Less than a Thousand Ways to Die

Some of the more sensationalized versions of global apocalypse that used to seem much more like science fiction than science have made recent resurgence into mainstream ideology and have more than just the alarmists on edge.  “Terminator” was a fun action, thriller-suspense film for generation that came of age in the 1980s.  However, with the development of ‘deep learning’ for computers and the advances in the auto-piloted drones of today, “Terminator” seems more like prophecy and less like fun.  Global warming evangelists, while bearing the less-than-good-news of greenhouse gases, may have forgotten the most significant impetus for immediate global climate change over the last few millennia – volcanic eruption.  Just look up the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora…and that was just one volcano.  Many astronomers who are more concerned with our cosmic backyard (i.e., the solar system) than with galaxies far, far away, note that there is almost certainly a meteor in our very solar system, likely in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter or in the Kuyper belt beyond Neptune, that has Earth’s mailing address stamped all over it.  But as the world advances in technology, and becomes more and more dependent on it for mere survival, I’m afraid the disruption of this fiber optic network would be far more detrimental than any humanoid nefarious robots, with or without Will Smith and the Governator.  Solar flares do serve a threat, but a rather small one; however, coronal mass ejections, each much larger than the earth itself, serve a real one.  While the probability is low – picture a beach ball at midfield in a stadium and a bee-bee swirling around the edge of the stadium for a gross estimate of proportions and likelihood of ejection from the former contacting the latter for an earth-sun system reference – the actualization of that probability would be more than devastating.  In 1859, a coronal mass ejection from the sun barely clipped earth and the new wires of the Trans-Atlantic cable, only about a year old, fried, shocked operators and fires broke out all over relay stations.  Imagine the destruction with the ubiquity of wires and, cables, transformers (the ones on telephone poles, not the ‘Autobot’ kind), and relay stations now…and yes, the internet does not exist on some ethereal ‘cloud’ without wires and fiber optics – there are entire buildings dedicated to housing these massive networks of wires (a map of “subterranean, submarine internet cables” will reveal this).  Whether this makes 2 Peter 3:10 (“But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.”) more or less imaginable is not the point.  The point comes one verse later (“Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives”), not to mention, feasibility is not the litmus test for actuality.