allure of explosives too great to pass up. With grenades, bombs, dynamite, gasoline, a mine detonator, electricity, ammunition, acetylene, chemicals, methane, lots of fireworks, a fire-breather, a bungee cord, and even a lava lamp, there’s never a shortage of examples for fire-safety courses! This chapter begins with a science essay on the biggest explosion in the history of the planet….

  DISCUSSION:

  CHICKEN LITTLE WAS RIGHT

  Norm Sleep, Science Writer

  Darwin Awards are minor personal catastrophes compared to a recent global catastrophe suffered by the Earth itself. If we don’t protect ourselves from a repeat, the human race will earn an inevitable mass Darwin Award.

  Yucatan, early June, sixty-five million years ago

  The summer day begins as usual on the shallow reef. Fish and ammonites forage among the vegetation as they try to avoid becoming shark bait. Pterodactyls soar in the trade winds, waiting for tidbits. Suddenly, the sky to the south brightens like a second sunrise. Within seconds, the entire sky glows at white heat. Every mobile organism instinctively dives for cover. But there is no hope for them. One second later, coming in fast and at a low angle, an asteroid fifteen kilometers in diameter crashes to earth at twenty kilometers per second, vaporizing itself and the upper few kilometers of its center of impact. The shock produces a crater as wide as the Mediterranean Sea. A thick blanket of hot rock fragments fries every living thing within a few hundred kilometers of the crater rim.

  * * *

  How do we know when this impact took place? We know the time of year from clues frozen in ponds and preserved in the geological record. The time of day is artistic license, because more goes on during the day than at night.

  * * *

  The pent-up rock vapor expands, carried rapidly northward by the momentum of the projectile. Within minutes, the vapor cloud sears the surface of western North America, igniting any exposed plant or animal. This is not an ordinary forest fire; the massive heat wave destroys even seeds buried underground.

  Several minutes later, across the ocean in Europe and Australia, dawn comes early as ejected sand-sized fragments return to Earth at cosmic velocities. They glow like meteors, filling the sky for hours. Their heat ignites exposed vegetation, leaving surviving animals with nothing to eat. Soot from the fires fills the lower atmosphere, quickly bringing darkness.

  The calamity is just beginning. The meteor fragments vaporize into a fine dust that circulates in the upper atmosphere, blotting out sunlight. Sulfate, vaporized from anhydrite beds beneath the Yucatan, contributes to the opaqueness of the stratosphere. It remains in the air longer than the dust. Darkness brings cold after the heat. Lilies freeze in Wyoming ponds. Photosynthesis stops in the open ocean for more than a year. Plankton species perish, along with the creatures in the food chain above them. Animals not dependent on photosynthesis eke out a living. Survivors include crocodiles in ponds, our insect-eating ancestors in logs, and a species of shore bird—the only remaining dinosaur.

  Long before the great asteroid forever changed life on Earth, even worse disasters occurred that make this more recent apocalypse pale, a mere pebble in a pond. Four billion years ago, objects hundreds of kilometers in diameter hurtled from the sky, reshaping the planets. These gigantic impacts produced the enormous basins still visible on the Moon and Mars. The heat from the kinetic energy of the projectiles partly vaporized the whole terres
trial ocean. Amazingly, life was able to weather these storms in the “Goldilocks Zone,” which is located in rocks over a kilometer deep, the only safe place for thousands of years after an impact. The surface and shallow subsurface alternately teemed with life, and became a death trap when a large asteroid hit every few ten million years. Both the surface and the deep subsurface were too hot to sustain life. Only heat-loving (thermophilic) organisms in the Goldilocks Zone, living at 100 degrees Centigrade, survived these tribulations to root the tree of life.

  Evolution does not directly prepare organisms for conditions they do not regularly experience, like a year of darkness in the tropical ocean. So most organisms are unable to cope with the disastrous results of such freak events. Some adaptations that arose to cope with other environmental conditions, however, provided salvation for a species. For example, in prehuman times the pike evolved sharp teeth for catching and eating its usual diet of smaller fish. Today, these teeth are advantageous for biting through fishing line. Other coincidental adaptations help during rare events. For example, sixty-five million years ago, when most creatures boiled to death during the great cataclysm, animals and plants that were low on the food chain and nestled deep in swamps managed to survive.

  Chicken Little was right—the risk is real!

  Your chance of being killed by an asteroid is about the same as in a passenger plane crash: one in a million per year. But with an asteroid, billions of humans will be killed at the same time. How do we avoid the indignity of a mass extinction, with no one left to bury us? Our species possesses one helpful adaptation: our intelligence, which has evolved for hunting, gathering, and social interaction. Unlike dinosaurs, we can observe, predict, and act decisively. Can our smarts save us from an otherwise inevitable tragedy?

  Asteroid orbits are predictable in the short run, but over a geological length of time the orbits change. The Earth is a tiny target in the vastness of the solar system. Moreover, earth-crossing orbits are chaotic—a series of minute changes in an asteroid’s actual position and velocity build up to huge changes over time. Thus, in the long term, asteroid orbits are effectively random—more so than even a fair roulette table. We know an asteroid will hit us, sooner or later, but we can’t say which one, or when.

  * * *

  Even a fair roulette wheel gives nonrandom results due to mechanical variations. By collecting statistics and betting appropriately, Joseph Jaggers broke the bank at Monte Carlo in 1873, and mathematician Claude Shannon built a wearable computer to outwit the roulette wheel in 1961. Nowadays, casinos regularly rebalance their wheels to keep the spin results as random as possible.

  * * *

  NASA monitors near-Earth asteroids. Before this program began a few years ago, we did not know whether an impact was more likely next year or a million years from now. Now, visual tracking and heavy mathematics predict the orbits of large objects five hundred years in the future. Early results are in: no ten-kilometer-diameter object has Earth’s name on it. And five centuries from now, society should be better equipped to deal with the hazard of an impending collision. However, the more numerous one-kilometer objects also present a danger of global catastrophe. We do not yet have a complete manifest of these vermin of the sky.

  What do we do if we find an asteroid in our path? Civilization will face this calamity sooner or later, certainly within a million years. If we have been diligent, we will have hundreds of years to prepare for an impact. We will be able to soft-land a probe to track the object’s course and confirm the danger of collision. We will probably not choose to blow it up, as that would turn one dangerous object into several. More likely we will change its orbit by detonating a nuclear explosive nearby, to spall off some material. Newton’s law of the conservation of energy predicts that the equal and opposite force would change the asteroid’s orbital velocity by a few centimeters per second. At that time, there may even be advanced rocket motors with enough power to do the job.

  The take-home message is that, thanks to the development of human intelligence and our continually increasing knowledge base, the next time an asteroid threatens to destroy the planet, there’s a good chance that life on Earth will be saved. And even if most life is destroyed, take heart. After another sixty-five million years, the cycle of evolution may lead to another civilization with the ability to protect Earth against these behemoths from outer space.

  With that cheerful note of impending doom, let’s delve into those who avoid the problem of asteroid impacts by leaving the gene pool in their own explosive manner….

  DARWIN AWARD: CHIMNEY-CLEANING GRENADE

  Confirmed by Darwin

  13 JANUARY 2005, CROATIA

  One fateful afternoon, fifty-five-year-old Marko retreated to his semidetached workshop to make himself a tool for chimney cleaning. The chimney was too high for a simple broom to work, but if he could attach a brush to a chain and then weigh it down with something, that would do the trick. But what could he use as a weight?

  He happened to have the perfect object. It was heavy, yet compact. And best of all, it was made of metal, so he could weld it to the chain. He must have somehow overlooked the fact that it was also a hand grenade and was filled with explosive material.

  Marko turned on his welding apparatus and began to create an arc between the chain and the grenade. When the metal heated up, the grenade exploded. The force of the explosion killed poor Marko instantly, blasting shrapnel through the walls of the shed and shattering the windshield of a Mercedes parked outside. Marko’s sooty chimney was untouched, however.

  Reference: Vecernji List

  * * *

  READER COMMENTS:

  “This fellow made an ‘ash’ of himself.”

  “A cautionary tale for Santa.”

  “Soot-black humour.”

  “Sounds like he blew it!”

  * * *

  DARWIN AWARD: UNSAFE AND INSANE

  Confirmed by Darwin

  2003, AUSTRALIA

  Parents often warn that firecrackers can blow your hand off, but as a twenty-six-year-old Australian learned, they can also remove your gonads from the gene pool. An ambulance rushed to a neighborhood park after receiving reports that a man was hemorrhaging from his behind. The mercifully unidentified man had placed a lit firecracker between the cheeks of his buttocks, stumbled, and fell upon it.

  “We do caution people against these acts,” said the local police.

  The emergency surgeon said the resulting wound looked like “a war injury.” The explosion was forced upward, “blasted a great hole in the pelvis, ruptured the urethra, and injured muscles,” rendering the man incontinent as well as sexually dysfunctional. He survived to tell the tale, making him eligible for the dubious honor of a Living Darwin Award.

  Reference: Illawarra Mercury

  DARWIN AWARD: DO-IT-YOURSELF LAND MINE

  Confirmed by Darwin

  27 MAY 2004, CHIAVENNA, ITALY

  When Peraldo found sticks of old dynamite in an abandoned stable on the hill above his vineyard, he decided to bury the problem. Some might think that burying unstable dynamite would be…unwise. But not Peraldo, a sixty-seven-year-old retired entrepreneur, who had been an explosives expert in the army. He had also worked as a licensed fuochino in charge of explosives at construction sites prior to his retirement. He knew the ways of things that go boom.

  This dynamite had been sitting around for some time, decaying and sweating highly unstable nitroglycerin. Peraldo carefully placed the high explosives in a hole thirty meters away from the stable and gently covered them with loose earth. Apparently the mound was a little too high to be aesthetically attractive, so Peraldo began patting it down with his hands….

  The massive blast rocked the entire town of Chiavenna. Police rushed to the vineyard to investigate. Peraldo was found torn to shreds but, miraculously, still alive and able to elucidate what had happened before he expired from internal injuries.

  Reference: www.espressonline.it

 
DARWIN AWARD: “PLUG ME IN”

  Confirmed by Darwin

  7 MARCH 2005, VIETNAM

  Nguyen, twenty-one, was drinking with friends in Hanoi when he pulled out an old detonator he had found. It was about six centimeters long and eight centimeters in diameter, with two wires hanging out. Because it was old and rusty, Nguyen said, it couldn’t explode. His friends disagreed.

  To prove his point, Nguyen put the detonator in his mouth and the dangling wires were plugged into a 220-volt electrical receptacle.

  Turns out Nguyen was wrong!

  The victim had little time to reflect on his mistake, or whether 220 volts alone could have been fatal. According to police, “the explosion blew out his cheeks and smashed all his teeth.” He died on the way to the hospital.

  Reference: Deutsche Presse Agentur