"Megacatastrophes!: Nine Strange Ways the World Could End,” a new book written by Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astro-biologist at Washington State University, and David Darling, a British astronomer and science writer, offers end of the world scenarios that could actually happen. Well, maybe.
Schulze-Makuch and Darling explore somewhat obscure as well as more common doomsday scenarios. Such horrors as an antibiotic-resistant virus, voracious “nano replicators,” technology spinning out of control al la The Terminator’s Sky Net and other man-made disasters.
One reviewer said that they authors “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.”
In the book, the authors write: "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. 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.”
But it’s not asteroids or rogue planets or Godzilla that Schulze-Makuch and Darling point to as the problem:
"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,” the pair wrote. "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.”
On the other hand, they point out that the world will not end this week or even in “our children’s children’s lifetimes.”
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