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Sunday, July 27, 2014

The End of the World

The End of the World

There have been five mass extinctions in the history of the Earth, and many scientists are saying we are in the midst of the sixth.  The worst one, 250 million years ago, 96 percent of ocean life and 70 percent of land life perished. What can we expect from mass extinction number six? We  would prefer not to find out.

Climate change is real. It is being caused by human beings.  As we burn carbon more and more greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere. On average, Earth’s temperature has been rising steadily since the Industrial Revolution unleashed our carbon-burning frenzy, resulting in a slow-moving train wreck. The hottest years in recorded history have occurred in the last decade. The Arctic ice cap is melting releasing more greenhouse gases, the great glacier above Greenland is thinning, both with disconcerting and unexpected speed. The oceans are distinctly more acid and their level is rising. The greatest storms on our planet, hurricanes and cyclones, have become more powerful. The great rain forest of the Amazon is drying on its margins. The great boreal forest of North America is dying in a matter of years.

Many environmentalists think we have already passed the point of no return. Once we pass a certain threshold, Earth will continue warming even if we do manage to cut our CO2 emissions. What we do know is that, if we don’t begin reducing the amount of CO2 we are releasing into the air, and at least minimize the damage, a planet-wide disaster is assured.

 Human activity is responsible for massive extinctions of countless species on Planet Earth. The current extinction rate is now approaching 1,000 times the background rate what would be considered the normal rate of extinction and may climb to 10,000 times the background rate during the next century, if present trends continue resulting in a loss that would easily equal those of past extinctions. This rapid extinction is therefore likely to precipitate collapses of ecosystems at a global scale. This is predicted to create large-scale agricultural problems, threatening food supplies to hundreds of millions of people. This ecological prediction does not take into consideration the effects of global warming which will further aggravate the situation.  When there is a sudden mass extinction of many species, a chain reaction can cause catastrophic results.
Bees are dying due to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). One of every three bites of food eaten worldwide depends on pollinators, especially bees, for a successful harvest. As many as 50% of the hives in the United States and Europe have collapsed in the past 10 years. The suspect in bee deaths is a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids, pesticides used on a massive scale in commercial farming. It is believed the chemicals impair the bees’ sense of direction, preventing them from returning to the hive. With reduced pollen in the hive, fewer queen bees are produced, and eventually the colonies collapse. Bees aren’t the only pollinators dying off. Bats are too as a result of deforestation, habitat destruction and hunting, combined with a fatal fungal disease spreading among the bat population called White Nose Syndrome. Besides contributing to the pollination crisis, the dwindling bat population brings about another possible human extinction scenario. As their habitats are destroyed, bats are increasingly crossing paths with the human population, in search of food and shelter. With bats come bat viruses. It's very easy to see how pathogens can jump from animals to humans. Every year, on average, five new infectious diseases pop up, and about 75% of these new diseases come from animals. It is already suspected that human killers like Ebola emerged from the bat population.
New diseases emerge every year.  Some have the potential to devastate the population. In 1918, a strain of influenza spread worldwide and killed between 20 and 50 million people—more than were killed in all of World War I. In the past several years, diseases like SARS have come close to igniting into worldwide pandemics, and it is not at all inconceivable that, in our airplane-riding, interconnected world, some other virus could arrive on the scene with the virulence and transmissibility to decimate, if not destroy, the human population. It is not in the interests of a virus to kill all of its hosts, so a virus is unlikely to wipe out the human race but it could cause a serious setback for a number of years. It is not hard to imagine a scenario where resulting acute food shortages bring on mass starvation, war and human extinction. We can never be completely prepared for what nature will do: nature is the ultimate bio-terrorist.

To be sure there are plenty of run-of-the-mill terrorists who all hope to get their hands on is a weapon of mass destruction like a nuclear bomb or a vial of smallpox virus. Today's society is more vulnerable to terrorism because it is easier for a malevolent group to get hold of the necessary materials, technology and expertise to make weapons of mass destruction. The most likely cause of large scale, mass-casualty terrorism right now is from a chemical or biological weapon.The large-scale release of something like anthrax, the smallpox virus, or the plague, would have a huge effect, and modern communications would quickly make it become a trans-national problem. There is a very high probability that a major attack will occur somewhere in the world, within our lifetimes. The availability to terrorists of nuclear weapons seems only a matter of when and not if.

We program more and more intelligence into our computers, exponentially increasing their capabilities every year, it is only a matter of time before they are smarter than we are. Already we entrust computers to run the stock market and land our planes. In development are robots that look like us, talk like us and recognize our facial movements. How long before they are us, as we download our thoughts and memories into our hard drives, the so-called “singularity”? How long before these machines are self-aware? Computers, it is claimed, will be as smart as us by 2029, and by 2045 will be billions of times smarter than us. What then? Will they decide we are superfluous? The danger is real that super-computers could develop intelligence and take over the world.

These doomsday scenarios, of course do not include such natural catastrophes as the super volcano or an asteroid impact!

Adapted from here 

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