When media muddy the waters

Last night, I caught the last half of 20/20's special "The Last Days of Earth." Much of what they said was pretty accurate, albeit seriously lacking in depth, detail, and source citation. The problem I have with the show, however, is that even I as a layman could see some things they said (or, more often showed) did not help the cause of good science.

If you didn't see it, you can probably guess what it was about by the title and the fact I'm writing about it on this blog -- various forms of apocalypse. They looked at seven, but I can't remember them all and only caught the last four: asteroids, nuclear war, global pandemic, and climate change, ranking the last as the most serious threat.

Common sense says all of those things are in fact real threats; but I'm not sure I'd give them the same order. To me, the most serious in terms of what it can ultimately do to humanity and nature is nuclear war, because, in a very real sense, it combines many of the effects of the other three. The combination of megadeaths plus long-term radiation plus a massive smoke pall plus other "synergies" would very likely destroy human civilization for a very long time and cause major changes in the genetics of human and natural communities alike.

Admittedly, I rank that a little higher than asteroids because, while a really big asteroid can actually sterilize Earth and I don't think we can nuke Earth into sterility, if a nuclear war happens it's our fault. Asteroids are impersonal; nuclear war is not.

Asteroids

Anyway, I'm digressing. 20/20's section on asteroids was simplistic but truthful about the prevailing theory that asteroids wiped out the dinosaurs, leaving mammals a chance to take over the reptiles' ecological niches. But the "reporters" then argued that an asteroid of the same size hitting Earth now would burn the crust to a depth of 60 miles. Obviously, that's crap: there's no way our mammalian ancestors would have survived such a strike. They lived semi-nocturnal, semi-underground lives, but not that far underground. The only lifeforms that have ever lived that far down are extremophile bacteria.

You can test the effects of various sizes of asteroids here or here.

It mentioned that people have found around 100,000 asteroids, but didn't mention that we occasionally lose some, are constantly finding some only when they cross Earth's orbit, and suspect there are countless more out there. Chances are, if one hits us, we won't see it until it's too close to do anything about.

Of course, they could be right about the one they mention specifically -- an asteroid that's due to make a close (within the Moon's orbit) pass in 2029. They don't say that will hit us -- general consensus is that it won't -- but that the near-miss might alter its orbit just enough to cause a hit the next time around in 2037. What they don't mention is just how small the risk really is: 1 in 26,000 in 2029 and cumulatively just .00023% chance between now and 2054, during which time it'll have three close approaches. The show doesn't identify that chunk of rock, but astronomers know it as 2004 MN4 or Apophis.

The show's discussion of what people are likely to do if faced with a probable direct hit was kind of interesting, but also fairly predictable. It's pretty safe to assume chaos would reign as the time drew near as people try to do things they'd never before attempted (for good and ill). Nobody said they'd go out and commit crimes (obviously, they wouldn't say it on national TV even if they would do it), but a few said they'd want to have children. Excuse me?!? How can someone be so supremely narcissistic as to bring children into a world they knew was going to get walloped by an extinction-level-huge asteroid?

What was equally troubling was what the show didn't mention -- the probability that some people would try to organize a major space effort to keep humanity alive off-world. Such an effort may well be the only thing that could prevent such widespread chaos, and I've said before that I believe we need a good global space program as insurance against just such a catastrophe.

Nukes

The section on nukes was woefully vague and much shorter than the subject warranted. It didn't say anything about radiation or various other ill effects, although it did point out (accurately, I think) that the nuke threat from places like Iran and North Korea is being blown out of proportion to the risk caused by the thousands of nukes the US and Russia still have on "launch on warning" status. It failed to mention, however, that both nations are trying to create new, smaller, more mobile nukes, especially the U.S. Add that to the simmering problems in the Middle East, and it may be time to revisit the Doomsday Clock's setting of 7 minutes to midnight, which hasn't changed since 1992.

The one really questionable assertion they made was that "an exchange of just 20 missiles would cause nuclear winter for several years." The problem here is that the number of missiles is irrelevant, what matters is the number and strength of the warheads and where they explode -- urban or rural, airburst or groundburst. Burning cities are significantly more likely to spew the toxic smoke into the sky that can block sunlight and cool the land, especially if hit by warheads that explode close enough to the surface for soil and debris to get sucked into the fireball. Even the TTAPS study of the early 1980s predicted a 5,000 MT threshold for nuclear winters, which requires significantly more than 20 missiles.

Elsewhere Sagan (as cited by Alan Phillips), notes it could happen with as few as 100 warheads if the targets are predominantly oil refineries and associated structures. Obviously, we don't know for sure... and sane folks don't want to. There's some controversy over the TTAPS calculations, sparking some of the theory's supporters to acknowledge that there needs to be more research done in this area. We've got better climate-study technology and computer simulation capability than we did in the 1980s, let's target it on this threat.

Desmond Ball of the Australian Nat'l University argues even more specifically that even a full-scale war hitting both cities and strategic weapons sites, which Ball estimates at 4140 to 4650 MT, would throw up less smoke than Sagan's nuclear winter threshold of 100 million tons, largely because of where those missile silos are -- in farmfields and tundra, not forest.

Obviously, I'm not citing him to downplay nuclear war's horrors. Even without nuclear winter, it would be by far the worst calamity to have ever hit mankind, and for that reason, I'm still in favor of banning the bomb.

My guess is that a full-scale nuclear holocaust would actually leave most people alive in the short-term, but hundreds of millions, if not billions, would not survive the social, economic, and agricultural disruption, radiation, temporary loss of the ozone layer, diseases, and other problems that can reasonably be expected after such a catastrophe, even if the temperature change is minimal. (Imagine what shape Europe or Japan would've been in for years after WW2 if the US had not created the Marshall Plan. That's the catch -- global nuclear war isn't likely to leave anyone untouched, even nations that don't get bombed, simply due to the nature of fallout and our world's high level of economic interconnectedness.) But I suspect humans will still be here long term, reduced in numbers and cultural complexity and possibly permanently unable to regain today's level of technology, science, and the possibility of reaching the stars.

Pandemic

I can't claim to have anything resembling detailed knowledge of this subject, since I'm not a doctor and have no medical experience of any sort. But as a layman with some knowledge of history, I noticed a couple of things that seemed a little out of whack. In one place, they claim the 1918 Flu Pandemic "killed only 3% of those who caught it." That figure didn't ring true ... but it was. If anything, it was higher than the actual percentage (I came up with about 2.5%). The New England Journal of Medicine reports that "the pandemic of 1918 and 1919 killed 50 million to 100 million people" worldwide. NPR adds, "About 25 percent of the population was infected, with perhaps 650,000 people dying from the virus." At that time, US population was about 104,550,000.

According to the same NEJM article, "more than half the deaths occurred among largely healthy people between 18 and 40 years of age and were caused by a virus-induced cytokine storm (see diagram) that led to the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). ...If we translate the rate of death associated with the 1918 influenza virus to that in the current population, there could be 1.7 million deaths in the United States and 180 million to 360 million deaths globally."

The show also notes that smallpox & other germs could be used as weapons. In its present state, the show said, smallpox kills about 30% of its victims -- a significantly higher rate than the 1918 Flu. Under some circumstances, it's even more deadly -- some evidence suggests the death rate among the biologically unprotected Native American population exceeded 65%.

Climate Change

This was an unfortunate mixture of mostly good spoken fact and grossly misleading imagery. Most obvious was when they spoken of sea level rising if Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melt -- 20 feet individually, 40 feet together. That's a pretty severe rise, one that would (as their sources, which includes climatologists and Al Gore, said) inundate south Florida, southern Louisiana, Bangladesh, parts of Manhattan and possibly London, and many other coastal areas. but teh graphics shown at teh same time exaggerated the flooding immensely: they showed blue covering over half of FLorida, huge stretches of the UK, and even mountainous regions of Southeast Asia and Africa far from the coasts.

As TV studios know quite well, people pay far more attention to images than words, a fact that makes such a presentation a major league disservice to the work the scientists are doing. By so exaggerating a threat that is serious enough on its own, it only provides ammunition to the very naysayers the show largely (and accurately) discounted verbally.

Instead of hyped up graphics of biblical proportions, they should have taken the time to show realistic maps of the potential sea level rise, scenery from areas that are already seeing problems, etc. Among those available are these ones from the EPA (note that they only show a 3.5 m rise), or go to places like this (USGS) or any decent topographic map of seashore regions and figure it out yourself from the contours.

Messing things up even after the end

The Long Tomorrow, by Leigh Brackett (1955; **** of 5)
A Gift Upon the Shore, by M.K. Wren (1990; **** of 5)
A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959; ***1/2 of 5)
Swan Song, by Robert R. McCammon (1987; *** of 5)
The Stand, by Stephen King (1990; ** of 5)

Religion plays a major, even inordinate, role in many conceptions of what life might be like after civilization collapses. That, of course, surprises no one. One factor in why armageddon in any form is a threat is that fundamentalist dogma says it basically has to happen for their doctrine to be fulfilled. To prove their way is the only "right" way, they promote massive destruction, although not always actively.

McCammon's Swan Song is probably the most obvious example of this I've ever read, possibly exceeded only by Stephen King's The Stand. Both of these lengthy tomes have strongly dualistic themes, with rampaging inhuman evil leading human evil in an effort to kill off the last of human hope. King's version is overtly Christian in tone, even to the point of having the evil forces based in Las Vegas, while McCammon's has almost a pagan feel, with its focus on a girl who can grow plants magically, an obvious mother goddess image. The main evil character in both is almost identical, right down to his ability to shapeshift, making me wonder if one inspired the other.

An interesting element of Swan Song, though, is a key good character's blatant rejection of the fundamentalist insanity -- literally. Sister, a former NYC street person, starts off being incredibly delusional, ranting to everyone passing by that "the Rapture" would be a wonderful thing. Appropriately enough, she calls herself Sister Creep at that time. Although she never remembers her real name, after the bombs fall, she does remember what happened to her to cause her madness and realizes the whole concept of "Rapture" is crap. Despite the existence of evil, nobody's coming down to swoop the good guys into a wonderful other world -- the only wonderful world that'll exist is if good people create it themselves.

That latter theme is sort of echoed in both Wren and Brackett, but in a different way. In both, a small element of society is trying to save the science and printed wisdom of our civilization ... to the great horror and religious opposition of the majority. Wren's tale is a microcosm of Brackett's -- it focuses on just one group of people, with two who want to save books and teach the children to think opposing several who believe all books are evil except the Holy Babble. The fact that the two skeptics are women in a very patriarchal cult and possibly lesbian lovers (that's never clearly stated, but definitely suggested) creates an extra level of tension.

In Brackett, the fundamentalist impulse reigns supreme, in the form of New Mennonites who overtly reject the science and cities of 20th Century America. The book has a good point that a back-to-simplicity mindset would indeed be a survival trait in the decades after WW3, but coupling that with venomous, Babble-quoting lynchings of people even suspected of harboring scientific devices or ideas is not. They go so far as to pass a 30th Amendment to the US Constitution banning all communities of over 1,000 people or 200 buildings. (Brackett writes one of the few post-WW3 books that postulates a new dark age in which the US survives as a country; in this case, our society is dropped back into the 18th or 19th Century.)

Brackett's New Mennonites would fit right into the Simplification envisioned by Miller: rampaging mobs of self-described "simpletons" murder the vast majority of educated people, then even literate folks, and burn any books they can in their anger at the folks they blame for WW3. That Simplification, however, doesn't specifically have a religious motive; in fact, the whole point of the book is that the Catholic church helps save what knowledge it can.

The irony there, however, is subtle -- the key character spurring the creation of the monastic order of "bookleggers and memorizers" is a scientific, secular Jew (the title character) later canonized for alleged miracles having nothing to do with his eforts to save knowledge. Furthermore, although the monks don't hide the material they slavishly copy over the centuries, they don't actively share or utilize it either. In 3074, the monks have had the printing press for a century ... largely becasue an abbot 500 years earlier specifically rejected a proposal to build one as unnecessary because there was no market for cheap books. (Never mind the fact that cheap books would have made it possible to educate people more easily; in 3074, there's a line noting that the village of Sanly Bowitts has the "fantastic literary rate of eight percent" despite being just a few miles from the abbey and its 100% literacy rate.)

That kind of dogmatic foot-dragging is common in Miller's chronicle. In fact, I'd say organized religion's strength (when not being used to promote hostility) is it's ability to preserve the past when the average level of society is low, but it is largely ineffectual at dealing with the present or promoting a healthy future when average people are educated. The browbeating that works on the ignorant only annoys and turns off the educated, but many churches cannot adapt effectively to cultural change, and tend to speak with a voice of unreason cloaked as "morality."

Toward the end, we see references to the Pope praying for peace as another nuclear war threatens a re-established global civilization that has progressed beyond ours technologically (including space colonies) ... but doing nothing to actually prevent war. Instead of criticizing people for their behavior, how about promoting the common ground humans share regardless of nationality? Had the Church done THAT over the centuries, there probably wouldn't be a threat of global war (Miller's future war OR modern war).

"Ill Wind"

Authors: Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason
Apocalypse Type: Economic collapse
Rating: **1/2 (of 5)

********

This is a plague novel, but not your typical one. There's no mad scientist-produced virus that wipes out 99% of humanity as in The Stand or Earth Abides. Instead a bacteria called Prometheus attacks the underpinnings of our economy directly, by consuming oil and many oil-based products.

Most of us don't realize just how many oil-based products we rely on in everday life, and this book's ever-expanding list of affected products is just a drop in the ocean. Just looking around me now, I see a lot: the computer I'm writing on, maybe the desk that supports it, the CDs I'm hearing, the phone, file crates, maybe the chair I'm in, my glasses lenses, the window moulding, the vacuum cleaner, various wiring, the potato chip bag, the window blinds, maybe the wallpaper, the paint & varnishes, the cat box & dishes, the broom...

And that's just the things I can see at the moment, never mind the dozens of things around me that aren't oil-based themselves, but required oil in some stage of their creation or shipment: my notebooks and books, beer glass, wooden furniture, metal file cabinets, etc. (For a longer but still incomplete list, see this site.)

Since I could probably list almost everything I own in one of these two groups, if this happened, I'd have to change lifestyles VERY fast. No more blog, no more freelance journalism, no more Echo & the Bunnymen, no more electric doo-dads, and some very blurry vision. I could probably salvage the beer, but I'd have to make it myself, and since I've never done that, it would be some pretty bad swill at first, I imagine...

Of course, causing such an economic meltdown wasn't the intent of Prometheus... or was it? As a desperate solution to an oil spill worse than Exxon Valdez, in a much more public locale (San Francisco Bay), Prometheus is sprayed on the water to eat the oil slick. It works. Too well.

That's entirely plausible, since we have developed bacteria that break down pollution -- the still controversial process is called bioremediation. In fact, most of the book's science is plausible, including the efforts of some survivors to restore an experimental solar station in NM that receives power beamed down by satellite daily. We have some of the technology to do that.

The book's portrayal of martial law being imposed in cities (with some revolting against it) to control urban chaos is also quite probable, although the authors generally skirt the issue of what that chaos would actually look like. The fact that such martial law might breed a "Napoleon of the Apocalypse" like General Bayclock, who brutalizes Albuquerque in the name of restoring order, is also possible. Although they mention that characters expect urban fires and looting, etc, none of the characters actually experience such things except to portray Bayclock's viciousness; in most cases, the characters escape the cities all too easily.

Also realistic: a government in Washington that thinks it has control but in fact does not. Violent local attacks on people the attackers blame for the crisis (in this case, the oil company). Brief mentions of overseas hostility to US representatives (including the stranded president) as the oil plague spreads around the world. Disparate communities forming to survive semi-independently, some of them very agrarian, some seeking to restore what tech they can.

One thing these communities have that seems a little questionable is the "Atlantis Network," a network of shortwave radio communications. Don't such radios use petroleum-based components (at least, if they're not decades old) and need electricity? The latter could be created in several ways that don't require oil; the former might be harder to come by. It could happen, but I doubt it would spring up so quickly.

Also questionable is the fact that two Navy pilots are flying across AZ when Prometheus consumes their fuel and their planes explode upon crashing. Common sense says that fighter jets flying across the US wouldn't be armed, and without those weapons, how do you explode without fuel?!?

Unfortunately, once we get beyond the science, there are some problems. Many of the characters are one-dimensional stereotypes or have no character at all, with repetition of their full name, title or a slogan replacing any real development. The Mayor of Albuquerque is the most obvious example: despite the fact that he must've had enough personality and leadership skills to get elected, he's totally spineless, with only the repetition of his title giving him any legitimacy at all. Gen. Bayclock is the other extreme: a caricature of what "liberals" see in military figures, a very unsympathetic bastard who hates scientists and other "weenies," a catagory that includes anyone who tries to question him. (Was he modeled on Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe?!?) Sgt. Morris is a stereotype of military women, lacking any semblance of femininity or even intelligent thought, and most of the other military people are just there.

Todd Severyn, one of the heroes, is a semi-steretyped cowboy/oilman; the authors mention that he regrets his role in spraying Prometheus, but we don't actually see it in his behavior. He escapes to an old hippie commune/farm, but is repeatedly portrayed as criticizing them as "weird" or "loony" despite the fact that they are farming and he spends a lot of time riding around rather than helping. (The whole commune's protrayl is itself conflicted: the authors note it has been surviving off the land for years, yet the group spends a lot of energy trying to pull together the "last big rock concert," so we learn nothing about how they farm.) In fact, there's little or no psychological exploration of the characters at all, except, to some degree, with the tanker's captain -- he at least is protrayed as having changed from a voluble guy to a taciturn one and trying to hide his identity due to guilt/responsibility for the oil spill, which he didn't actually cause.

It would've been a lot better if the authors kept us guessing who he was until he re-encountered the spill's cause, Connor Brooks, who is portrayed as having absolutely no redeeming qualities and no sense of responsibility. By the second time he was mentioned, I hated him, far more than Bayclock, who at least had a warped sense of duty motivating him. There are such people, but even sociopaths aren't usually quite so obviously self-centered assholes as this guy is.

Come on. Having minor characters be one-dimensional is expected in a book, and I understand that getting too psychological can slow down the flow of the story. But having almost everyone be a caricature of a real person becomes trying.

So, too, is the ultimate plotline: barbarian with real military training gets defeated by civilized (mostly) civilian heroes who travel all over the place and somehow manage to avoid starving, or, in this case, dehydrating to death. (They do, after all, cross the deserts of the Southwest....) There are way too many of those plots in apocalyptic lit; see for example, The Stand, Swan Song, or Wrath of God, to name a few. I'd much rather see an exploration of what it might take to survive such a crisis, the variety of communities that develop, and how people adapt to the changes.