From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Sat Jun 21 2003 - 09:29:28 PDT
THE NEW IMPACT RISK HYPE: SARS AND AIDS FROM ASTEROIDS?
Stuff, 19 June 2003
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2544922a4560,00.html
By BEVAN HURLEY
Alien intelligence is out there and if it arrives on Earth, we don't
stand a chance of outsmarting it, a Wellington astronomer believes.
Richard Hall says science fiction is fast becoming science fact.
"It's no point looking at movies like Independence Day where we outsmart
the aliens. If something's got the technology to come here, believe me,
we don't have a chance."
Mr Hall, who spoke to the Manawatu Branch of the Royal Society of New
Zealand at Te Manawa last night, said humans exploit animals even if
they show signs of intelligence, and we could find that the worm turns
if, or when, higher intelligence arrives.
Recent technological advances that have enabled astronomers to detect
hundreds of planets in other solar systems point towards the existence
of extraterrestrials, Mr Hall said.
"By the sheer size of our galaxy, there must be millions of worlds in
the galaxy."
And if you're wondering what form aliens might take, forget Hollywood
and lurid comic book images. "We construct our ideas about what they may
look like based upon ourselves, but they won't look like us," he said
yesterday.
Even though aliens may not have arrived on Earth yet, a potentially
deadly threat is arriving from space at the rate of a tonne a day. It's
bacteria.
Mr Hall believes epidemics like Sars and Aids could have arrived here on
asteroids.
The prospect that killer diseases came from outer space is not a new
one, but Mr Hall said a recent experiment where living organisms were
shown to survive 41km above the earth backs up the theory.
Sars could have come from an asteroid crashing into Mars and the
remnants reaching Earth.
That niggly question about where we come from can also be answered by
looking to the stars, he says.
The building blocks of DNA are evident in cosmic cloud gazing and this
confirms we are a part of the rest of the universe.
"You can take two views of life on Earth. You can take the spiritual
view - that God created the earth. Or you take the view that everything
on earth is part of the natural universe."
Copyright 2003, Stuff
=============
(10) AND FINALLY: WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!
Wired, 17 June 2003
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/doomsday.html
But it won't be from germ warfare, runaway nanobots, or shifting
magnetic poles. A skeptical guide to Doomsday.
By Gregg Easterbrook
Omigod, Earth's core is about to explode, destroying the planet and
everything on it! That is, unless a gigantic asteroid strikes first. Or
an advanced physics experiment goes haywire, negating space-time in a
runaway chain reaction. Or the sun's distant companion star, Nemesis,
sends an untimely barrage of comets our way. Or ...
Not long ago, such cosmic thrills, chills, and spills were confined to
comic books, sci-fi movies, and the Book of Revelation. Lately, though,
they've seeped into a broader arena, filling not only late-night talk
radio, where such topics don't seem particularly out of place, but also
earnest TV documentaries, slick mass-market magazines, newspapers, and a
growing number of purportedly nonfiction books. Everywhere you turn,
pundits are predicting biblical-scale disaster. In many scenarios,
mankind is the culprit, unleashing atmospheric carbon dioxide,
genetically engineered organisms, or runaway nanobots to exact a bitter
revenge for scientific meddling. But even if human deployment of
technology proves benign, Mother Nature will assert her primacy through
virulent pathogens, killer asteroids, marauding comets, exploding
supernovas, and other such happenstances of mass destruction.
Fringe thinking? Hardly. Sober PhDs are behind these thoughts. Citing
the hazard of genetically engineered viruses, eminent astrophysicist
Stephen Hawking has said, "I don't think the human race will survive the
next thousand years." Martin Rees, the knighted British astronomer,
agrees; he gives us a 50-50 chance. Serious thinkers such as Pulitzer
Prize winner Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague, and Bill Joy,
who wrote Wired's own 2000 article "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us,"
warn of techno-calamity. Stephen Petranek, editor in chief of the
science monthly Discover, crisscrosses the world lecturing on "15 Major
Risks to the World and Life as We Know It." University of Maryland
arms-control scholar John Steinbruner is lobbying organizations like the
American Association for the Advancement of Science and the World
Medical Association to establish an international review board with the
power to ban research into the Pandora's box of biomedicine.
If we're talking about doomsday - the end of human civilization - many
scenarios simply don't measure up. A single nuclear bomb ignited by
terrorists, for example, would be awful beyond words, but life would go
on. People and machines might converge in ways that you and I would find
ghastly, but from the standpoint of the future, they would probably
represent an adaptation. Environmental collapse might make parts of the
globe unpleasant, but considering that the biosphere has survived ice
ages, it wouldn't be the final curtain. Depression, which has become 10
times more prevalent in Western nations in the postwar era, might grow
so widespread that vast numbers of people would refuse to get out of
bed, a possibility that Petranek suggested in a doomsday talk at the
Technology Entertainment Design conference in 2002. But Marcel Proust,
as miserable as he was, wrote Remembrance of Things Past while lying in
bed.
Of course, some worries are truly worrisome. Nuclear war might
extinguish humanity, or at least bring an end to industrial
civilization. The fact that tensions among the US, Russia, and China are
low right now is no guarantee they'll remain so. Beyond the superpowers,
India and Pakistan have demonstrated nuclear capability; North Korea
either has or soon will have it; Japan may go nuclear if North Korea
does; Iran and other countries could join the club before long.
Radiation-spewing bombs raining from the sky would, no doubt, be
cataclysmic. If you're in the mood to keep yourself up at night, nuclear
war remains a good subject to ponder. But reversal of the planet's
magnetic field?
At a time of global unease, worst-case scenarios have a certain appeal,
not unlike reality TV. And it's only natural to focus on danger; if
nature hadn't programmed human beings to be wary, the species might not
have gotten this far. But a little perspective is in order. Let's review
the various doomsday theories, from least threatening to most. If the
end is inevitable, at least there won't be any surprises.
1. Laws of probability!
Standing at the Berlin Wall in 1969, Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard
Gott III used a statistical formula to predict that the barrier would
last 2.66 to 24 more years. It lasted 20. Later, Gott applied the same
equation to humanity and calculated, with 95 percent certainty, that it
would last 205,000 to 8 million more years. His paper on the subject
made it into the august British scientific journal Nature.
Basically, Gott's formula (you will be spared the details) combines a
series of estimates, then treats the result as though it was precise.
Speculations about the far future have about as much chance of being
spot-on as next week's weather forecast. But Gott's academic reputation
won't suffer; if humanity still exists in 8.1 million years, it will be
a little late to revoke his tenure.
2. Chemical weapons!
Spooky-sounding, sure. And dangerous. But bombs and bullets are
dangerous, too. In actual use, chemical weapons have proven no more
deadly, pound for pound, than conventional explosives. In World War I,
the British and German armies expended 1 ton of chemical agents per
enemy fatality.
Are modern nerve agents like sarin superdeadly in a way World War I
mustard gas was not? When the Aum Shinrikyo cult attacked Tokyo's subway
system with that substance in 1995 - the subway being an enclosed area,
ideal for chemicals - 12 people died. That was 12 too many, but a
conventional bomb the same size as the cult's canisters, detonated on a
packed subway, would have killed more.
During this winter's duct tape scare, I heard a Washington, DC, radio
talk-show host sternly lecture listeners to flee if "a huge cloud of
poison gas" were slowly floating across the city. Noxious clouds of
death may float across movie screens, but no military in the real world
can create them. Wind rapidly disperses nerve agents, and sunlight
breaks them down. Outdoors, a severe chemical attack likely would be
confined to a few city blocks.
Some chemical incidents have been horrifyingly deadly. In 1994, when a
Union Carbide plant accidentally loosed a cloud of methyl isocyanate
over Bhopal, India, 8,000 people died, some of them 20 miles from the
site. But the source was an industrial complex, and it spewed gas for an
extended period of time, something no bomb or aircraft could do. Another
heinous event, Iraq's poison gas attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja
in 1988, killed an estimated 5,000. However, the slaughter involved
dozens of Iraqi aircraft flying repeated sorties over an undefended
city. Had they dropped conventional bombs, the toll might have been
equally high.
Gregg Easterbrook, a senior fellow at The New Republic, wrote about the
convergence of science and religion in Wired 10.12.
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