Today Popular Science has a list of 12 ways the world could end in 2012 (Hat Tip: Instapundit). Forget the Mayans, here's 12 actual, scientific ways we could all be in a lot of trouble (according to PS).
1) Asteroid Impact. That would take an asteroid about one mile across to destroy civilization and make humans extinct, according to PS. There just doesn't seem to be any asteroids that size in the neighborhood after NASA searched for them. But even a small asteroid, say the 300-yard-wide asteroid called 99942 Apophis that is going to have a very near pass by Earth in 2029, if it hit a city, could kill millions.
2) Pandemic. Some new strain of the flu that is very deadly and very contagious emerges. Or something nasty comes out of the jungles of the tropics (like HIV) that is very deadly and very contagious. And it doesn't have to kill everyone. Just take out, oh 200 million and civilization would be in trouble.
3) The Rise of the Machines. I still have trouble thinking we can make machines that are dangerous to us. All we have to do is include a line of code that says "if someone says 'klaatu barada nikto' to you, shut down." But the machine doesn't have to be a terminator that wants to kill humans:
"A malign neglect would be a bigger problem. You get something that's very intelligent but has motivations that are completely nonhuman. [The computer] might not really care about anything that we care about, but since it's smarter, it's going to get what it wants."
And if it wants water, air, oil, and takes it . . .
4) Gamma Ray Bursters. Much more worry some (in my opinion) than machines is astronomical events, such as gamma ray bursters (GRB) which happen when some massive stars die. If one happens within 3,000 light years of Earth, we could all be fried by the radiation. The good news, most galaxies only have them about once every 10 million years.
5) Brrrrrrrrr. A nuclear war or supervolcano eruption (see #8) could cause enough debris to be in the atmosphere to cool the planet significantly. And if it gets cold enough, all the ice and snow would reflect sunlight back into space, leaving the planet in equilibrium at a nice 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Apparently this has happened before and life only survived in volcanic-warmed areas. And we are over-due for another ice age.
6) Ocean Acidification. The ocean is normally basic (pH higher than 7.0, think back to your high school chemistry). When environmentalists use scary terms like "ocean acidification" they mean a slight drop in its alkalinity. For ocean acidification to threaten humans, it would have to kill the oxygen-producing plankton. And no one sees that happening. So I don't know why they even brought it up.
7) Solar Storm. Another astronomical event. The sun shoots out charged particles at the Earth (well, into space, Earth just happens to be in the way). A "storm" where a whole lot of these particles are shot at the planet could overwhelm the magnetosphere and cause widespread damage to our electrical infrastructure.
During the worst solar storm ever recorded, in 1859, the currents were so intense that telegraph lines burst into flames. "If we had a storm like that today, it would be possibly quite catastrophic," says Jeffrey Love, a geomagnetic researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey. "Months without electricity could cause losses of trillions of dollars and basically wreck the economy."
(An EMP with a nuke could also send a large portion of the planet back into the pre-electricity age. Iran has been training to unleash an EMP over the US.)
8) Supervolcano:
Two million years ago, a massive volcanic eruption near what is today Yellowstone National Park shot 600 cubic miles of dust and ash into the atmosphere—2400 times more than Mount St. Helens did in 1980.
So we are talking global cooling at worst (see #5), longer cold winters, shortened growing season, and disrupted air travel for years at best. Oh, and we're about 40,000 years over-due for such an eruption.
9) Geomagnetic Reversal. What the heck is that, you're asking? No, it's not when Romney changed positions after he decided to run for president.
Right now, the magnetic North Pole is up near the rotational north pole, but this hasn't always been the case. Throughout the earth's history, the north and south magnetic poles have swapped places, a phenomenon known as geomagnetic reversal. It happens irregularly, every 100,000 to 1 million years, and the last time they flipped was 780,000 years ago. So maybe we're due. Geophysicist J. Marvin Herndon has suggested that the reversal could cause the geomagnetic field to temporarily collapse, disrupting everything from power grids to gas pipelines to communications satellites.
The good news is, the "flip" would probably take 1,000 to 10,000 years. A blink of an eye geologically but a long time to mitigate the problem for humans.
10) Nuclear War. Well, Iran will probably have a nuke soon and China is building up their stocks of nuclear weapons and Russian is acting all tough and hegemony seeking. And it doesn't have to be a full out superpower nuclear exchange:
A study published in 2008 by the journal Physics Today suggests that a regional war involving as few as 100 bombs could cause a nuclear winter, resulting in the lowest temperatures in 1000 years, while an exchange involving thousands of weapons would, the study concluded, "likely eliminate the majority of the human population."
Do over on that "Reset" policy with Russia?
11) Artificial Black Hole.
In 1999, as the Brookhaven National Laboratory prepared to fire up its Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a Hawaiian man named Walter Wagner filed a lawsuit to have the facility shut down. He claimed that the collision of high-energy subatomic particles could spawn tiny black holes that could subsequently grow until they swallowed the earth.
In more than a decade of operation the RHIC has not produced a black hole, but Wagner is currently warning of the same danger for Europe's Large Hadron Collider, which is generating yet higher energies.
But physicists say there's nothing to worry about. The energies in these colliders are too low to produce black holes. And if they could produce black holes, we'd all be dead, now.
And number 12) "The X Factor." Yes, cheesy British-derived talent shows can wipe out civilization. Actually, this refers to the unknown unknowns. The thing we have no idea about that could kill us. Like vacuum decay of the entire universe. But hey, we don't know anything about it, so why worry.
Well, let's see, of the dozen ways to wipe out civilization, only 3 are man-made (assuming catastrophic ocean acidification isn't possible by humans). The rest are pretty much out of our control. Or we could just surrender to the Islamofacists and turn back the civilization clock 1,000 years. That would almost be as bad.
But don't let it keep you up at night. I'm sure our leaders take this as seriously as they take Iranian nukes, the rise of fundamental Islam in the Middle East, and the amount of money we owe to potential enemy, China.