![]() ![]() Stepping back to last century, James Cameron would become synonymous with many things, from sinking the Titanic (and subsequently blowing up the box office), to turning Alien into a franchise in the making (with Aliens). Franchise fascination has never been higher and likewise, the lustre in Hollywood for remakes, reboots and sequels remains strong. The objects that explode are nowhere near us.” I’m with her.Tom Jolliffe looks back at No Country For Old Men, the relentless chase film which did ‘Terminator’ better than every 21st century sequel in the Arnold Schwarzenegger franchise… Her response was brief and to the point: “I’m not worried about getting zapped by gamma rays from deep space. To get a handle on this, I emailed Sara Seager, a professor of physics and planetary science at MIT and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. ![]() These are powerful jets of radiation from deep space, produced by exploding or colliding stars, and theoretically a threat to Earthlife. “The chances of having a super-eruption in the lifetime of a person is exceedingly low. He has calculated the probability of a full-blown eruption at Yellowstone at 0.00014 percent per year. Smaller eruptions happen more often than the big, caldera-forming eruptions. He assured me Yellowstone is not about to have a catastrophic eruption. The impeccable source on that is Robert Smith, a University of Utah professor emeritus who has studied the Yellowstone volcanic and hydrothermal system for 66 years and is known as Mr. When Mount Tambora in present-day Indonesia erupted in 1815 it led to “the year without a summer.” And what about Yellowstone - a “supervolcano”? The national park sits atop a hot spot in the Earth’s mantle and had massive eruptions 2 million, 1.3 million and 630,000 years ago. What about volcanoes? They somehow get ignored amid the existential risk conversation. As for existential risks, “currently there are significant technical as well as knowledge barriers to using genetic engineering in ways that could threaten our society at scale.” By email, she pointed out that researchers are using the technology to help humanity on multiple fronts, including health, agriculture and climate strategies. What about a potentially catastrophic misuse of genetic engineering, including the revolutionary CRISPR gene-editing technique? I posed that question to Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel laureate who co-invented CRISPR and who has been outspoken in warning against misuse of the technology. He answered that he and his colleagues estimate there are at least “320,000 viruses awaiting discovery.” Recently I emailed Ian Lipkin, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, and asked how many animal viruses are lurking out there, yet undiscovered. Pandemics may become more frequent as we invade new habitats and intensify interaction with wildlife carrying viruses potentially capable of spilling into the human population. The good news: Vaccines, antibiotics, antivirals, monoclonal antibodies and genome sequencing have given us tools to fight pathogens. Yet again we find ourselves living through plague years. There are so many potential doomsdays.Īlso worth remembering: There’s no reason to think that multiple existential risks can’t happen simultaneously.Īfter the past 2½ years, pandemics - once a relative afterthought for most of us - have resumed their historic position as a scourge of humankind. It could be an existential threat to national well-being - an economic disaster as well as an environmental disaster.” He paused a beat and said, calmly, “So it’s not something you want to happen.”Īnd here we are at the crux of our existential predicament as a species: There are just so many things we don’t want to happen. That includes all the earthquakes and hurricanes that have ever happened in the past. Johnson explained that there are many asteroids lurking out there, still unidentified, that are bigger than the Tunguska object, and they “would devastate a multistate area - a natural disaster of a scale we’ve never had to deal with. It was, he said, “probably a once-every-200-years or so event, on average. He cited the Tunguska event of 1908, when either an asteroid or comet exploded over a remote region of Siberia and flattened 800 square miles of forest. My question to Johnson: How worried should we be, really, about killer rocks from space? He said a major asteroid impact is rare but potentially catastrophic. Dear Earthlings: Please stop obsessing about UFOs ![]()
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