Game
Over Quakes, asteroids, mass extinction — when
the end comes, will it come from below, above
or within? By GENDY ALIMURUNG
No matter how you work out the endgame in your
head, humans are destined for extinction: Apocalypse
is built in to the human condition. Science,
which defines and quantifies the heft of that
apocalypse, is all about control — in naming
the beast, it suggests, we gain power over it.
So how do we prevent it? And what does apocalypse
actuallymean in a real-world context?
In Los Angeles, partly, it means earthquakes.
It means the fear of The Big One that will shake
the land until the entire West Coast breaks off
like a cracker into the ocean. Luckily, in California
we have not just one but two motherly, reassuring “Earthquake
Lady” scientists to chase the nightmare
scenario away. “Southern California will
certainly experience more earthquakes similar
to the 1857 Fort Tejon and 1906 San Francisco
earthquakes,” says Caltech seismologist
Kate Hutton. “Those quakes both had magnitudes
in the upper 7s, probably 7.8 or 7.9.” If
the big quake happens during a Santa Ana wind
season, she says, fires are inevitable, and the
response will not be as fast as it normally is.
If it happens during the rainy season, mudslides
will complicate matters. But the biggest problems
may come from disruption of the infrastructure:
roads, water mains, power lines.
In her office at Caltech, Lucy Jones of the
U.S. Geological Survey talks about the possibility
of an earthquake causing damage of the magnitude
that occurred in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. “Oh,
yeah,” she says, “we can be a lot
worse than that. Our worst-case scenario doesn’t
happen very often, but if we put a magnitude
7.5 under downtown L.A., which will happen at
some point geologically speaking, you can imagine
the damage.” There are 300 faults running
through Southern California capable of a magnitude
6. Of those, a hundred run through the Los Angeles
metropolitan area. The longest single fault we
have, the San Andreas, is capable of producing
a magnitude 8. (Northridge was a 6.7.) Earthquakes
can even start on one fault and jump to another.
The largest quake ever recorded was a 9.5, in
Chile.
Jones, whose messy desk looks as if an earthquake
has just hit, has run chains of seismometers
up and down the Los Angeles River and set off
explosions to see the geological structures below.
Deaths result from the magnitude of the quake,
the proximity of people to it, and the age of
the buildings in the area. In Los Angeles, we
model what will happen only to the biggest buildings
in an earthquake. And we definitely don’t
do full-size “shake tables” in L.A.,
in which an entire building is put on a table
that shakes. It costs too much. The Japanese
spent $600 million on theirs. “Will the
perfect storm happen in my lifetime?” Jones
says. “It’s hard to say. I’m
getting older, so chances are it won’t.
By definition the perfect storm is something
that doesn’t happen very often. I’m
over 50. I could live another 50 years, but that’s
not that long in geologic years.” Given
that at some point a big earthquake has to happen,
and she’s studied it her whole life, Jones
says she’d like to live to see it.
Death comes from above as well as from below.
The ancient Mayans, who knew what they were doing
sky-wise, kept a long-form calendar based on
the movement of the planets. The calendar stops
abruptly at the date December 21, 2012, the winter
solstice, as if they couldn’t be bothered
to track out the remaining days because there
would be none. With that in mind, I visit NASA’s
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena to seek
wisdom from Don Yeomans, director of the Near-Earth
Object Program, which monitors the comets and
asteroids that enter Earth’s neighborhood.
It is a sunny September morning — September
11, by coincidence, the anniversary of that day
when the end of the world seemed a grave possibility.
Yeomans is a tall, smiling, professorial fellow,
and I ask him what the probability is that a
large asteroid will hit Earth and kill us all.
“Slim to none,” says Yeomans, who
has been studying comets and asteroids for more
than 40 years. “When you say ‘large’ asteroid,
you’re talking about something that’s
a mile wide in diameter. Those events don’t
occur but every several million years. We get
hit by basketball-size asteroids daily. Volkswagen-size
asteroids come in twice a year. None of those
make it through Earth’s atmosphere. They
would have to be half the size of a football
field before they can make it through, and you
don’t expect those objects but about every
600 to 700 years or so.” Nevertheless,
he is keeping an eye on a short list of objects
for which he can’t rule out an impact,
but only because he hasn’t observed them
enough to be able to refine their orbit.
For instance, there’s a big chance (“About
3 percent,” says Yeomans, “which
is huge!”) we’ll get hit by the asteroid
Apophis, named after the Egyptian god of doom,
who lives in the eternally dark underground and
tries, nightly, to destroy the sun. Apophis will
more likely make a very close approach to Earth — lower
than some geosynchronous communications satellites — on
April 13, 2029. If it sneaks through a region
of space 600 miles across, a “keyhole,” then
it will return in seven years to hit Earth. But
the chances of that happening are only one in
45,000, and as they refine the asteroid’s
orbit, the chances will be even lower. Apophis
will simply be visible to the naked eye as a
graceful point of light moving across the night
sky.
In fact, if scientists find these Earth-impacting
objects early enough, 20 or 30 years prior to
impact, say, they can slow them down or speed
them up a tiny bit by hitting them with nukes
or by “running into” them to change
their trajectory. In 2005, NASA smashed the spacecraft
Deep Impact into a comet, basically to get a
closer look at the thing when it blew up.
Right now, five NASA-funded telescopes scan
the entire sky every two months. “We can
find the objects, we can track them, we can predict
where they’ll be in space and time,” Yeomans
says, “but if an object is found on an
Earth-threatening trajectory, it’s not
currently NASA’s responsibility to deal
with it. In fact, it hasn’t been determined
whose responsibility it is to deal with it. But
that’s being worked out.” Yeomans
leads the group of astronomers who compute impact
probabilities. “There’s four in the
group,” he counts on his fingers, “and
about two of us who work full time.”
“That seems like... not enough,” I
say. Yeomans laughs heartily.
Extinction is a natural phenomenon and occurs
at all levels. University of Michigan physicist
Mark Newman, who created a mathematical model
for mass extinction, tells us that the vast majority
of species become extinct within 10 million years
of their first appearance on the planet. We humans,
as a species, have been on the planet for about
200,000 years. So, all things being equal, we’ve
got a way to go.
But all things are not equal. There have been
five previous mass extinctions on the planet
(205 million, 250 million, 375 million and 440
million years ago) caused by big geophysical
events — supervolcanoes exploding, asteroids
hitting, major climate shifts. The dinosaurs
were the most recent of these mass die-offs.
Dinosaurs were extremely abundant and successful,
dominating the land ecosystem for 150 million
years. Then they disappeared. They are now icons
of extinction and evolution. I have always loved
going to the Natural History Museum and gazing
up in awe at the “Dueling Dinosaurs” in
the grand foyer, at a tyrannosaurus locked in
battle with a triceratops. An asteroid had the
last say on those guys. These days, humans are
causing the sixth wave of mass extinction, the
only species-driven — as opposed to natural-phenomenon-driven — extinction
in the history of the planet. And we’re
not even trying to stop the extinction. At this
point, we’re just trying to slow it down.
Harvard naturalist Edward O. Wilson estimated
a current extinction rate of about three species
an hour. Cheetahs, coral reefs, gorillas, tigers,
killer whales, rhinos, salamanders, sharks, sea
horses, you name it: If it’s cool and it’s
alive, it is probably going extinct. As last
year’s Biodiversity Summit in Australia
put it, “Life is ticking away.” There
are those in the scientific community who feel
there is a kind of snowball effect to extinction,
that once you head down that path, there is no
return. For each species, there is a point at
which it can never recover, when the numbers
of animals in a population are too few to sustain
it. I tried to look at the online Red List, the
official tally of threatened species published
by the World Conservation Union, just to get
a feel for what’s going on; finally gave
up because there were 41,415 entries.
Literally translated from the Greek, “apocalypse” means “lifting
the veil.” Or, the progress from one phase
of existence to another. Apocalypse in that nomenclature
signifies not so much the end of the world as
the end of an era. When the veil is lifted for
us, Homo sapiens will perhaps have evolved into
some new form of life that will study us and
be fascinated by us, in much the same way that
we study and are fascinated by our ancestors
Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalis. Now they
are even getting their own TV show soon by way
of their popular Geico commercials. Is the Zeitgeist
trying to tell us something?
I wonder, if this video holds proof,
what force we are giving off in the universe
by getting larger?
I mean,.. think about it.
Game
Over