Posted on 02/27/2007 2:52:00 PM PST by blam
The Shape of Armageddon
Sure, the world will end. What will rise up to take the place of human civilization?
The years 2004 and 2005 brought global disasters enough to gladden the heart of any prophet of doom. With the tsunami, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, famine, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, suicide bombers, and bird flu, all the biblical signs are there to suggest that the end of the world is at hand. But that should be qualified by saying that the end of the world as we know it may be at hand - civilization, we call it.
Human life will not be wiped off the face of the earth by natural disasters, plagues, or wars; there are just too many of us. Consider our history. The million Biafrans killed in that terrible 1967-1970 war of attempted secession in Nigeria were replaced by natural procreation in just one year. The Black Death of 1347-1351 wiped out at least one-third of the people of Europe when its population was a fraction of today's, but the continent recovered. There will always be some humans who avoid the killer diseases; in addition to isolated developing world tribes that have never been exposed to such killers, some people in developed countries are now showing resistance to AIDS.
So what will the world look like after the populations of the major cities have been destroyed by nuclear holocaust or disease, and with them the whole infrastructure that moves money, food, and fuel over the face of the earth? People on the fringes of the global village will survive, but civilization will not - remember William Golding's Lord of the Flies?
Members of mountain militias in the United States believe they have the answer, stockpiling food, fuel, and ammunition, but they will last only as long as those stocks last. They will soon use up their fuel by using their transport to sally forth and loot the area around their headquarters. Then they will turn to attacking each other for plunder until the ammunition runs out.
The true survivors will be the woodsmen and plainsmen who know how to hunt with bows and arrows and traps, or grow field crops and live off the land. There will be no shortage of bush meat; in North America, there are more deer today, due to their protected status, than there were when the Mayflower landed. The Eskimos will move south to colonize abandoned land. The Australian aborigines will make a comeback. A few technologically savvy people may survive by absorption into primitive tribes, to whom they could impart advanced technology in much the same way as Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, so that in a few years the wheel, steam power, the printing press, electricity, and radio will have been reestablished and civilization will be on the way back to the mess it is in today.
But whether humanity can reestablish itself, it is doomed in the end by the cooling sun. Bacteria are already way ahead of us in adapting to extreme environments, from polar below-zero temperatures and zero humidity to the edges of boiling hot geysers and much hotter undersea fumaroles. And now, thanks to groundbreaking work by Bonnie Bassler at Princeton and others (see her profile in the June 2006 issue), we know that they can communicate with each other. So if they can avoid internecine warfare and cooperate, then when all the existing coastal areas are under water and all that remains is desert, with no other animal or plant life, they could cover the land with biofilms, regulate the weather by changing surface reflectivity, control the atmosphere by determining how much land area is devoted to photosynthesis, recycle their pollutants, build nanobots to do their bidding, and as the sun cools, survive at freezing surface temperatures well below those that would end all homeothermic life. In the absence of any human competition, they may just take over, create a completely bacterial civilization, and rule the globe.
Of course, once they become politicized, or worse, develop rival gods, this micro-utopia will be all ruin.
Jack Woodall is director of the Nucleus for the Investigation of Emerging Infectious Diseases in the Institute of Medical Biochemistry at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. jwoodall@the-scientist.com
Catastrophism Ping.
Optimistic chap, what?
Oh, jeez, these libs just can't wait to wipe us out. Do you know how to make a liberal fly into an apoplectic rage? Tell him humans are going to be around a million years from now and they aren't going to be hunter-gatherers.
Yeh...the little guys got big plans...
The "damn dirty" apes will rule the earth!
Jeez, now it's the bacteria rising up against us. Heh heh, once they form a bacteria union and demand benefits, they're toast.
steveo - from the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous.
Jack Woodall strikes me as a real "glass-half-empty" kinda guy.
"Catastrophism Ping."
Bad things happen Ping, they might get worse Ping, we are screwed, Ping, or nothing big will take place, Ping. So, now where are we? Anyone?
Be prepared......
"Today, I was led by an angel to the Chasms of Hell. It is a place of great torture; how awesomely large and extensive it is! The kinds of tortures I saw:
The First Torture that constitutes hell is:
The loss of God.
The Second is:
Perpetual remorse of conscience.
The Third is
That one's condition will never change.
The Fourth is:
The fire that will penetrate the soul without destroying it. A terrible suffering since it is a purely spiritual fire, lit by God's anger.
The Fifth Torture is:
Continual darkness and a terrible suffocating smell, and despite the darkness, the devils and the souls of the damned see each other and all the evil, both of others and their own.
The Sixth Torture is:
The constant company of Satan.
The Seventh Torture is:
Horrible despair, hatred of God, vile words, curses and blasphemies.
These are the Tortures suffered by all the damned together, but that is not the end of the sufferings.
Indescribable Sufferings
There are special Tortures destined for particular souls. These are the torments of the senses. Each soul undergoes terrible and indescribable sufferings related to the manner in which it has sinned.
I would have died
There are caverns and pits of torture where one form of agony differs from another. I would have died at the very sight of these tortures if the omnipotence of God had not supported me.
No One Can Say There is No Hell
Let the sinner know that he will be tortured throughout all eternity, in those senses which he made use of to sin. I am writing this at the command of God, so that no soul may find an excuse by saying there is no hell, or that nobody has ever been there, and so no one can say what it is like...how terribly souls suffer there! Consequently, I pray even more fervently for the conversion of sinners. I incessantly plead God's mercy upon them. O My Jesus, I would rather be in agony until the end of the world, amidst the greatest sufferings, than offend you by the least sin." (Diary 741)
__________________________________________________________
"Before I come as a just judge, I am coming FIRST as "King of Mercy"! Let all men now approach the throne of my mercy with absolute confidence! Some time before the the last days of final justice arrive, there will be given to mankind a great sign in the heavens of this sort: all the light of the heavens will be totally extinguished. There will be a great darkness over the whole earth. Then a great sign of the cross will appear in the sky. From the openings from where the hands and feet of the savior were nailed will come forth great lights - which will light up the earth for a period of time. This will happen before the very final days. It is the sign for the end of the world. After it will come the days of justice! Let souls have recourse to the fount of my mercy while there is still time! Woe to him who does not recognize the time of my visitation."
Amen to that.....:)
The article is bogus. The sun is growing brighter (and larger) with age. Although its surface temperature will be lower in the end, the surface area and brightness will cook the Earth.
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How about the Amish? They do without most of modern civilization already. It seems to me they've got a head start on the rest of us, if civilization as we know it collapses.
The preferred currency will be bullets.
:')
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