WSU News Archive

By Robert Strenge, WSU News

 

 

 

PULLMAN, Wash. - The good news is that all the "end-of-Mayan-calendar” doomsday talk is pretty much hogwash. The bad news, at least according to a professor at Washington State University, is that there are a genuinely disturbing number of scientifically valid scenarios in which our planet – and in some cases, the entire universe – could be slammed into catastrophic oblivion.

 

From a universe converted into "grey goo” by ravenous nano replicators to an earth depopulated by plagues of virulent microbes, Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist with the WSU School of the Environment, and co-author David Darling, a British astronomer and prolific science writer, explore a number of the more scientifically plausible doomsday scenarios in their new book "Megacatastrophes!: Nine Strange Ways the World Could End,” scheduled for release next month by Oneworld Publications.

 

Relying on a "catastrophometer” of their own creation to rate both the likelihood and severity of the various calamities considered, the authors of "Megacatastrophes!” separate fact from pseudo-science and popular hysteria to offer a reasoned and oddly reassuring view of a variety of both common and relatively obscure doomsday scenarios.

 

And while they offer the belief that our world "won’t end this week” or even "in our children’s children’s lifetimes,” they clearly aren’t discounting the validity or severity of many of the manmade and natural apocalyptic threats we face as the human race.

 

"Space rocks as big as houses zip by us, closer than the moon, every few months or so; some the size of large mountains have smashed into the Earth in the past causing serious mayhem,” they write. "Giant stars explode, supervolcanoes erupt, ice ages come and go. The very fabric of space and time might rip apart at any moment if some theories are to be believed.

 

"And if these potential natural disasters aren’t enough,” they continue, "there are threats of our own making in the form of new technologies that could spin out of control.”

 

To Schulze-Makuch and Darling, an antibiotic-resistant virus that spreads rapidly, a computer that learns and adapts its own programming, an asteroid hurtling towards our planet, and aliens intent on harvesting Earth’s resources are not just plots for some of Hollywood’s most popular movies. They are scientifically plausible threats to the continued existence of human kind.

 

And without discounting or ignoring the most obvious astronomical threats to continued human occupation of the planet, Darling and Schulze-Makuch choose to focus on what they call the "lesser known, and sometimes slightly eccentric, ways that our species might meet a sticky end.”

 

As our science and technology continue to expand, the authors suggest, some of the potentially stickiest threats come not from beyond our own world, but from within.

 

"The biggest threat to life on Earth comes, oddly enough, from the only creatures who spend a lot of time worrying about their well-being and also think of themselves as being the most intelligent species in town,” they write. "The fact is, we’re busily engaged in destroying the very support system upon which we and all other animals and plants depend, while simultaneously finding ever more ingenious ways to kill each other. In many ways the universe would be a safer place without us.”

 

In addition to theorizing about megacatastrophes, Schulze-Makuch is a professor with the WSU School of the Environment and director of the WSU Laboratory for Astrobiological Investigations & Space Mission Planning. He does research on planetary habitability and also on the movement of microbes and viruses through groundwater. He holds a patent for a mineral-based filtering system that blocks viruses and E. coli bacteria from entering wells.

 

He is the author of "Life in the Universe: Expectations and Constraints” (Springer); "Voids of Eternity: Alien Encounter, We are not alone: Why we have already discovered extraterrestrial life” (One World Publisher), co-authored with David Darling; and "Cosmic Biology: How Life could evolve on other Worlds” (Praxis Publishing).

 

Currently living in Dundee, Scotland, Darling has a Ph.D. in astronomy (Manchester, England) and has been a freelance science writer since 1982. His books include "Deep Time” (Delacorte), "Equations of Eternity” (Hyperion, 1993), "Soul Search” (Villard, 1995), "Zen Physics” (Harper Collins, 1996), "The Extraterrestrial Encyclopedia” (Random House, 2000), "Life Everywhere: The Maverick Science of Astrobiology” (Basic Books, 2001), "The Complete Book of Spaceflight” (John Wiley, 2002), "The Universal Book of Astronomy” (Wiley, 2003), "The Universal Book of Mathematics” (Wiley, 2004), "Teleportation: The Impossible Leap” (Wiley, 2005), "Gravity's Arc: The Story of Gravity from Aristotle to Einstein and Beyond” (Wiley, 2006), and "We Are Not Alone,” co-authored with Dirk Schulze-Makuch.

Attention Producers/Editors: Soundbites and BRoll are available for media use. Download information is available HERE

Contact:
Dirk Schulze-Makuch, WSU School of the Environment, 509-335-1180, dirksm@wsu.edu
David Darling, daviddarling@daviddarling.info

Note: To share this article, please click the orange-colored 'Share' button at the top or bottom of the page

 Print  Email  Facebook  Twitter  Release  Share

	email
	digg
	del.icio.us
	google
	newsvine
	reddit
	yahoo!
	release