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Future Disasters
10 Possible Future
Disasters
BY NICHOLAS GERBIS
"In a world
..."
That's
how the trailer for this article's movie would begin, followed by a two-minute
series of slow-motion collapses, fireballs and sooty, photogenic close-ups.
And
why not? Be they perils from space, forces of nature run amok or the results of
human hubris, upheavals feel — for those not enduring them, at least —
cathartic.
But
real disasters aren't lone events born of simple, soluble problems, and
they don't end when the credits roll.
Nor
are they necessarily a question of scale.
The
line that divides an incident from a disaster is defined by a society's
preparedness and capacity to deal with the aftermath.
Vaccines,
rapid-response teams and early-warning systems can shift that line toward
recovery, while poverty, corruption and ignorance slide it toward catastrophe.
For
good or ill, the technology and unprecedented control over life and death we
have will likely allow future disasters to unfold along lines unique in world
history.
As
we look at the upcoming examples, try to let that bit of novelty cheer you up.
10. Genetic
Manipulation Gone Wrong
Let's delve into destruction with one of
the clearest cases of genie-out-of-the-bottle tech since nuclear arms: genetic
manipulation..
From the get-go, ethicists and
science-fiction authors alike have feared that our genetic ambitions would
outpace our safeguards.
We could take comfort in contemporary
technology's cost and crudeness and hope that the robustness and adaptability
of life would take care of the rest.
But newer techniques like CRISPR-Cas9 and
TALENs have transformed genetic manipulation from shotgun to laser-guided
scalpel.
What once took years and cost a small
fortune now requires weeks and a few thousand dollars.
On the plus side, the technology could
allow us to alter grain genomes to resist fungus or equip mosquitoes with
genetic barriers to malaria.
But whereas older methods of genetic
modification would eventually breed out of populations, these new techniques
can leverage "selfish" genes that force organisms to pass
modifications to offspring.
Put simply, we can now wipe out entire
species with a single mistake [source: Maxmen].
In April 2015 a team of Chinese scientists
described using CRISPR-Cas9 to edit nonviable human embryos.
Scientists have called for a freeze on gene
fiddling at such an early stage, and many journals refuse to publish such
studies for ethical reasons.
But bioethical standards tend to lag behind
technology, and who can say what a less ethical party might attempt?
9. Global
Pandemic
When it comes to biological factors that
tear through entire species, humans can't take all the credit.
Remember how the West African Ebola
outbreak of April 2014 stirred up fears of how far and fast a virulent disease
could spread — and of how ill-prepared to deal with it we might be?
You should, because days after the World
Health Organization pronounced the region Ebola-free in 2016, another case
popped up [source: Fox].
History has shown that a pandemic now and
then can be a good thing, at least for the survivors.
Apart from their traumatic emotional
effects, pandemics can create better prospects for poor laborers and aid in
ecological recovery, as long as they don't kill too large a fraction of the
population.
But while in progress, they can profoundly
alter how societies function, taxing infrastructures well beyond their
tolerances and forcing people to spend their off-work hours nursing family
members.
A disease that kills 80 to 90 percent of
all people on Earth could tip this balance toward an unrecoverable social and
technological crash.
The more we travel, alter our landscapes
and closely mingle with all types of animals, the more we increase our risks [source: Vince].
So how likely is either of these events?
It's hard to say.
We've averaged a pandemic roughly
every 10 to 50 years over the past few centuries, with the most recent being
the global H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009 and 2010 [source: Vince].
That means another pandemic could happen
during your lifetime.
8. Coronal
Mass Ejection
Coronal mass ejections (CMEs), or bursts of
plasma and magnetic field from the sun's corona, have much in common with
pandemics.
They follow a cycle, albeit a far more
regular one (the conditions are ripe every 11 years or so) [source: NASA].
They also cause variable but potentially
ruinous damage, and their destructive scales depend, in part, upon humans'
connectedness.
In 1859 amateur astronomer Richard
Carrington observed a solar flare that heralded a geomagnetic storm.
The burst of magnetized plasma that struck
Earth built enough electrical ground charge to power telegraph transmissions
for days [source: Billings].
Since then, astronomers have watched for
such Carrington events (powerful solar storms) and their linked CMEs
with mounting concern.
We've been lucky so far. A trick of
magnetic field alignment tempered the impact of a sizable CME in October 2003.
It nevertheless caused hundreds of millions
of dollars in damages by disrupting flights, satellites and power grids.
In July 2012 another CME barely missed us [source: Billings].
In the worst case, a CME could cause
continental power outages and loss of GPS satellites.
That would mean no commerce, no refrigeration
and no fuel or water pumps, amounting to trillions of dollars in damages and
untold casualties.
Some experts cheerfully predict outages
would last a few weeks at most.
But a quick about-face would prove
impossible if, as some people fear, the CME's ground current cooks all the
transformers.
In that case, the risks of social breakdown
and mass starvation become quite real [source: Billings].
7. Peak
Phosphorus
Speaking of mass starvation, did you know
there's a theoretical limit to how many people the planet can support?
It's mainly limited by available solar
radiation, but there are other limits we would reach well before that one.
In the 18th century, economist Thomas
Malthus famously worried that the population was growing much faster than
the food supply.
Many scholars shrug off his warning today,
but near the turn of the 20th century, a food crisis loomed because of the lack
of nitrates and ammonia.
German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch
bought some time by devising a nitrogen fixation process that takes
gas from the air and turns it into fertilizer.
Today a different nutrient shortfall looms
— a shortage of phosphorus.
Our bodies need phosphorus to move energy
around and to build cells and DNA. But our demand will likely outstrip our
known supply within 30 to 40 years [source: Clabby].
The push for biofuel options will only
deepen the crisis.
Currently, a large amount of phosphorus is
lost in human and animal waste.
Much of what remains ends up in the trash
or washes away as farm runoff.
Reclaiming these sources and finding new
ones could buy some time, but everything has its limit — even the bounty of the
earth.
6. The
Thermohaline Circulation Shuts Down
Like most natural mechanisms, the global
climate system has a certain amount of built-in give.
But push past that point, and forcing
factors, or environmental processes that affect climate, take over.
This could create feedbacks that will alter
climates for decades or centuries to come.
One nightmare scenario begins when global
climate change melts arctic ice too quickly.
As the resultant freshwater spreads across
the North Atlantic Ocean, it shuts down a looping global current vital to
global climate called the thermohaline circulation (THC).
The THC runs off a blend of heat and
density, and its motion helps transport heat around the world.
For example, Atlantic surface waters warm
up near Florida and flow northeast toward Europe, which partly explains why
London has a temperate maritime climate even though it shares the same latitude
with Calgary, Canada and Kiev, Ukraine.
Research suggests the THC has shut down in
the past, likely due to massive freshwater dumps that occur during waning ice
ages.
Whether such a shutdown will occur because
of climate change remains unclear, but the bulk of data says the THC will more
likely experience a slowdown [source: Hausfather].
In the unlikely worst case, however, the
effects of a mini-ice age combined with other climate change stresses could be
nothing short of seismic.
5.
The Cascadia Superquake
Pop culture may have taught us that
California's San Andreas Fault will one day drop the Golden State into the
Pacific Ocean (it won't), but at least it has made us aware of California's
looming Big One, an earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or greater.
We cannot say the same for another overdue
earthquake threatening the western states and Canada: the Cascadia superquake.
At least temblor-tossed Southern California
features earthquake-proofed buildings and emergency-preparedness policies to
handle seismic activity.
Conversely, the Cascadia subduction zone —
a 620-mile (1,000-kilometer) area where the Juan de Fuca plate slides under the
North American plate — undergoes dormancy periods just long enough for unwary
coffee-drinkers to blithely build cities elsewhere [source: Watts].
To imagine how the superquake might play
out, we need only consider how a similar event affected land on the opposite
side of the Ring of Fire, in Japan.
In 2011 the 9.0-magnitude Tohoku quake and
resultant tsunami killed 18,000 people, triggered the Fukushima meltdown and
caused more than $200 billion in damages.
All this happened in a region prepared for
quakes, just not ones of such scale [source: Schulz].
A similar quake and tsunami has a one in 10
chance of striking the Pacific Northwest in the next half century.
Under current states of awareness and
readiness, such an event would shatter the Interstate 5 corridor that runs
along the West Coast, killing thousands and leaving millions of refugees
homeless and hungry.
The chances of a smaller but still
devastating quake striking in that same time frame stand at one in three [source: Schulz].
Either way, it's only a matter of time.
4. A
Killer Asteroid
For those inclined to gamble with disaster,
nature offers plenty of prospects. Just ask the dinosaurs.
On February 15, 2013, a fireball streaked
across the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia and exploded in a window-shattering
airburst.
It was nearly a disaster: A ground strike
might have killed tens of thousands of people [source: Kaku].
Regardless, the event proved that Earth's
game of asteroid Russian roulette is far from over.
Scant hours after the event, a space rock
three times larger than Chelyabinsk's threaded the space between Earth and its
artificial satellites.
Had this city-killer struck a densely
populated location like New York, it would have destroyed midtown instantly,
blasted down surrounding skyscrapers and rained firestorm-spawning meteors for
hours.
Short-term death tolls might have reached
the millions [source: Kaku].
Of course, water covers 71 percent of
Earth, and many large inland regions remain sparsely populated.
Thus, in the rare case that such a massive
rock actually hit Earth, it would stand a small chance of striking a population
center.
But a nation-wrecker or even a
planet-killer could come knocking someday, perhaps sooner than we'd like to
think.
Take Apophis, an apartment-building-size
asteroid due to kiss our atmosphere in 2029 and possibly smack right into us on
its 2036 return trip.
Astronomers are bullish that it won't, but
if it does it will pack the wallop of a 300-megaton atom bomb, to say nothing
of the ensuing fires, disruption of solar energy and famine [source: Kaku].
3. Global
Economic Collapse
While pundits and politicians enjoy
trotting out global economic collapse to energize the voter base,
economists are split over the chances of such a crash.
It's a ticklish problem, partly because
forecasts can distort the very system they seek to describe, and partly because
collapses can result from disparate sources, from a deep and protracted
depression to runaway inflation.
Indeed, economists still struggle to
unravel collapses that already occurred.
All we can really say, as we watch China
prop up its ailing stock market and the European Union struggle to define a set
of economic policies suited to the diverse needs of its member states, is that
indicators look more than a little dodgy.
Whether we look at the tepid fiscal
recovery, obstinate job insecurity or looming food and water anxieties, it
seems likely that problems will only worsen under global climate change
scenarios or energy-asset depletion [source: Froetschel].
Or not. That's the nature of the dismal
science, after all: risk and uncertainty.
Meanwhile, China's economic strategies,
including its debt addiction, are past due for a reckoning — one that could
rock the world economy.
Elsewhere in East Asia, Japan courts a
currency war by exporting its deflation [source: Mauldin].
Then again, Japan could sidestep the issue
entirely by leading the world in building the robots that will revolutionize
our lives — or end them ...
2. The
Singularity
Some say the world will end in fire, some
say ice; others say it will end in the steely grip of self-improving superintelligence born
of human hubris. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
On one hand, it's hard to imagine we'd be
so foolish as to create a Frankenstein's monster without a fail-safe. But do
you know what's not hard to imagine?
That some garage hackers or industrialists,
driven by rivalry, revenue or (Asimov help us) fetish, will sit
nose-to-breadboard until they've created artificial intelligence or some weird
imitation of it.
However it happens, the doom that follows
need not come from so literal a source as a robot hand around our throats.
A society unprepared for massive labor
shifts and joblessness could face financial and social turmoil.
Should society survive, millions of people
will face existential crisis, whether in the form of a sense of futility or a
headlong descent into decadence and dissolution.
Optimists insist that matters will
self-correct, and economists argue that tech will create more jobs than it
destroys.
But even ignoring the risk that
superintelligent machines will rise, self-improve and decide a femtosecond
later to eliminate humans, we'll still face one of the most transformative
moments in social and psychological history.
Because however it shakes out, it'll be
something we're not prepared for, and that alone will make it a disaster.
1.
World War III
There's probably no greater disaster
imaginable than a world war fought with tactical nukes, cyberattacks and
bioweapons.
It's an idea that we haven't taken very
seriously since the Cold War.
But when the World Economic Forum asked
experts across a variety of fields to name the most likely, worst outcome
of the next 10 years, guess what they picked?
The reasons are deeply enmeshed: food and
water insecurity, climate change, financial crises, infectious diseases and
profound social instability.
Add rising nationalism, dubious territorial
claims by major powers like China and Russia, Japanese militarization and a
pinch of terrorist pseudo-states, and a fearsome picture begins to emerge.
Of course, one could argue that our global
connectedness militates against any large-scale conflict; we simply would lose
more than we gained.
The U.S., China's biggest product consumer,
and China, America's banker, share an economic suicide pact so tight that some
have nicknamed it MADE (mutually assured destruction of economy).
That said, entangled powers once made World
War I unthinkable, too, and its major players had a lot in common.
Then again, they didn't face the prospect
of nuclear extinction.
Nor did they have our access to satellite
intelligence and instant communications, assets that help limit
misunderstandings.
So, on balance, a third World War would be
irrational but not impossible.
Why doesn't that make us feel better?
Author's
Note: 10 Possible Future Disasters
Socially or ecologically, there is growing
concern among experts that change today occurs at a rate that far outstrips our
ability to cope with it.
Moreover,
in a world characterized by ever-growing connectedness, it's unlikely that some
types of disasters — economic, political, ecological and epidemiological — will
remain geographically confined.
The
same globalization and mass communication that transform the world may just as
easily doom it if we're not careful, and perhaps even if we are.
Nicholas Gerbis, Contributing Writer
Nicholas Gerbis is an independent science
journalist, editor and teacher. He earned his Master of Science degree in
geography (climatology) from University of Delaware and a Master of Mass
Communication degree (journalism) from the Walter Cronkite School at Arizona
State University. He is currently an adjunct professor at University of
Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he teaches courses on science history and science
fiction.
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People run as a
building collapses during an earthquake in Mexico City. Could a massive quake
threaten global disaster in the future?
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Workers carry an
Ebola victim in Monrovia, Liberia in 2015.
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A coronal mass
ejection could cause large-scale power outages and starvation.
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The Yunna Phosphorus
Chemicals Group Crop. Limited mines phosphate ore in China, mainly for the
production of fertilizers.
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Climate change could
disrupt global ocean currents and cause a major catastrophe.
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A person surveys the devastating aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and
tsunami in Japan.
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A meteor sent
shockwaves across Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013, injuring hundreds of people and
damaging this local zinc plant.
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A scientist holds test tubes of DNA that will
be used for gene editing of stem cells.
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A protester sets fire
to copies of euros in Greece in 2011.
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A robot competes in
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Robotics Challenge. Could an
artificial-intelligence takeover end society as we know it?
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Indian soldiers
prepare for a gun battle.
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No scientist had
observed any virus until 1931,
because before that time, no instrument was capable of observing an object so
small.
