The Apocalypse?

What’s on the cards?

“But of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only.”

The Last Judgement (the Apocalypse).
(Michelangelo, Roma, Capella Sistina)

In the late 1990s, a Russian astrologer foretold, among other catastrophes, that New-York would suffer severe terrorist attacks at the turn of the century. I dismissed them as hearsay or a would-be seer's gibberish at the time, but on 11/S it immediately sprung to mind. Another of his prophecies of doom and the only one I remember, which I now regret, was that UK was going to sink into the ocean some time before 2050.

Species that can't keep its number in balance is doomed to die out due to starvation when it destroys its habitat, in the animal world predators are key to population control, humans are supposed to know better.

Personally, I don’t believe in exact dates (or I don’t want to), instead catastrophes are more likely to strike when we least expect them. Mind that they even seldom forecast weather properly much further ahead than a week.

What could trigger the Apocalypse?

 Solar wind.
(The Apocalypse?)

Cataclysmic pole shift is one of the hypotheses that are very much in the vogue these days, although it shouldn’t be muddled up with geomagnetic reversal, the periodic reversal of the Earth's magnetic field (switching the north and south magnetic poles), since the term is sometimes used for both phenomena, which is beyond my ken. Pole shift is also called crustal displacement (picture yourself sliding from, say, Arctic zone to the tropics in a couple of hours without using any means of transport together with your home and landscape, but hardly in one piece). The geographic poles of the Earth are the points on the surface of the planet that are “pierced” by the axis of rotation. A sudden change in position of these “points” with respect to the underlying surface is what the hypothesis refers to.

Geomagnetic reversal is considered more plausible by the scientific community than pole shift hypothesis. Small magnetic pole shifts take place every year, but a total one could leave the planet without any magnetic field at all and therefore without protection against solar radiation for some time, enough for the atmosphere to fly away — which means all life on the Earth would be scorched or choke to death, although the exact order is open to discussion.

Meteorite hitting the Earth.
(Armageddon?)

Magnetic reversal could be produced by the inner mantle and outer core changing direction or stopping its flow, but what would make them? There isn’t much scientific evidence to support these theories apart from the whole-frozen well-preserved bodies of a mammoth and rhino with fresh tropical fruits in their stomachs found in Siberia. We can also dread the prospect of black holes sucking up matter, the Earth’s cooling, impacts of asteroids or huge meteorites and the like — a wide range of bogeys to put us off real problems, unless there are some signs that I haven’t heard about.

A bunch of boffins smashing particles to create minuscule black holes in Hadron Collider (SERN) could be considered a bad sign? On its website expert wiseacres say openly they are looking forward to creating small black holes, which would prove the existence of multiple dimensions and, therefore, universes. No mention of how that would justify $600,000,000 of taxpayers’ money and how much would seep back into their pockets. ‘The results of such experiments are totally unpredictable at the moment.’ The word “unpredictable” is a telling example of how large are the leaps of faith science geeks are taking to justify their salaries.

‘But the chance of planetary annihilation by this means "is totally miniscule," experimental physicist Greg Landsberg at Brown University in Providence, R.I. told Live Science.

So there is a “minuscule” chance of messing it all up, he didn’t say “the chance is 0” for some reason by the same token even the most absurd theory has an infinitesimal chance of proving true. For my money, if any apocalyptic cataclysm is going to happen it’ll be almost certainly of our own making, to put it more exactly, we’ll owe it to the scientists who brought this planet to the brink of disaster by providing the necessary tools for greedy plunderers.

Hadron Collider

 To think that we know anything for certain is pure hubris, which will probably be our downfall as a species.

 The question isn’t whether to trust or not, but to what extent, nor what margin of error to allow, but that it simply exists.
A 100% certainty is for God alone.

Supernova blowing the Earth up.
(The Apocalypse?)

There are crackpots that can’t think of a better way of spicing up their otherwise boring lives than worrying about the explosion of the Sun in a massive super-nova, the fact that it’s going to happen million years or so from now and we’ll have long since become extinct by then doesn’t seem to allay their fear.

For the lovers of mysteries, auguries and stuff, as well as astrology buffs there are Nostradamus' predictions, which are so encoded, scrambled, disordered, abstruse and obscure that nobody has ever managed to actually make any positive sense of them. His writings lend themselves to so many dubious interpretations, that I wouldn't lose any sleep over their meaning, I honestly believe their meaning is lost for ever. Even if we could decipher all the prophecies, we wouldn't be able to head any disaster off, so why take the trouble to worry about it?

Nostradamus

Mind that all his so-called fulfilled prophecies were matched to the events post factum, which belongs in the realm of sheer shoehorning! Well then, I could call myself a prophet, too, since I predicted, second-guessed or sensed certain events in my life with unsettling precision, as well as a couple of wars.

What use are the prophecies if we can't prevent them from happening? The biblical Apocalypse is full of doom-laden prophecies, but so far nobody has found a clue as to what events it might refer to.

Did they avoid the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger, the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11/01 etc?

It's not the prophecies, but contamination with all its attendant dangers that is really a good reason to be horrified. In addition, civilization dependent on electricity as much as ours is always at risk. Solar storm strong enough would disrupt electrical supply with catastrophic or even apocalyptic consequences.

While past generations thought they lived in end-times, we are indeed much closer to Doomsday than ever, because technological progress has never posed a greater threat to life on this planet than today.

I’d have confidence in science if it were combined with wisdom, but as A. Einstein once put it  'Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal'.

There’s nothing more dangerous than intelligent fools. Even mainstream ideas should be broken down critically, just because a vast majority of people buy into them doesn’t mean they’re flawless (actually it's rather the other way round).

Beats me what use good scientific ideas are, if the bad ones are going to finish us off? 

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
The following products of human genius surely qualify as such:
DDT, Asbestos, feeding sick sheep to vegetarian cows later fed to people, military experiments in Chernobyl, Nukes, gender-bending chemicals, biological weapons, fossil combustibles, stuffing our food with hormones and antibiotics, and the list goes on. Although I highly doubt the victims of these brilliant inventions wouldn’t prefer them to have been nipped in the bud!

Very few things invented by science have really proved beneficial (and if they did, for whom?).

Admittedly, many theories work (Nukes work, but can we control them once they went off?), but that doesn’t mean we fully understand why. Newton’s theory, for instance, was thought to be complete for a long time, and the rest is history. New evidence eventually turns up to either confirm or debunk ideas.

One of the last brilliant ideas is to use space shuttles (with all the pollution every launch would suppose) to produce energy in the space (by placing solar panels on the Moon, for example) and then beam it back to earth. Some bright minds recklessly propose to tackle Global Warming by increasing aerosol pollution (Global Dimming).
That's along the lines of "the guillotine being the most efficient remedy for dandruff, headache and a bunch of other diseases". I wonder what mutations in their brain cells make them throw up such twisted ideas.

Admittedly, what seems faulty reasoning to some might look quite convincing to others. When asked how he hit on the idea of the relativity, Einstein said: ‘Everyone knew, I didn’t, that’s why I made a discovery.’

Some scientists now say that other scientists falsified the reports of rising temperatures, which smacks of professional rivalry and makes you wonder who is really pulling the strings.

Modern throwaway society goes by the principle ‘Après nous le deluge’. Throughout the 20th century we basically tried to eat our cake and have it, that is, to contaminate without suffering side effects. If we have a fairly good understanding of the current theories, how on earth have we ended up in this mess? What use is our expertise if it doesn’t stop us from destroying ourselves?

Tomorrow we’ll quite likely end up in a big Gas Chamber, because that’s what contamination is going to turn our planet into, and we’ll start to choke, unless we mutate into methane, CO2 etc breathing species. 

Mars, for sale soon!

Those who say we aren’t causing climate change probably have already built themselves houses on Mars or elsewhere. I thought I was kidding, but it turns out many corporations, businessmen, institutions, John Travolta and the like scramble for parcels of land on the Moon. The Lunar property company is raking it in issuing purchase documentation. Is it legal and what does it all mean? Is moon already colonised? Can you otherwise picture stingy millionaires throwing their money away? 1m² goes for $20. Quite a bargain! Hurry up!

Estates on Mars are up for grabs.

Humankind survived thousands of years without sophisticated technology and just in about 150 years this very technology brought us to the brink of disaster! Isn’t that paradoxical?! What was supposed to make our lives better is actually destroying us.

And now that we have come to know we are responsible for the harmful changes in our environment what measures are we going to take? Are we going to stop contaminating, using cars, planes etc, etc, etc? Nope, I’m afraid we can’t, even if we wanted to. We are trapped, forced into using modern technology and adopting modern lifestyle. One way or another we are all at fault.

So why would anyone waste their time thinking about an impending apocalyptic cataclysm? If it’s due to happen, it will anyway and there’s nothing we can do about it.

If knowledge is power and power corrupts, what can humanity do so as to survive?