FOOLS! I will destroy you all!

Greetings!

I trust all of us are prepared for the upcoming End Of The World? Yay! I don’t have to Xmas shop this year!

It’s  not the first time people have predicted the end of the world!   Impressive list, which Wiki says is not exhaustive!

Washington was worried that the first nuclear test would ignite the atmosphere. That was actually dis-proven BEFORE Washington even knew about it.

A doomsday bomb is actually possible. And once a country has successfully tested a two stage device, it has the knowledge to make a bomb with as many stages as it wishes. Three stages gets you to 100mt, but the Soviet’s 50mt test used lead rather than U238 in the tamper, cutting the yield in half and enabling the drop plane to get clear of the blast.

The Large Hadron Collider was also predicted to destroy the world.  Someone actually filed a lawsuit against it. If it had really been a world ending threat, the judge said

And even if he had established a credible threat of harm, the judge noted that the U.S. has no control over the operation of the LHC, which is owned, managed and controller entirely by CERN. “The U.S. government enjoys only observer status on the CERN council, and has no control over CERN or its operations,” the judge wrote. “Accordingly, the alleged injury, destruction of the Earth, is in no way attributable to the U.S. government’s failure to draft an environmental impact statement.”

I feel safer.

Halley’s comet was predicted to wipe us out in 1910. Not by impact, but by the cyanide detected in the tail. We actually passed through the tail. Nobody died.

We could get a magnitude 10 quake. With a Tsunami to match.

This doesn’t mean we don’t have any actual potential end of the world scenarios. None of them are killing us yet, but alarms are already ringing.

Here’s a map of radiation levels around Fuku. You may need to use google translate. Notice the large area with no data south and west of the reactors? Not sayin’ nuthin, just sayin. Remember, they’ve paved over ocean bottom to prevent radiation spread? That was a year ago and they’re still leaking radioactive water. And they’re running out of places to put the radioactive water they’ve managed to store. Still, the good news is that TEPCO has moved up the start date for emptying SPF#4 to November, 2013 and they think they’ll finish in Dec 2014. I think they’re assuming those fuel rods are in better shape than I think they are. They are also very optimistic about earthquakes.

GMO corn cannot be regarded as safe, says one disputed study. Industry is hitting back at it, but remember the results haven’t yet been reproduced. Still, interesting.

Britan’s official position: Might as well put GMO in the stores since it’s really already there.

The arctic is melting faster than thought. Really good article, with some maps. Greenland ice sheet melting broke records this year. This is really bad, as that Ice sheet will raise sea levels where the arctic ice cap won’t. And get this: Antarctic melting hasn’t contributed as much as we thought to sea level rise. So we still have that to look forward to.

And don’t forget, in the name of science we’ve genetically engineered bird flu to make it air contagious amongst humans. It even scared the scientists working on it. Genetic engineering is complicated, but enough has been published that anybody already doing genetic engineering could do this.

Survival Stew:

Large can Tunafish

Can of Hershey’s syrup.

Can of sauerkraut.

Can of Fruit cocktail.

Can of green beans.

Mix, eat survive. Supposedly a recipe from the US Navy Survival school Coronado, Calif. Can anybody confirm or refute?

Twinkies are dead, but pot is legal. It’s  the apocalypse, I tell you!

Boxturtle (The best we can hope for is to be eaten first)