Yesterday I featured Part 1 of this posting. I left at #9, Supervolcanoes. Here are the remaining eight ways Humanity could go extinct. I will today particularly focus on what I've all my adult life feared most, nuclear war.- #8 Solar Storms
- The most intense storm peaked in the September 1-2 period of 1859, and is known as the Carrington Event. Carrington was a British astronomer.
- The aurora borealis over the Rocky Mountains was so bright, that gold miners thought it was morning.
- Even Hawaii saw this phenomenon.
- Telegraphs gave operators shocks. However, there is a much-publicized conversation between two operators in Boston and Portland (Maine) who were able to communicate without using batteries to power the line.
- If this were to happen today, the USA alone stands to lose $3.35 trillion to our general economy.
- Researchers examining carbon-14 tree rings and beryllium-10 in ice cores found two other major solar storms: in the years 774-5 and 993-4.
- #7 Antibiotic Failure
- The danger here is that we are over-subscribing antibiotics to make factory-farmed animals grow faster that we ourselves could become immune to antibiotics.
- One possible solution is the use of short-wavelength ultraviolet light to kill microbes during surgery. But this is only for this specific application.
- #6 Global Warming: need I say anything more?
- #5 Electromagnetic Pulse attack.
- A nuclear weapon would be detonated high above the Earth's surface, sending gamma rays to take out modern technologies.
- Some military equipment might still work.
- #4 Famine.
- Sunlight would be diminished from a supervolcano eruption, nuclear winter or major asteroid hit, leading to total agriculture failure.
- Access to marine products helped some animals survive during the dinosaur extinction event.
- #3 Nuclear War.
- The Man Who Saved Humanity: in the early hours of 26September1983 the Soviet Union's early-warning systems detected an incoming missile strike from the U.S. The protocol was to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own.
This left Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel, in an unenviable situation. Petrov was the duty officer at the command centre for Oko, the Soviet system designed to give early warning of approaching ballistic missiles.
It was an intensely dangerous period in Russian-American relations, with both sides on high alert for nuclear attack. American bombers, probing Soviet radar vulnerabilities, would soar towards the edge of Soviet airspace before turning away at the last minute. At the beginning of that month, the USSR had shot down a South Korean passenger jet that had strayed into Russian airspace.
Petrov, sitting in the bunker just south of Moscow, would have been well aware of these tensions. Imagine, then, the horror he would have felt on hearing the bunker’s alarm go off. Lights were flashing. Over the intercom, an officer shouted for Petrov to stay calm and do his job. The computers were reporting that an American intercontinental ballistic missile was hurtling towards Russia, and Soviet military doctrine dictated an immediate counter-attack. “LAUNCH”, said the computer display.
Petrov didn’t know whether the report was accurate, but he told his commanders it was false. “I thought the chances were 50-50 that the warnings were real,” he later recalled, “but I didn’t want to be the one responsible for starting a third world war.”
Even when the computers said another quartet of missiles were on their way, the lieutenant colonel held his nerve. The satellite system’s reliability had been questioned, and the Soviet view was that an American attack would involve hundreds of missiles, but we can count ourselves lucky that Petrov stayed his hand. He was soon vindicated: first by his continued survival, then by the finding that the system had been triggered by light reflecting off a cloud.
Petrov died in 2017. Two years earlier, in an interview with Time magazine, he spoke about the continued risk that nuclear false alarms posed to humanity. “The slightest false move can lead to colossal consequences,” he said. “That hasn’t changed.”
- On 11July2019, only 9 days ago, the chairman of Foreign Affairs Committee of the Russian State of Duma, Leonid Slutsky, issued a nuclear warning to the U.S.
- Five years ago I watched a 1984 film Threads, The Most Frightening Film I Have Ever Seen.
- This British film has no known actors, only a story to tell. Rotten Tomatoes gave it 100/91 scores.
- You can watch this entire 2-hour film by clicking on this. Slow moving at first, but wow...monumental.
As an added gift of horror, mentioned in all the reviews of Threads is The War Game (1966, RT 93/89), another British film about the effects of nuclear war. This production was not shown in the UK in those days because the government feared mass suicides. Couldn't find the film, but here is a review.
To close the list:
- #2 Lab Leaks.
- You haven't heard much recently about the state of biological and chemical warfare research.
- Various agreements have been reached to control this, but war means being secret, so you never know. Especially about China.
- What about the COVID-19 origin and what was happening at the Chinese Wuhan research laboratory? Seven million people died (although more accurately, 21 million), with a world GDP loss of around $13 trillion.
#1 Artificial Intelligence. Last year I ended one of my postings with:
In other words, we should imagine future intelligence billions of years into the future not in human bodies, but some form of silicon or other molecules or the ether. Humanity's greatest achievement could well be to create our successors. Is this what God intended? Or maybe there is no God. Or could the ultimate AI be God?
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