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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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Editor's note: This is the introductory article for the September 2010 special issue "The End".
Once again, the world is about to end. The latest source of doomsday dread comes courtesy of the ancient Mayans, whose calendar runs out in 2012, as interpreted by a cadre of opportunistic authors and blockbuster movie directors. Not long before, three separate lawsuits charged that the Large Hadron Collider would seed a metastasizing black hole under Lake Geneva. Before that, captains of industry shelled out billions preparing for the appearance of two zeros in the date field of computer programs too numerous to count; left alone, this tick of the clock would surely have shaken modern civilization to its foundations.
You might think that the enterprise of science, with its method and its facts, would inoculate us against the most extravagant doomsday obsessions. But it doesn’t. If anything, it just gives us more to worry about.
Some of the most fervent and convincing doomsayers, after all, are scientists. Bill Joy, co-founder and former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, has warned that of out-of-control nanobots could consume everything on earth. Astronomer Royal Martin Rees has publicly offered a bet that a biological catastrophe—accidental or intentional—will kill at least one million people by 2020 (so far, no takers). Numerous climatologists sound the alarm about the possibility of runaway global warming. They all stand on the shoulders of giants: British economist Thomas Malthus predicted in the 19th century that the rise in population would lead to widespread famine and catastrophe. It never happened, but that didn’t stop Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich from renewing the warning in his 1968 book The Population Bomb when he predicted that global famine was less than two decades away. Catastrophe didn’t arrive then, either, but does that mean it never will? Not necessarily. Still, people often worry disproportionately about disasters that are unlikely to occur.
Science may be a culprit, but it also offers some explanation for why we can be so fearful. Some researchers think that apocalyptic dread feeds off our collective anxiety about events that lie outside our individual control. The fear of nuclear war and environmental decay that gripped the nation in the 1960s was a big factor in the rise of the counterculture, says John R. Hall, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis, and author of Apocalypse: From Antiquity to the Empire of Modernity. In this decade, civilization has suffered through even more fundamental threats. “After events like 9/11 and the Great Recession, as well as technological disasters like the BP oil spill, people begin to wonder—not just people who are fringe zealots or crazies—whether modern society is any longer capable of solving its problems,” Hall says. If the world appears to be going to hell, goes the thinking, perhaps that’s just what is happening.
The impulse is partially a consequence of our pattern-seeking nature—we are, after all, creatures of the savanna, programmed to uncover trends in the natural world. It is in our nature to weave a simple story from a complex set of data points. (In recent years this tendency has been amplified by news media that are very good at turning complex events into cartoon crises.) The desire to treat terrible events as the harbinger of the end of civilization itself also has roots in another human trait: vanity.
We all believe we live in an exceptional time, perhaps even a critical moment in the history of the species. Technology appears to have given us power over the atom, our genomes, the planet—with potentially dire consequences. This attitude may stem from nothing more than our desire to place ourselves at the center of the universe. “It’s part of the fundamental limited perspective of our species to believe that this moment is the critical one and critical in every way—for good, for bad, for the final end of humanity,” says Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego. Imagining the end of the world is nigh makes us feel special.
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43 Comments
Add CommentIs this the "end" of summer vacation for SA writers? When will we see articles related to SA's charter?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks to the destructive nature of the Spaniards and the religious zealots who accompanied them when they met the Mayans and destroyed their libraries and wiped out the greatest majority of their population with disease, we now have limited knowledge of what they spoke of that will probably happen to the earth during its new 26,000 year cycle. The Mayan did not predict the end of time or the earth - just the beginning of a new earth cycle and what usually happens within that cycle. We know that the earth tilts one degree every 72 years and it always gets warmer or colder in different locations with each tilt and we know what these changes in temperatures do to some animals and other life forms - like vegetation. The desert in northern Africa, about half way through the tilt, 180 degrees or 13,000 years will turn back into a tropical oasis. This is a proven fact and it is this that the Mayan wrote about in their journals. They aren't trying to scare the be'Jesus out of us, just telling us what has happened before.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese other people, scientists and Al Gore, are using scare tactics to bring our attention to certain things we are doing that may produce a catastrophe event if we don't stop doing it. They use scare tactics because it is the only thing that gets thoughtless people to pay attention. A good example of these 'thoughtless thinking people' is the government in West Virginia. They have lived around the extraction of coal and natural gas so long that they can no longer see its destructive nature and the extraction and use of these fossil fuels is destroying the state and the health of the people living there. If they are not scared or threatened into taking a look at what they are doing, they will continue in what they are doing until they completely destroy their habitat and health and the health of everyone around them.
Thanks for the fresh perspective and analysis. A lot of debunking has required that a "reductio ad absurdum" tactic precede it. Many of the ancient wisdom cultures were excellent observers, and recorded phenomena that science has insisted on re-discovering through its own devices.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAn odd way to frame warnings of catastrophe. It's perfectly fair to suggest that it's part of human nature to fear apocalyptic events, just as it is to seek patterns in randomness or become involved in community. But these are human nature for a reason. Perhaps a sense of impending doom is necessary in certain situations to overcome complacency that might come with a misunderstanding of potential dangers. If people all over the world had not been overwhelmed by the concern of possible extension during the Cold War, there may have been a nuclear war with dire consequences. Even now this concern has to be constantly reinforced.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSimilarly, to compare the valid raising of awareness of the appropriate sense of alarm concerning climate change with mystic tales of Armageddon is poor judgment. While the two may spring from the same human trait, climate change deserves the attention as much as the possibility for nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic.
In cases where their are serious concerns, it's just as dangerous to ignore the natural urge to fear impending doom as it is to ignore the need to eat or sleep. It's just not as immediate, so there must be strong feelings associated.
I hope that Scientific American continues to publish important articles on the science of climate change and its dangerous implications.
26,000 year cycle? 180% tilt?? And the Mayans had all that documented and understood?? How many of these cycles must their civilization have lasted for to be able to identify the cycle? 4, 5, 6 cycles worth? What kind of technology musy they have had to record and compute that?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou've GOT to be kidding!
Can you people get it through your heads:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe planet we live on has a proper name, that name being Earth, which is capitalized, please stop denigrating it by referring to it as "earth". We aren't talking about soil or dirt we are talking about the only known planet to harbor life, so please get it right.
We are all doomed
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thislarry
The Mayans were clearly centuries ahead of anyone else in their understanding of astronomy and were obsessed with the heavens and night sky.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat said, I would be highly surprised if they knew anything about 26,000 year cycles in which the earth's axis tilted at predictable changing angles to the sun.
That said, I understand the Mayans had their own version of the iPhone and it was flash compatible.
Conversely, by lumping all potentially catastrophic hazards into a single category, psychological analysis can be used to dismiss all as irrational fear. How comforting to have so much faith in science and humanity. After all, I'm sure nothing can go wrong.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"BobTBuilder", I don't want to call you stupid or a lazy researcher or anything, but the Mayan probably only lived through the same "earth cycle" we have lived through. In the four books we have of the ancient Mayan, they show a spaceship that looked like the old Buck Rogers spaceship with an astronaut wearing the same kind of spacesuit our astronauts wear today - watch the History channel. When you realize how they were able to draw a picture like that, then you may come to realize how they were able to describe the other events that happen in each new "earth cycle". I don't want to sound like I am making fun of your understanding, but, you will probably even start to believe that the Alantians were, and probably will be again, a real race of people on this planet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOK, regarding detection of 26,000 year cycles, etc., our own observational data spans only a very few hundred years, yet we are aware of the Solar system's (not the Earth's) 26,000 year cyclic alignment with the galactic plane.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe have been able to calculate that cycle based on our knowledge of physics and the meticulous records or our astronomical observations. Unfortunately there is no surviving documentation of any mathematical methods or detailed observational data that the Mayans could have used to predict this cycle. To my limited knowledge, the end date of their calendar could have simply randomly coincided with this galactic alignment, as it is not specifically referred to in their surviving literature.
"JamesDavis," I don't want to call you stupid or a lazy researcher or anything, but that's kind of how you are portraying yourself. Bobs point was that the Mayans would have had to lived through at least 2 or 3 of those 26,000 year "cycles" in order to detect a pattern. Obviously they did not so they could not. If you're talking about the depiction of the ancient ruler, Pacal, with some typical Mayan iconography as a "Buck Rogers spaceship" then you obviously have an agenda. Who, in their right minds (which may or may not be your problem here), would say that depiction looks like a Buck Rogers spaceship? It has zero resemblance to any known or theoretically possible spacecraft. Wishful thinking on your part. Please don't believe everything you see on the History channel. Do your own homework and try to apply a dose of critical thinking the next time you watch or read anything in which someone who is often labeled a "crank" is involved.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStrangel - Not to disagree with your other comments, but 'we' are aware of a 26ky cycle even though we have not been observing the galactic plane for 2-3 of those cycles, as explained above.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYeah, not my comment. That was Bobs comment. I was just pointing out that JamesDavis misunderstood BobtBuilder. Thank you, though, JT.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStrangel - Sorry I misunderstood. Thanks for clarifying!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree, why does Sci Am publish this drivel? Does this author really think we DON'T have global famine? The only thing that saved Malthus and Ehrlich temporarily was the "Big Ag" takeover accompanied by poisonously grown artificial food that may be even worse than famine in the long run. (I hust read a SciAm essay on the poisoning of the oceans.) Every technology breeds disaster as well as benefit.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut--I suppose this author listens to the smily faces on TV news for whom nothing can psosibly go wrong with Modern Western Civilization (especially in the "perfect" Unired States), or the TV ranters who think environmental crises like global warming are a crock but preach imminent "communism" from one of recent history's most conservative presidents.
Idiots, all!
The whole argument against climate change is broken down to a wild sense of paranoia and a wish. It seems that the author bends over backwards to stress the point using historical facts and a means to prove the point that we are "suckers" for our own egos. Climate Change is not real and is only a figment of ones sick imagination or perversion. Really band things are nicely tucked away in the far reaches of fiction where all of the really bad things happen. When the author states that "people" worry to much about event that will never occur. It is true that futurists have tried to predict the future and absolutely no success, but what is the point of the whole article. No flying cars. No trip to Mars. No nuclear powered ovens.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDon't worry be happy. Don't worry. Be happy! If you feel that the world is about to end, just face it with a big fat grin, so don't worry be happy. Remember Mad Max and you'll be fine, so don't worry be happy. Glaciers melt and the seas will rise, but don't worry be happy.
The end is always near. It is always the end times. Infinity surrounds us each with heaven and hell in mixed proportions. It's up to us as individuals. This idea that there is only one world around all of us is kind of nutty. Each person has their own world, their own heaven or hell. Our nature is to extrapolate the world we see, that which is a reflection of ourselves, and extend it as being true for everyone else.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTime holds the secrets that keep the truth hidden from us. Time is not just one dimensional, it has width too.
The articil says a lot about the writter because the writter thinks we humans will last forever, when other millions of organisms didnt make it But there again we humans will bring upon or own death.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJames:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks to the destructive nature of the English (mainly) most Native American Indians were simply exterminated. Those who survived and their descendants (the rightful owners of what is today the U.S. of A.) survive in ''reservations'' (concentration camps).
Look out for the beam in thine own eye.
Julio Rivas-Pita
(Proudly Spaniard)
You sir "unlike" the article appear to be of rational mind.....and not just extrapolating a bunch of "scientific" jargon......and or bullshit!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMauro
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAsk yourself the question raised by Enrico Fermi more than 60 years ago "Where are they?"
This is known as the Fermi paradox, that no one has adressedd properly.
Maurop
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAsk yourselves the same question raised by Enrico Fermi, more than 60 years ago: "Where are they?"
This became to be known as the Fermi Paradox, not satisfactorily responded so far.
After the Sun has begun to expand into a red giant, the descendants of humankind will have to take drastic measures to survive. One measure is to colonize space and other worlds. Another is to move Earth out to a higher orbit from the Sun. That could be accomplished by moving the Moon, using its gravity as tow line. Thrusters could be attached to the Moon. They would be unimpeded by atmosphere, and problems such as air pollution would not be a concern.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisit's not about science but how some scientific facts and research are used by the media.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thissome reasons why that article is misleading the facts about science
The first 2 examples in the article are not even really science (Mayan 2012 and the Swiss black hole), and rather good example how media with a mix of ignorance and opportunism used some information in a very misleading ways.
About Malthus predictions, they didn't come true mainly for 4 reasons:
1. two devastating world wars
2. pandemics (e.g. Spanish flu 1918)
3. increase in food production tech (e.g. chemical fertilizers)
4. population control (e.g. 1 child per family in China)
Given the fact that it was all destryed, as you so bitterly but accurately point out, wouldn't you agree that everything about what they may or may not have known is pure and simple - and undeniable - speculation?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd wouldn't you agree that your own attitude is just another example of this relish on theories of the apocalypse and other eschatological 'views'?
Anything that does not rely on science (=knowledge) appears to me as simple hysteria-inducing, scaremongering old wives tales. Or else just fictions of apocalypse. Going full circle.
Given the fact that it was all destryed, as you so bitterly but accurately point out, wouldn't you agree that everything about what they may or may not have known is pure and simple - and undeniable - speculation?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd wouldn't you agree that your own attitude is just another example of this relish on theories of the apocalypse and other eschatological 'views'?
Anything that does not rely on science (=knowledge) appears to me as simple hysteria-inducing, scaremongering old-wives tales. Or else just fictions of apocalypse. Going full circle.
Our new source of scientific knowledge: the History Channel.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAfter all, who needs libraries...? Who needs proper science and research and learning? Let's all whatch telly.
Yes, the Mayans definitily had iPhones and used flash... among other things, obviously.
Three cheers for James Davis! I am a native West Virginian, and the child of over 9 generations of West Virginians ... and I can vouch for everything he says about West Virginia. It's one of the saddest cases of the ruin of our world by greed that you will ever find!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"A biological catastrophe will kill at least one million people by 2020". Well our failure to provide available treatments for malaria, TB and Aids, not to mention deliver clean water or safe natal care are pretty catastrophic and are killing more than ten times that every year.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe doomsday apopalytic scenarios are especially popular in western mind. The Japanese have no "Terminator" type equivelent and our apopolytic movies are a bit puzzling to them. India has the continuing cycle or rebirth and transcendence. Perhaps all cultures share a desire to understand what happens after we pass on, but the doomsday fear of death and destruction of the universe.... that belongs to us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thislacnss - In the 1950s, not long after we unleashed the horrible nuclear monster on Japan (they has also been horrible), they were obsessed with the Godzilla series of giant monster movies. I was confused by them as a child until I realized that they may represent the horrible nuclear holocaust.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot to give credence to any perceived Mayan prophecy, if I recall the end of their calendar should have marked the fourth end of humanity. The Mayans also recognized a cycle of human reformation.
The Western fascination with apocalypse is most likely related to the teaching of the Christian Bible's Book of Revelation.
I really don't think the idea of an apocalypse far fetched and if I had to choose I would rather take my chances with nature.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI can't say that I have too much confidence in the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction either, since someone always comes along for whom any amount of lives is dispensible.
One can only imagine what would have happened had Hitler's scientist discovered the A-bomb first, and now with today's weapons capable of far greater MADness around, I seriously hope that we secure the inmates less one of them take over the asylum.
Now it's global warming. Not that temperatures haven't risen a few tenths on that we can all agree. But the silly doomsday scenarios being rammed down our throats by Al Gore and his NGO handlers, as well as, every company who things they can make a buck buy scaring the pants off the ignorant masses.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI just finished reading Chris Impey's book "How it Ends" Lots of good information done with a good sense of humor. (Same theme as this special annual edition). My interests are in cosmology, which Impey's book and this edition covers very well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere's no question of "the world" ie planet Earth coming to an end, at least not until our Sun gets into its red giant phase in 7-10 billion years. Our own species will go extinct presumably long before that. Eventually biological diversity will return to pre-human levels.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJamesDavis you seem to have the Mayans mixed up with the Wikipedians.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat you are talking about is extrapolation and the enthused deductions of enthralled Mayan lovers- NOT "proven facts" as you not only suggest but emphatically state.
Personally, I find it interesting that you want to credit ancient people about whom we realistically know very, very little with "factual" omnipotent knowledge.
The world might not be ending anytime soon, but the American empire just might. The risk of a world changing nuclear attack on America is a lot higher than you think.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow would one know a nuclear attack is likely?
For starters, look to history. There are the three Es of war: Empires in decline, economic volatility and ethnic conflict. America is clearly in decline, there is the global economic crisis (Affecting Russia and China too) and conflict in the Middle East (Israel vs its neighbors plus Iran).
What about the cycles of war?
A couple of historians noted that America runs into a major crisis every 80 to 100 years: American Revolution, Civil War and Depression plus World War II. The current crisis period started in 2005 and runs until 2025. If our current pain level is a 2, then it will reach 10 before everything has played out.
The factors present right before World War I are present today: A weakened superpower, powerful rivals, weak alliances, terror sponsoring countries and terrorist organizations. The first three represent the possibility of war. The last two provide the catalyst for war.
Understanding how complex systems collapse will show how the further you get from the last crisis, then the closer you are to the next one. Wars, economies, forests, sandpiles, earthquakes and a lot more systems follow the power law. The power law implies that suppressing small and intermediate collapses only brings much bigger ones.
Think about how firemen can put a forest system on the expressway to a supercritical collapse by putting out every fire. The same applies to our economy and war.
Want to know more? Follow me at http://www.1913intel.com
I'm glad to read an article like this, but at the same time, given the content of SciAm in the past 4 years, I'd have to issue you a citation for backpedaling, you proselytizers of Global Warming.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAt the same time, think of all the people with terminal diseases. Seriously, wouldn't you be happier if you had six months to live, but the rest of the world had five?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think I like apocalyptic literature, film & predictions, because deep down, every time I walk out my door and see the perfect world our dumb species is ruining, I look forward to the removal of humans from it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe apocalyps has not come for us but it has come for many other species and we call this the Anthropocene, and it is caused bu mankind.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was going to post a comment about the end. But, it's now the 22nd and, as we are all well aware, the WORLD ENDED yesterday.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo I guess, it's never mind.