Despite what the famous advertising phrase said, not even diamonds are forever. The history of the planet reveals to us that every species has its expiration date: what it does not tell us is when and how. In particular, how will we disappear? Here are some possibilities.
Disappearance of the Earth’s magnetic field
Our planet is continually bombarded by a shower of high-energy particles, cosmic rays. Some of them are stopped by the atmosphere, which acts as a protective layer, not totally efficient but not completely ineffective either. There is also another type of protection that is more effective but less durable, which is the Earth’s magnetic field, a force shield generated by the slow rotation of the molten iron core that protects us from the charged particles contained in cosmic radiation. Now, this shield seems to have lost 15% of the intensity it had in 1670 , when the first reliable measurements were made: if it continues like this it will disappear in the year 4000. As if that were not enough, we know that the magnetic field has reversed its polarity several times throughout history, the last time 780,000 years ago. And for an inversion to happen, it must be reduced to zero for a period of time.
Should we worry? There is no correlation between past extinctions and global declines in the magnetic field, but that doesn’t mean it won’t affect us. The problem is that we don’t know enough to be able to decide what those impacts will be and how to protect ourselves from them .
Skynet’s arrival
Do we remember the Terminator movie? In it, the great Artificial Intelligence (AI) machine Skynet decided that Humanity was superfluous and that the best thing to do was to make it disappear. Well, both the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, Elon Musk, and the late Stephen Hawking have expressed fear that something like this could happen. For Musk, AI is “potentially more dangerous than nuclear weapons” and for the physicist “the development of a complete AI will herald the end of the human race.”
Yet that doesn’t seem to worry Silicon Valley’s tech millionaires. There, more than 200 companies are on the hunt for true AI. Should we fear what comes out of those labs? History has shown us that experts are overly confident in their ability to deal with anything . That has led us to situations like Fukushima, located in a country where everything is built in anticipation of a major earthquake… And nature caught them with their pants down. The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was a clear demonstration that specialists are unable to understand the risks of their own activity. Such petulance ended with more than 11,000 km 2 of contaminated water. That is why it is not strange that there are those who think that when an expert says that there is nothing to fear, it is time to start trembling .
biotech disaster
On many occasions, scientists, driven by their passion, are not aware of what it can cause, and that any minimal error can end in disaster . And we have already had several warnings, such as the one in the middle of the last century at the University of Sao Paulo by Warwick Estevam Ker, one of the best Brazilian geneticists and the world’s great specialist in bees. Ker was looking for a new species of bee that would produce a lot of honey and be resistant to the Brazilian climate. To do this, he crossed the European honey bees with the violent African bees, perfectly adapted to hot and humid environments. From that cross a robust producer bee was born. As in a B movie, a human error freed 26 queens of those Africanized bees. Warwick Kerr did not worry because he thought they would not prosper, but soon news began to arrive of wild bees attacking human beings . Baptized by the press as ‘killer bees’ , they spread throughout America at a speed of 150 km per year, reaching the US in 1985.
The doomsday asteroid
On February 15, 2013, an asteroid 17 meters in diameter caused an explosion 35 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb in the Chelyabinsk region, Russia. The rock was not detected until it entered the atmosphere .
We must be clear about one thing: we do not live in a very quiet neighborhood. Our peaceful cosmic life can be disrupted by an asteroid or comet whose orbit crosses the Earth’s. Knowing how many cross the Earth’s orbit is complicated, but we can give some data: larger than 1 km in diameter, it is believed that there are about 2,000; above 500 m, about 10,000; greater than 100 m, 300,000 and of 10 m there may be 150 million. Below that size they are not dangerous: each year one usually arrives but it disintegrates before reaching the ground. To deal with global extinction we need an asteroid between one and ten kilometers in diameter. In the worst case, the energy of the impact would be about 500,000 times the global nuclear potential. And the probability that such an object will fall in the next 50 years is between 6,000 and 20,000: it is more difficult for you to win the lottery jackpot.
global pandemic
Thirty years ago we thought we had put an end to two fearsome diseases, smallpox and polio, but others took over. This is how HIV arose and other fearsome viruses began to be known, Ebola and Marburg, of which almost everything was unknown except their virulence. We have also had a resurgence of pathogens that were believed to have been eradicated , and which have often been accompanied by new capacities to resist antiviral treatments. Finally, we have the spread to other regions of some diseases that are characteristic of specific latitudes, such as malaria and dengue. All these facts have caused that the optimism of being able to control infectious diseases has collapsed.
In most cases, these viruses were already present in nature in cycles that included the presence of one or more animal hosts, and the truth is that the jump to the human species has favored the development of a new disease with much more severe symptoms. severe than those developed in their usual animal reservoir. The rule is that a change of host is associated with an increase in virulence. An example of these emerging viruses is the one to blame for the first pandemic of the 20th century, SARS-CoV-2. With a very low fatality rate (around 3% of those infected), it has caused a global economic and health crisis of unimaginable proportions. Covid 19 has shown in the starkest way that we are not prepared for a much more lethal global pandemic .
the next ice age
In a few tens of thousands of years – practically the same time that has passed since our hunter-gatherer days – we will find ourselves before a white planet, where snow will cover from the poles to the equator . Sea levels will fall exposing new coastlines, linking islands with continents and turning gulfs into grasslands. The few humans alive are likely to huddle around campfires in equatorial zones. We will be in the next Ice Age, worse than the one endured by Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals. And many scientists think that it is starting now.
Reference:
Close, F. (1990) END – Cosmic Catastrophe and the Fate of The Universe, Penguin Books
