Daniel Guevara
The End of the World: Are you Ready?
The end of the world; we all know it will happen eventually, after all nothing is eternal.
However, exactly how will it end? Some say alien invasion, others a zombie, robot, (insert
random noun here) apocalypse. But wait, before you run to the nearest hardware store and
buy yourself some tinfoil to fashion your anti-mind-control helmets you should know
something. While these might be possible, they are somewhat unlikely. There are far more
deadly (and credible) manners in which the world might end—natural disasters, things that are
inevitable and that man has no control over.
First up, is something that already scared us a bit this year—global pandemic. If swine
flu does not scare you, this one will. Scientists and doctors agree that it is only a matter of time
before a disease emerges that will spread so fast that it will leave us a daze. It will prove
resistant to anyway in which we might try to kill it. Today everyone is connected to each other
in some way. Just one person has to get it and it will be in every continent within a day and
from there it’s only a matter of days.
Next, is a Hollywood favorite—the meteor crash. Who can say that they have never
seen at least a TV show that involved the world being saved from a catastrophic collision?
Unlike in the movies, the worst thing that you could do is blow up the asteroid. The reason is
simple, you get more asteroids, and sure they are smaller, but they would still be one hundred
meters in diameter. The impact would create a crater hundreds of miles wide and would
literally boil the oceans. It would create an electromagnetic wave that within seconds would
wipe out all computers and power grids in the world. It would throw millions of tons of earth
into space then rain down as smaller asteroids. The smoke and dust raised by the impact would
block out the sun for years causing an ice-age and perpetual darkness.
Odds are that you have never heard of this last one and if you have then you provably
forgot about it. Gamma ray bursts are formed when a super massive star dies and explodes
emitting jets of deadly radiation from its poles. These beams carry ten quadrillion (that’s sixteen
zeros) times more energy than the sun emits. If one were to hit the Earth, our trusty magnetic
field would protect us from most of the deadly radiation, but at a hefty cost. Our atmosphere
would boil over destroying our ozone layer; you know that one layer of rare gas that people
used to think was unimportant until skin cancer showed up? UV rays will cook the surface of
the earth giving everyone instant sunburns and almost certain cancer. The radiation will kill the
plankton, the producers most of the world’s oxygen, along with most of the other life on earth.
All of the phenomena listed here have one thing in common, they all exist and their
arrival is inevitable. There is absolutely nothing we can do about the last one; and to top it all
off, there is a star with its axis pointed straight towards Earth. It could have already gone off
and we are completely oblivious to it.