Media we love: The Doomsday Guide
Kelly Kizer Whitt recommends The Doomsday Guide
In The Doomsday Book, Marshall Mind, the creator of HowStuffWorks.com, presents us with 25 situations that would destroy a metropolis, nation or the world. He divides his guide into three elements: man-made disasters, pure disasters and science fiction made actual.
Mind eases into the catastrophes to come back with a unusual state of affairs that he calls “Splitting the US in Half”. It particulars a scenario I’d by no means head of earlier than. In Montana is a lake referred to as Ft. Peck held again by an enormous earthen dam. He explains how, if the dam failed, the water speeding downstream would take out one dam after one other till an incredible wall of water would wash away Kansas Metropolis, amongst others, earlier than discovering its strategy to the Gulf of Mexico. The mass of water would wipe out all of the bridges and prepare trestles, chopping the western half of the US off from the japanese half.
For each state of affairs, Mind critiques the science behind it and doable preventions, when there are any. Among the different subjects in man-made disasters embody EMP assaults, runaway world warming, pandemics and organic assaults, and the opioid disaster.
Pure disasters
Then Mind strikes onto pure disasters, the type you’ve seen in epic and not-so-epic catastrophe motion pictures. Among the many subjects are asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes, earthquakes, supertsunamis, coronal mass ejections, hurricanes and extra. The ocean acidification chapter felt particularly prescient as I learn it within the spring of 2023. Sea-surface temperatures have shot to record highs the previous couple months. About 1/3 of the carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels dissolves within the ocean. The carbonic acid created makes the oceans extra acidic, and an ocean pH of 7.8 could be the tipping level to trigger an enormous die-off of marine life. Because the guide states:
At the least 50% of the oxygen within the Earth’s environment comes from plankton and algae within the ocean. If we permit ocean acidification to kill off the plankton, the scenario might grow to be dire for people and different land animals when oxygen ranges within the environment decline.
Science fiction made actual
Within the last part, science fiction made actual, Mind examines a robotic takeover, alien invasion and grey goo. However my favourite subject (when you can say that about Doomsday situations) was the Relativistic Kill Automobile (RKV).
In case you, too, had by no means heard of this idea earlier than, right here’s a fast overview. An alien civilization shoots an object towards us at close to the velocity of sunshine. The car doesn’t even need to be giant. An object only a foot or two in diameter transferring at simply half the velocity of sunshine (93,000 miles per second) could be disastrous. So, for instance, a baseball transferring at that velocity would have the kinetic vitality of 25 occasions the Hiroshima bomb. A RKV the scale of a phone pole (30 toes by 1 foot) and product of uranium touring at that very same velocity would have the vitality of 9 million Hiroshima bombs.
After all, the aliens must be fairly good at math to shoot an object from a fantastic distance at a small, transferring object (Earth). Only for enjoyable I regarded into our personal space probes to see in the event that they may very well be RKVs for different planets they encounter. Voyager 1, the faster of the 2 Voyager spacecraft, is presently transferring at about 10 miles per second. So, whereas extremely quick (and damaging if it hit someplace), possibly not within the vary of an RKV.
Backside line: On this installment of Media we love, EarthSky editor Kelly Kizer Whitt recommends The Doomsday Guide.