"DARK FUTUR"
8 WAYS
THE WORLD
COULD SUDDENLY END
By
Søren Nielsen
2019
8: A Pandemic is coming.
Let`s begin the 2019 countdown.
You`re looking at the "N1H1", it`s the original flu virus that caused the last great pandemic, "The Spanish flu of 1918".
Which infected 50 % of the world`s population at the time, which was a billion people and probably killed one out of every ten people.
But here`s the interesting thing about it, it came in three waves. Three different waves, pretty much about six months apart and the second waves killed every single person who got the flu and that is how bad flu can be.
Now here we are in 2019 and in barnyards all over China, there are ducks and pigs and chickens in close proximity and that`s actually were influenza originates.
H5N1. 61% human death rate.
Now viruses have gotten so good at mutating and in these barnyards mostly that you and I haveto get a flu shot every year to protect against this, although I will tell you something interesting, less than half of the population in the United States, does get a ful shot every year.
But that is not what keeps the "Center for Disease Control" up at night, what they worry about is something called a "Recombinant Flu Bug" and here`s how it works there are two kinds of viruses.
They`re viruses infect animals and animals pass them easily to other animals and then there are viruses that infect humans and they pass them easily to other humans.
When a human has something like the "Hong Kong Flu" or in 2009 that "H1N1", that came back and they go to market and they buy a chicken that happens to have one of these animal viruses and they take it home and they don`t cook it properly and they eat it, they get the animal virus and now inside that person are two kinds of viruses.
A virus that transmits easliy from human to human and a virus that transmits easily from animal to animal, but in almost all cases, that animal virus is far more toxic and far more of a killer.
Now in just the lastb few weeks, a new very deadly animal flu called "H7N9" has popped up, about a hundred people are infected, a lot them have died and this is one that the "CDC" is really worried about and we could be looking at another worlwide pandemic like "The Spanish Flu", if a human being, who has a human-type virus that transmits easliy to people happens to eat one of these animals.
Now there are a solutions to this, but we live in a very different world from 1918, there are 80.000 commercial jets that take off every day full of passengers.
It would tkae a flu virus about two weeks to circle the globe.
Privat producers cannot make enough vaccine, fast enough to save us. The only thing that we can do is what "The Australian Government" has done, which is to create laboratories that are ready to go on a moment`s notice to create vast quantities of flu virus, we should do this.
Second we need to make a simple dipstick test, you go to the drugstore, you buy a swab, you put it in your mouth, if turns blue, you have the flu, how many times have you gone to the doctor, "do I have the flu, do I have a bacterial infection", half the time they don`t even know.
When a pandemic comes, you want to know if you have the flu and you will not be able to find a doctor.
Thirdly we need to invest in a really good public health system we`ve actually been firing about 50.000 public healt workers in the last three years.
40 - 50 years ago, this country built thousands of bomb shelters, because we thought nuclear war was a real threat, if we can do that, we can build a public health system that will take care of us, in a pandemic.
7: The Sun Brightens
Numer seven isn`t that beautful, that`s a mass coronal ejections coming off the Sun, it makes something called "The Solar Flare" look like kindergarten.
It shoots uncountable numbers of atoms that have been broken apart into little particles and radiation out into space.
Almost all of these blasts missed the Earth, because the Sun is like this huge yellow beach ball in space and we are like this little tiny BB, so no matter which direction the Sun sends this out, it`s very unusual for us to get a direct hit, however happened last August and it happened a month ago and you would not have been wanting to fly or been in an airplane at that time.
In 1859 a coronal mass ejection took the brand-new US telegraph system, and it basically melted it, it started fires, it shocked the operators and the wires disappeared.
Most of the time our magnetic field in our atmosphere protect us from coronal mass ejections, but a severe direct hit would take out the entire world`s power grid at once and all the satellites in orbit.
Plunging us essentially into a 19th century existence. It would take 20 years to restore half the grid, because we do not have backup, try to imagine life without electricity, almost all cities would become an uninhabitable.
We build skyscrapers 80 stories high and up, and 2 stories underground, we need to create saftety zones beneath our bulidings, we should be building down 8 stories for every 80 stories up and we should make that part of our building code, we are in the state of New Jersey rebuilding 20.000 bridges in the state, because they know there will be a massive earthquake on the east coust sooner or later, if we can do that, we can have different building codes for our buildings.
We should also view transformers and wires as vulnerable and expendable and we should have hardned underground power plants ready to go in an emergency.
6: We develop a new life form.
This is a synthetic genome, invented by "Craig Venter Institute", and inserted into a bacterial cell to create, what I would call a new life-form.
This life-form nerver existed before and it can reproduce. It was done 3 years ago and the goal is Noble, it`s to produce anything we want from a cell, takes in certain thing, put out stuff that we want.
For example, they could make synthetic vaccines or they could turn carbon dioxide into usable fuels, now what should be wrong with that.
Our history is littered with examples of bad things that got out of secure labs, things that go amuck, when we try to tamper with Mother Nature and here`s a low-tech example, we have "Kudzu" from Japan to control soil erosion, didn`t
work out so well.
And meanwhile labs around the world are experimenting with biotech in ways you cannot imagine, you can create a perfect in vito male baby with blond hair and blue eyes and you can make modified corn, you can do anything you want.
Now is genetically modified corn savings from famines, I see it as a threat to the only purely wild corn genome left in the world that grows in Mexico.
Look at number one here, "Watch closer, regulate more".
No single federal agency or a single law governs this vast new world, instead there`s hodgepodge of regulations from "The Food and Drug Administration" and "The United States Department of Agriculture" and "The EPA".
We need a new single agency of the government to bring order to this. Meanwhile less watched people are entering this field all the time and amateurs will follow.
Kickstarter just got its first proposal for a synthetic life-form, a plant that would glow at night, so we can sprinkle its seeds along roadsides and eliminate streetlights.
Remember that genetically modified crops are not driven by a need to produce a better world and to save people from starvation, they are driven by money and synthetic biology about money too.
5: Robots take over.
Now for a little humor, I`m going to tell you this you`re not going to believe it.
Computers will be smarter than us, in 20 years, you know this stuff, you know that "Deep Blue" can play chess better than anyone on the face of the Earth and you know that the Google Car can drive itself better than you can drive it.
It`s "Hasta la Vista, Time", time to wake up and smell a silicon, if you want to get ahead of this curve you are going to have to become a "Cyborg".
4: A Lot of Volcanoes go off.
These things are huge trouble, we do not live on a nice stable solid planet, it is mostly molten rock and iron and it probably has a nuclear reactor in the center of it, that keeps it hot.
We`re like on these life rafts, floating over all this molten rock. Earth`s crust is so constantly folding in on itself, that we cannot find a stone on the surface of the Earth, that is as old as the planet.
98 percent of all the species on Earth have gone extinct and volcanoes are the biggest reason why. Of the 11 biggest extinctions, four were caused by volcanoes.
A new study that likes the Late Triassic extinction of volcanic eruptions and outflows, a new study links this amazing extinction of life, "95 percent" of life on Earth to volcanoes, that essentially stretched and all went off at the same time, essentially stretched from what was then or what is now "New Jersey" to what is now "Morocco".
In our past Earth has opende up many times and flowed out for centuries, "India" is an outflow of volcanism. Volcanic activity fills our sky, with soot and hot ash and berries every living thing and blocks the Sun for so many summers the plants on land and the plankton in the sea die and when they die, we die.
Volcanoes can also produce so much carbon dioxide that they will massively warm the planet and create a runaway greenhouse effect, which is the opposite of what we ofetn expect from them.
In Holland they grow most of their food in greenhouses with synthetic light 24 hours a day, we can do that.
When I was putting this together, I just had this weird idea, I went to Amazon, I look to see how much they were and how good they are.
Gas maske are the cheapest insurance you can buy, they don`t take up much space and they get you though a lot of hard times and finally, the ultimate solution to living on a planet like ours, which really is unstable and will not last forever and four and a half billion years, the Sun will take us in.
Our species will eventually die if we do not colonize other planets in other solar systems.
3: Runaway Greenhouse (or an Ecosystem Collapse)
The greenhouse effect, I just talk about that a little or an ecosystem collapse.
No surprise we`re heating up, in 1990 the mean atmospheric temperature on Earth was 14.5 degrees centigrade, in 23 years we`ve gone up 3/4 of a degree.
Never in the history of this planet, we know from ice cores has carbon dioxide risen so fast, when we get to 16.5 degrees, that`s one and a quarter degrees from where are, we will lose control of our climate or let me put it a different way, it will become extremely unpredictable.
Every major extinction in Earth`s history has been characterized by rapid increases in co2 and we`re now in an unprecedented period of increases in co2.
Normally the atmosphere releases about 10 percent of the heat, we get from the Sun, but as we heat up, more and more water turns to vapor more global warming methane and other gases are released from the Norther and Southern permafrost at some point the Earth works like a greenhouse gets into a feedback loop that eventually will turn us into "Venus", where the average daytime temperature is 900 degrees Fahrenheit.
At the same time we`re witnessing a huge extinction cycle in the next 25 years, we will lose 25 percent of all species in the "Hawaiian Islands" alone.
We`re devastating our oceans by overfishing them and we`re killing our coral reefs with heat. Somewhere in the Amazon rainforest is what I like to call a marginal tree.
We keep cutting down oxygen producing and someday when we get to that marginal tree, we will see the beginning of the collapse of our oxygen ecosystem.
We are still asleep at the wheel, global warming is an emergency it`s almost incomprehensble, how much co2 we have to stop putting in the air in the next 10 years to stop this process and we need to prioritize the animals and the amount of nature we`re trying to save, we can`t save it all, we need to save the species that help us the most.
2: Nuclear War Breaks Out
Computers will be smarter than us, in 20 years, you know this stuff, you know that "Deep Blue" can play chess better than anyone on the face of the Earth and you know that the Google Car can drive itself better than you can drive it.
It`s "Hasta la Vista, Time", time to wake up and smell a silicon, if you want to get ahead of this curve you are going to have to become a "Cyborg".
4: A Lot of Volcanoes go off.
These things are huge trouble, we do not live on a nice stable solid planet, it is mostly molten rock and iron and it probably has a nuclear reactor in the center of it, that keeps it hot.
We`re like on these life rafts, floating over all this molten rock. Earth`s crust is so constantly folding in on itself, that we cannot find a stone on the surface of the Earth, that is as old as the planet.
98 percent of all the species on Earth have gone extinct and volcanoes are the biggest reason why. Of the 11 biggest extinctions, four were caused by volcanoes.
A new study that likes the Late Triassic extinction of volcanic eruptions and outflows, a new study links this amazing extinction of life, "95 percent" of life on Earth to volcanoes, that essentially stretched and all went off at the same time, essentially stretched from what was then or what is now "New Jersey" to what is now "Morocco".
In our past Earth has opende up many times and flowed out for centuries, "India" is an outflow of volcanism. Volcanic activity fills our sky, with soot and hot ash and berries every living thing and blocks the Sun for so many summers the plants on land and the plankton in the sea die and when they die, we die.
Volcanoes can also produce so much carbon dioxide that they will massively warm the planet and create a runaway greenhouse effect, which is the opposite of what we ofetn expect from them.
In Holland they grow most of their food in greenhouses with synthetic light 24 hours a day, we can do that.
When I was putting this together, I just had this weird idea, I went to Amazon, I look to see how much they were and how good they are.
Gas maske are the cheapest insurance you can buy, they don`t take up much space and they get you though a lot of hard times and finally, the ultimate solution to living on a planet like ours, which really is unstable and will not last forever and four and a half billion years, the Sun will take us in.
Our species will eventually die if we do not colonize other planets in other solar systems.
3: Runaway Greenhouse (or an Ecosystem Collapse)
The greenhouse effect, I just talk about that a little or an ecosystem collapse.
No surprise we`re heating up, in 1990 the mean atmospheric temperature on Earth was 14.5 degrees centigrade, in 23 years we`ve gone up 3/4 of a degree.
Never in the history of this planet, we know from ice cores has carbon dioxide risen so fast, when we get to 16.5 degrees, that`s one and a quarter degrees from where are, we will lose control of our climate or let me put it a different way, it will become extremely unpredictable.
Every major extinction in Earth`s history has been characterized by rapid increases in co2 and we`re now in an unprecedented period of increases in co2.
Normally the atmosphere releases about 10 percent of the heat, we get from the Sun, but as we heat up, more and more water turns to vapor more global warming methane and other gases are released from the Norther and Southern permafrost at some point the Earth works like a greenhouse gets into a feedback loop that eventually will turn us into "Venus", where the average daytime temperature is 900 degrees Fahrenheit.
At the same time we`re witnessing a huge extinction cycle in the next 25 years, we will lose 25 percent of all species in the "Hawaiian Islands" alone.
We`re devastating our oceans by overfishing them and we`re killing our coral reefs with heat. Somewhere in the Amazon rainforest is what I like to call a marginal tree.
We keep cutting down oxygen producing and someday when we get to that marginal tree, we will see the beginning of the collapse of our oxygen ecosystem.
We are still asleep at the wheel, global warming is an emergency it`s almost incomprehensble, how much co2 we have to stop putting in the air in the next 10 years to stop this process and we need to prioritize the animals and the amount of nature we`re trying to save, we can`t save it all, we need to save the species that help us the most.
2: Nuclear War Breaks Out
This is interesting because 11 years ago this wasn`t even on my radar screen, because I don`t think nuclear war was any kind of significant threat.
There`s a good reason every major nation in the world wants to keep "Iran" from getting the bomb, but there`s a larger reason that`s really out of our control, both "India" and "Pakistan" have more than 100 weapons each, far more than enough to create a nuclear winter which will kill us all.
They have fought three wars since 1947 and "India" is developing a nuclear submarine fleet, so it can fire its missiles from anywhere.
President Obama has spoken about this idea, it makes tremendous sense and there`s, a huge rap against anti-missile systems, because if we use it and we knock down everybody else`s missiles, then we`re left with all the good missiles.
Part of the reason to this problem or part of the answer to this problem may be to develop anti missile technology cooperatively with many many other nations and place them where they are needed.
You have to fire an anti missile 30 seconds after a missile with a warhead on it is fired so that it catches it before it`s on the downward curve in space.
1: We cross paths with a realy big asteroid.
There`s a good reason every major nation in the world wants to keep "Iran" from getting the bomb, but there`s a larger reason that`s really out of our control, both "India" and "Pakistan" have more than 100 weapons each, far more than enough to create a nuclear winter which will kill us all.
They have fought three wars since 1947 and "India" is developing a nuclear submarine fleet, so it can fire its missiles from anywhere.
President Obama has spoken about this idea, it makes tremendous sense and there`s, a huge rap against anti-missile systems, because if we use it and we knock down everybody else`s missiles, then we`re left with all the good missiles.
Part of the reason to this problem or part of the answer to this problem may be to develop anti missile technology cooperatively with many many other nations and place them where they are needed.
You have to fire an anti missile 30 seconds after a missile with a warhead on it is fired so that it catches it before it`s on the downward curve in space.
1: We cross paths with a realy big asteroid.
This is my favorite. Now there`s a possibility I`ve been worng about some of these things, the possibility some of these things won`t happen in the best sense of journalism, that is my disclaimer.
But I am NOT worng about this and this is what keeps me up at night, this is my passion.
Right now somewhere in space, maybe in the asteroid belt between "Mars" and "Jupiter" or farther out in "The Kuiper belt" of large objects that exist beyond "Neptune" there`s a missile with our name on it.
It could break out of it`s orbit tomorrow or not for a hundred thousand years, but its fate is sealed, and it will hit Earth, it has happened before many times.
The Earth is just as pockmarked as the Moon, with asteroid hits, its just that folding crust that we have, that`s hidden a lot of them and vegetation has covered a lot of it.
A large asteroid took out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago by creating shock waves and fire storms across this planet and created a sky so full of debris that summer did not return for at least a hundred years and maybe a thousand years.
Had humans been alive then, they would all have been wiped
out.
Here`s some hope, "433 Eros", this is a huge rock, it`s bigger than the one there took out the dinosaurs, this orbit in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
At some time in its future, it will shift from a Mars crossing orbit that it`s in now to an Earth crossing orbit, it will intersect with where our planet is.
It`s bigger than the asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs, but here`s where this thing gets interesting, we took this photo from a space probe that left the Earth in the year 2000.
A NASA probr that was designed to study asteroide and the spaceship settled into orbit around the asteroid, you can put a baseball in orbit around me, if you`re in space, there`s enough gravity.
When the mission ended, there was a little leftover fule, there was was a little leftover electricity and the mission controllers wasn`t part of the mission, they landed the spacecraft on "433 Eros" successfully.
And since then we have intercepted three comets in deep space, that move at twenty miles per second.
Stop and think about the implications of those missions, for the first time in human history, we have the ability to fly an into incoming asteroid and change its orbit, but only if we know it`s there and only if we have a rocket ready to go.
Most asteroids are found by amateurs when it`s too late to do anything. NASA is looking for bad guys in the asteroid belt and there are about 20.000 of them out there, but they can`t in "The Kuiper belt" it`s too far away and it has a hundred thousand objects in it, that is ten times bigger than the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs.
In only 20 years we have developed the technology to change our fate, we can intercept an asteroid and we can take it out of play.
One day you or your children or their children, will wake up and this news will be real, the headline on the front page of "The New York Times", "killer asteroid found on collision course with Earth".
What happens after that if we`re not prepared is really beyond horror, most humans will not die from the impact, most will die of starvation and the price of insurance to protect us from this , is what we spend on one B-2 bomber.
The asteroid problem is stupidly obvious, a physicist said almost a hundred years ago, there are two kinds of civilizations, those who can protect themselves from an asteroid impact and those who can`t.
We are the former, what are we waiting for.......!
But I am NOT worng about this and this is what keeps me up at night, this is my passion.
Right now somewhere in space, maybe in the asteroid belt between "Mars" and "Jupiter" or farther out in "The Kuiper belt" of large objects that exist beyond "Neptune" there`s a missile with our name on it.
It could break out of it`s orbit tomorrow or not for a hundred thousand years, but its fate is sealed, and it will hit Earth, it has happened before many times.
The Earth is just as pockmarked as the Moon, with asteroid hits, its just that folding crust that we have, that`s hidden a lot of them and vegetation has covered a lot of it.
A large asteroid took out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago by creating shock waves and fire storms across this planet and created a sky so full of debris that summer did not return for at least a hundred years and maybe a thousand years.
Had humans been alive then, they would all have been wiped
out.
Here`s some hope, "433 Eros", this is a huge rock, it`s bigger than the one there took out the dinosaurs, this orbit in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
At some time in its future, it will shift from a Mars crossing orbit that it`s in now to an Earth crossing orbit, it will intersect with where our planet is.
It`s bigger than the asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs, but here`s where this thing gets interesting, we took this photo from a space probe that left the Earth in the year 2000.
A NASA probr that was designed to study asteroide and the spaceship settled into orbit around the asteroid, you can put a baseball in orbit around me, if you`re in space, there`s enough gravity.
When the mission ended, there was a little leftover fule, there was was a little leftover electricity and the mission controllers wasn`t part of the mission, they landed the spacecraft on "433 Eros" successfully.
And since then we have intercepted three comets in deep space, that move at twenty miles per second.
Stop and think about the implications of those missions, for the first time in human history, we have the ability to fly an into incoming asteroid and change its orbit, but only if we know it`s there and only if we have a rocket ready to go.
Most asteroids are found by amateurs when it`s too late to do anything. NASA is looking for bad guys in the asteroid belt and there are about 20.000 of them out there, but they can`t in "The Kuiper belt" it`s too far away and it has a hundred thousand objects in it, that is ten times bigger than the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs.
In only 20 years we have developed the technology to change our fate, we can intercept an asteroid and we can take it out of play.
One day you or your children or their children, will wake up and this news will be real, the headline on the front page of "The New York Times", "killer asteroid found on collision course with Earth".
What happens after that if we`re not prepared is really beyond horror, most humans will not die from the impact, most will die of starvation and the price of insurance to protect us from this , is what we spend on one B-2 bomber.
The asteroid problem is stupidly obvious, a physicist said almost a hundred years ago, there are two kinds of civilizations, those who can protect themselves from an asteroid impact and those who can`t.
We are the former, what are we waiting for.......!
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