150,000,000 crabs swarm slowly onto Christmas Island. When their eggs hatch simultaneously, there could be as many as 75,000,000,000,000 of them. They walk slowly, but… man…
Ya gotta wonder if they have enough sentience to know, even close to ballpark, how many of them there actually are. My hope is that they don’t.
Christmas Island Red Crabs - Amazing videos are here
In another not-so-shocking proof that pollution can really mess up a species, scientists have shown DNA damage and mutation in mice can be caused by polluted air. This is one of those experiments that just didn’t need to happen, much as it may be nice to confirm the point from time to time.
See the scoop here.
The latest in “the oil’s REALLY running out and there’s nothing we can really do about it since we’re jackasses and let it get this bad and now emerging economies are tipping the balance towards destruction” news here.
Extra! Extra! The oil business is full of greedy, morally vacuous weasels who are going to destroy us all. What? You already knew? Well then, how about an account of all of the back room deals, willful and criminal ignorance of environmental consequences and the insane lengths to which people are willing to go in order not to give up the hydrocarbon dream. If that sounds like something that tickles your fancy, I highly recommend reading William Marsden’s Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (and Doesn’t Seem to Care)
Know your enemy!
If an asteroid was on course to hit Earth, one of the best things to know, apparently, would be its composition. The strategy for dealing with it can change depending on what it’s made of. My guess is that it comes down to just how solid and strong it is, and thus how severe the measures taken have to be.
Read some more about it here.
I don’t like being watched. While it’s classic paranoid behaviour to think you are being watched, recent evidence has led me to think that I am, in some capacity. In bleak future world scenarios, the Big Brother scenes typically come up. Those with the means finding ways to track and watch us all, keeping tabs, keeping control… As technology advances, I like to keep an eye on who wields it most. I’m cautious, what can I say? I embrace technology, but I do fear it. Technological leaps are leaps worth making - carefully. So… what happened?
I spoke to a friend of mine recently, who told me that she had found a “siamese mushroom”. I thought that sounded kinda nifty. “Siamese mushroom.” I like to build web sites. After some good cognitive wiring, a radar now goes off in my head whenever I hear a domain-nameable phrase or expression. Siamese mushroom set off that alarm. I checked Moniker when I got home, and it was available. Hooray! I figured I’d wait a little bit and decide whether or not to buy. As with anything else, impulse is not a good reason to spend money.
Today is about a week later. I’m at work. While thinking about domain names, siamesemushroom.com popped into my head again. I realized that I liked it, and didn’t want to forget it, so I sent myself a Gmail, as I often do, for note-taking purposes. Subject heading: Domain Name Idea. Body: www.siamesemushroom.com. Maybe I’ll buy it when I get home, I thought.
I messaged my wife using MSN Messenger, asking her what she thought. She agreed that it sounded kinda funky, giving me the greenish light to go buy. Then, a couple of minutes later, she messaged me again:
“It’s a fake site. Link list.”
I checked the URL, and saw what’s there now. One of those waste of webspace piece of junk linkfarms, the scourge of any genuine domain name collector (for the record, I don’t have very many – I just appreciate, enjoy, and use them). How strange, I thought. I checked the whois info, and voilà! Bought today.
Today! Never mind the odds of searching whois info on the day a domain name is bought, but a day when I e-mailed the exact URL to myself? Memories of “Google’s getting creepy” articles flood back into consciousness. Don’t worry about the ads that pull keywords from your e-mail, they say. No one’s reading them, they say. I’m familiar enough with Google’s ad tools to know that it makes sense, but clearly this isn’t normal. I know this isn’t exactly a major incident, but it’s most certainly noteworthy.
What am I missing? Is there a hole somewhere? I’ve never searched the .com itself in Google, to avoid clicking on someone’s site and my search ending up appearing in their tracking info, just in case. Either something’s up with Moniker, MSN messenger, or Gmail (or my wife e-mailed her secret contact in the Caribbean, who bought it before I could). If this is somehow my fault, I’d like to know, and so should everyone else who operates at all like I do. I’m not suggesting that a domain name coincidence is evidence of the technologically dominant group tracking us in order to take us over and rule the planet, but I find the circumstances most certainly steps in the wrong direction. At a minimum, it’s a relevant, practical nuisance. Any thoughts? Other than that I should stop blogging and get back to work.
If we’re concerned for our long-term survival, we should pay attention to all other instances of extinctions, past and present, and take notes. Whether plague monkeys that remind us of ourselves through their faces and genetic similarity, or dinosaurs with whom we’re connected as far as planetary domination, we’d be wise to acknowledge fragility, and humble ourselves in cautious preparation.
The general consensus is that an asteroid crash wiped out the dinosaurs. How unlikely was that? Well, a 100m asteroid hits the planet every century or so. The one that hit the dinosaurs was a lot bigger, sure, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen again. So what are we thinking of doing if we look up and see one coming straight for us? Well, we won’t blow it to smithereens, since that’ll just mean a load of chunks smashing into us anyway. The current plan of a team of Scottish scientists is to use an appropriate number of spacecraft (depending on the size of the rock) coordinating equally many mirrors to redirect beams of sunlight at it on a concentrated spot to heat it thousands of degrees and knock it off course.
I feel like this was figured out by the children of the Cold War scientists who considered using live chickens to regulate temperature in nuclear land mines. If an asteroid is going to smash into us eventually, I hope it’s once this technology is fully operational and no better (read: sane) solution has been proposed. I’d really love to see this tried. That is the draw of end of the world scenarios, after all. Ludicrous reality entertainment on the most massive scale. Not that I’m itching for it to happen, but it’s the ultimate opportunity for narrative there can really be, is it not?
Read more about it here.
What a strange sort of species we are. As all others got bigger teeth, sharper claws, and quicker strides, we managed to tool our way out of the natural reject pile, in turn usurping the top spot of the predatory chain through a cognitive back door. How fitting, then, for our string-tied stones and sticks to themselves evolve to such beasts of devices, able to crater mountains at the push of a button. Like an animal enlarging its own teeth, sharpening its own claws, we have actively re-endowed our own ferocity, so much as to exceed the scope of possible targets. I dare say an animal that could claw the world in two so fairly might.
This is, indeed, where we stand. Majestic creatures that need to be mindful of the animal types that would otherwise tremble and disappear in their newly natural wake. The only classes we tend to intentionally eliminate include the pestilent, and the human, for whom we invented the bulk of our weaponry. Yes, one human may actively prime the harpoon and willfully slaughter every bit of a shark, but the human masses typically do not aim to destroy the shark masses in their entirety, as much as the same actions define both. The fishman wants to both do his job, and keep it, after all. That is the crux of the short-term versus long-term, individual versus collective matrix. Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and eventually, nobody eats.
Collective behaviour is uncontrolled momentum. It can move so slowly, a potentially defective lumbering in fact concealing the ideas and actions that gain in strength, gaining until reaching such a size and speed as to become finally visible and heavily problematic. We are all people without whom the collective entity would not exist, yet we are each near-powerless to drive it off course, like sentient drops in a crashing wave. Six billion handshakes at once and the world could otherwise change overnight.
How tragic, then, for death to sign the long fast one-way road. We began the push early and never relented, having helped along the extinction of species since we were Cro-Magnon. Times changed, and so did the weaponry, the type and lethality marking the nation and age. For us to have survived to this point on the Earthen time line, in bold wars world and cold, have we needed to develop the primary technologies that naturally evolved into planet-destroying arms? While free human hands guided the process at every interval and turn, it is not always that individual freedom that commands the course of history. However much free will you believe an individual to wield, the acts of the group are governed by markedly less. We may never have had a choice.
But was this point really inevitable? A past-looking science fiction mind can posit a possible today with gaps in our developed technological tree. But there is a degree of sequentiality in scientific development. Synchronous inventions, like the calculus of both Newton and Leibniz, underscore this point. As society busies, the minds at the intellectual fringe tinker on to the next available, and rewrite the world’s rules. The zeitgeist informs the hearts of the people and steers our compulsive drive towards progress, drives it off a cliff with an eventually floored, braking foot.
Evolution has a remarkably cunning side that humbles those that over-thrive. Perhaps this is a backup plan that levels uneven playing fields, just as a booming population inevitably stumbles into an equivocating famine. A predator is bones without prey. On a long enough time line, the capacity to destroy must always at least equal the capacity to create, mustn’t it? The balance of change requires the checked strength of the destructive.
If this fails to comfort you, consider that this storm cloud’s lining yields another, peculiar, bitter-sweet bookend: we have entered upon an age of realistic planetary annihilation at the pre-cusp of inter-planetary travel. How delightfully narrative for us to achieve the capacity to destroy our planet along with the capacity to leave it and potentially begin anew. We’re most certainly in the thick of it now. As much as the bookend may seem decidedly more bitter than sweet, it is the only way for us to stick around should our biosphere collapse, or should a once-unitary mass be reduced to continental dust by means of nuclear cluster or the like.
Could space travel have come first, or not at all, or is this critical band of total vulnerability a sequentially encoded phenomenon? Were technology to exist in another world, even with an entirely distinct foundation, could this general pressure point have necessarily come to pass after enough leaps in technological orders of magnitude? No human invented destruction, however much we may have glorified it. Indeed, perhaps the biggest obstacle for otherworldly life to overcome in finding us is the survival through this critical band. The absence of visitation is thus discouraging. Let us hope that our future is not written in the stars.
Have you been swimming in Lake Havasu? While the man-made body of water is similar to many others, it’s been the one in the news. Recently, bacteria there entered through a child’s nose and slowly ate at his brain until he died. Cases are rare on a global scale, but often enough to freak people right out locally, prompting some calls to close the lake. It affects children, predominantly. Think of them!
You start with a stiff neck. Maybe, you think, you pulled or strained something while swimming, or playing. You were thrashing about, after all. In fact, that’s how the bacteria got up your nose. It’s the bacteria causing the headaches, not staying out in the sun for too long. How else could you explain the fever?
Then you know something’s wrong. Your consciousness starts to get affected. You behave differently. You hallucinate. You experience the cognitive effects of your brain being eaten inside out, and then you die. The Naegleria Fowleri bacteria thrive in hotter climates, so our polluting effects might increase the number of cases just like this. See, it’s fun when one problem connects to another. Global warming, temperature up, bacteria thrive, brains get eaten. Who knows wherein lies the first link of the destructive chain that wipes out the planet.
Twenty-three died from the bacteria from 1995 to 2004, but six died in the past year. What to do in the meantime? Keep water from going up your nose. And keep your pool clean. Not kidding with either of those.
See the rest in the original article.
The most common type of gorilla is on the verge of extinction. This is only partly because of massive amounts of poaching. The main culprit? Ebola. Remember Ebola? In its peak, it was the trendiest pandemic threat in town. Endearing phrases like “plague monkey” and “flesh-eating disease” were really coined for the first time. Then Outbreak went from the New Release section to the regular movie section, and we forgot all about it. Maybe witnessing our closest biological relative self-eaten into inexistence will remind us. Don’t try to wash your hands: it’s airborne!
Check out the original article.
So never mind the illness from space that the people of Peru had to endure. New scientific evidence gives us the lowdown on bugs in space. Apparently, Salmonella typhimurium bacterial bugs mutate, thrive, and get worse amongst the stars. Researchers noticed that mice were three times as likely to die from the new variations.
Good to know that even if we manage to get away from this planet before it’s completely ruined, we can still all die from sicknesses that actually work better off the planet.
Read more here.
There are the one-shot doozies that annihilate us overnight (like a comet), and there are the slow movers, the turtles of the apocalyptic world. The melting of icecaps is one of the latter. Bit by bit, ice melts, sea levels rise, and eventually tangible problems develop, magnify, and cascade into other catastrophes, and we all die. The problem with the apocalyptic turtles is that once the problem is noted in the (relatively) early stages, it’s hard to turn into a fresh headline, however pertinent the call to action may still be.
“In other news, ice caps are, well, still melting.” And? The same news, however bad or important, is no news. That’s why people jump all over occasions when something actually does change.
Recently, some satellite photos were taken across northern Canada, Alaska, and Greenland. Apparently, enough ice has melted that a new waterway has opened up, although it may not be fully operational as a shipping lane for quite some time.
See? There’s a reason for a headline if I ever saw one. What an opportunity! I love global catastrophes with a positive spin. A melting country and rising sea levels… a new waterway! Seafarers rejoice.
The original article can be found here.
On September 17th, a meteorite crashed near a village in Peru. As if the thought of large chunks of space rock smashing into your neighborhood wasn’t enough to scare you, the thing is emitting toxic fumes that are hospitalizing people, inducing vomiting and headaches.
This straight-out-of-bad-science-fiction scenario’s still in the mystery stage, so even though the numbers affected are minimal so far, we can always imagine the worst. Here we are, betting on a massive comet slamming us into a dino-legacy, and the bloody thing’s got the nerve to bring along a mysterious illness. It’s that insult to injury overkill, like Superman being able to shoot molten-hot laser beams from his eyes even though he’s already got incalculable strength and speed, and is indestructible. Unless, of course, Kryptonite falls from space and lands near him and he gets sick and barfs. Hmm. Don’t trust space rock.
Here’s the original story.
Hello everyone.
We’ve all seen the headlines: hair-trigger nuke wielders, flesh-peeling diseases, environmental catastrophes, astronomical threats… we fear them, but are equally fascinated by them. For thousands of years, we’ve been interested in (and ambitious in bringing about) our end, in the most massive and final sense.
This blog explores the many ends we may face, and our culture as apocalypse-awaiters. We’ll keep an eye on the headlines for the latest best-bets, and on the history books for looks at the doomsayers of the past. Speaking of books, expect end of the world book reviews. Movie reviews, too. Following this stuff is sick, in a way, but it sure is fun, too.
Hope you enjoy it!
