olilolo blog

I was recently talking about how we were all doomed because basic stuff that we need to make things is rapidly running out. From rare elements used to make electrical devices right down to relatively common stuff like Zinc and Copper are dwindling at an alarmingly rapid rate.

I found this awesome chart which shows in simple graphic form all that I was trying to bludgeon you over the head with using clumsy words. Read and be afraid.

(Thanks to MightyGodKing for the link)

Up until now I’ve kind of avoided talking about Global Warming in this series, as it’s something which tends to attract fanatical debaters on both sides. People line up like rival armies, and like a war sometimes people’s arms get ripped off.

ABOVE: What each side in the climate change debate looks like to the other side.

But if you can accept the IDEA of global warming, that a fairly small rise in the overall temperature of the globe would result in the end of life as we know it, then we can proceed with today’s article. Okay?

So, scientists are now predicting that the world is on the way to a catastrophic six degree rise in temperature by the end of this century. If that doesn’t sound like much, think of the difference between a 24 degree day and a 30 degree one. Or, consider that many experts say as little as 2 degrees of change in the overall temperature of the world would be enough to permanently change the ecology of the planet.

This is, naturally, a problem. A change that large has impacts on every level of the ecosphere, from the tinest plants to the largest animals. And in between, looking nervous, humans.

A lot of people have the idea in their heads that “global warming” means that the seas will rise and everyone will be living in a world covered in water.

ABOVE: If only we had listened...

Fortunately it probably won’t be like that. Although it could possibly be that way for people living on small islands. But no one cares about those guys anyway.

ABOVE: No one cares.

In reality most of us will actually find it getting drier, as the temperature rises and previously sub-tropical areas become arid, while the tropics because so hot most of the wildlife literally couldn’t live there any more. It’d be like nature was the fat guy who spent too long in the sauna.

Of course there’s a lot of opposition to the idea of climate change. Mostly from people who have a fairly tenuous grasp of the science involved, but still, they have a sort-of point. There’s no actual hard data that backs up the climate change theory.

Having said that, getting rid of all the crap that we’re pumping into the atmosphere probably isn’t a terrible idea in the long run, you know?

Regardless, my bunker is fitted with airconditioning, just in case.

It’s fair to say that humans are tool-using animals. In fact our mastery of tool use has allowed us to become the dominant species on the planet. And over the years our tools have become increasingly complex. From the simple bone used to club someone over the head, to mastery of the wheel, the pulley, the printing press, computers, televisions, mobile phones and microwaves. All designed to make our lives easier and hold back the bloody jaws of nature, which sits waiting on the outskirts of our quiet little civilised lives.

ABOVE: Black metal album covers have been trying to warn us for years.

But there’s a problem. As machines got more and more complex, more and more complex materials were needed to make them. A rare element called Indium is used to make Liquid Crystal Displays, for example, which are used in everything from calculators to flat screen TVs. Hafnium does not occur naturally in nature, but is extracted from sand and used in computer chips and nuclear reactors. Gallium is used in a range of products, from semi-conductors to nuclear weapons. Not to mention the more common minerals and elements like Platinum, Copper and Zinc, which are used for a multitude of manufacturing puposes.

So just to recap- incredibly rare materials are being used in products which are mass marketed, many of which are designed to be disposable and replaced within 6 months. I’m sure that couldn’t possibly be a problem.

In 2007, German materials chemist Armin Reller sat down and worked out roughly how long our current known supplies of rare materials would last. The answer? Until about 2017. Less than 10 years. Indium, Hafnium and Gallium will be completely exhausted by that point. Zinc, which is used for such a myriad range of things that just listing two of them like “coins” and “bullets” barely does it justice, is expected to be used up by 2037.

And that’s just the short-term. Supplies of nickel, phosphorous and even copper are starting to get on the worrying side. They could conceivably be used up by the end of the century. But long before that, every TV, computer, radio, nuclear power plant, stove, flashlight and a thousand other devices would have gone dark. The old saying is that humanity is three hot meals away from anarchy. It’s possible anarchy could reign in the next 50 years.

ABOVE: Dogs and cats living together; MASS HYSTERIA!

People worry about the oil supply running out, but this is a far more immediate and pressing problem. Especially because, in a twist of irony so great that it proves God exists and that he’s a bastard,  these materials are used in things like solar cells and high-storage batteries which are being touted as the green alternatives to petrol cars and coal and nuclear power. We’re replacing one set of problems with another, far more immediate set.

Luckily, my bunker is fully constructed and ready for use right now. And I have lots of spare parts. When the lights go out, I’ll be a mile underground, listening to my iPod and basking in the glow from the halogens.

All right, so you know how people say that the Amazon and other large rainforests are the Earth’s lungs, and by chopping them down it’s like the earth smoking a pack a day and slowly losing the capacity to breathe? Well, it turns out that the rainforests don’t actually produce the majority of our oxygen. Before you fire up your chainsaws for some recreational logging, understand that it’s still probably a bad idea to cut down enormous chunks of rainforest. But that’s a discussion for another day.

The interesting thing is that it turns out a great majority of the world’s oxygen comes from microscopic plants floating on the surface of the ocean. These plants are everywhere in the oceans, and they generate huge amounts of breathable air. It’s a good thing human beings don’t treat the ocean like an enormous toilet/waste disposal system then, isn’t it?

Oh shit.

Scientists have been noticing for a few years now that large expanses of ocean now are essentially “dead”, as in, all of it’s plantlife has died, rendering it unable to produce oxygen. The areas are getting larger with each passing year, and with each passing year the world gets shorter and shorter of breath. Eventually, it will suffocate.

But we’ll probably all starve before we get to that point, because marine life will have died out, and with most fish and aquatic food sources removed, the ecosystem will be in serious imbalance. Take a major piece from the bottom of the teetering Jenga tower that is the Earth’s biosphere and everything tumbles. Only you can’t get bored and go play Guitar Hero afterwards.

So that’s why my fallout bunker is equipped with both hydropnics bays and breeding tanks. It’s good to know I’ll eat salmon while the rest of the world eats gruel.

Imagine machines so small that you literally cannot see them. Tiny machines, the size of a few atoms, designed to attack virus proteins or cancer cells, or maybe convert air into water, or some similar task. Now imagine that these machines have been programmed to self-replicate, a relatively simple proposition, given they’re only a few atoms big, they don’t take up much building material. You can basically make them out of anything.

Now imagine that somehow they malfunction, or for irony’s sake maybe they were mis-programmed to begin with, and they begin to multiply unchecked, slowly increasing in numbers. Of course, they’re only small, so a few more won’t hurt, right? Well, take that small number, and then start increasing it exponentially, and you very quickly have a very big problem on your hands.

These machines require no real fuel, and they would endlessly self-replicate. They would self-replicate until they had literally consumed every atom of useable material on the planet up to and including the planet itself.

The machines are nanobots, and the scenario I am shrilly talking about is the grey goo apocalypse.

What you have to understand about that event is that we’re not talking about the earth being covered in a grey sludge of quadrillions of living machines. They would consume rock and lava, from the brittle crust right to the molten core, until there was nothing left but a giant blob of grey ooze, floating in space. Earth, and everything on it, would be utterly, totally consumed.

Now, many scientists say that that sort of talk is just paranoid nonsense. But if there’s one thing I know, it’s paranoid nonsense. And I know good paranoid nonsense when I see it.

What you have to do is weigh up the cost-benefits. On the one hand, nanotechnology has already given us carbon nanotubes which promise to revolutionise several industries from medicine to construction. Speaking of medicine, scientists from very early on have talked up the possibility of nanobots to cure cancer and disease, by attacking it on it’s own terms, at the molecular level. There’s a very real possibiility that AIDS and most forms of cancer will be cured in our lifetimes due to nanotechnology.

On the other hand, a single mutation in one miniscule robot means the entire earth is turned into galactic play-doh.

That’s why my bunker is hermetically sealed with a leak factor of less than a micron, and is fully insulated against the vacuum of space despite being buried a kilometre underground. You never know when rock is going to turn into creeping grey sludge oozing mindless malevolence.

There’s something special happening today. It’s a time of hope, of change, of the promise of a better tomorrow. And what better way to celebrate the lighting of a candle in the darkness than to wildly speculate about ways in which the world might end right this second? I can’t think of any!

So, to business- Nasa has detected a “booming” noise in deep space. Space being a vacuum, what they actually mean is a metric crapload of radio waves and other raditation hit one of their detector arrays and sent the “holy fucking shit” alarms off at Nasa HQ. The brains trust at the world’s leading Space Agency remain clueless as to what it might be-

“…to get this kind of signal, you’d have to pack [radio galaxies] into the universe like sardines. There wouldn’t be any space left between one galaxy and the next”

So if I’m reading this right, that noise could only be made by something which is infinitely large and yet exists outside of the universe as we know it? Nasa, maybe if you’d spent more time reading the classics and less time firing off your little rockets you’d know what we’re facing here.

Yog-Sothoth.

That’s right, The Lurker at the Threshold, The Key and the Gate, The Beyond One, Opener of the Way, The All-in-One and the One-in-All, The King and Queen of the Outer Gods and Final Judgement. It’s quite obvious when it’s pointed out to you.

What else could make such a noise? It’s obvious it has heard the challenge made  by its lesser cousin Dread Cthulhu and is even now approaching to once and for all punish the upstart entity. We are as nothing to the great and glorious might of Yog-Sothoth, the Lurker of the Iridescent Spheres! We are bacteria crawling on the face of a rock and we shall be swept out of space and time with the approach of the eldritch deity! REPENT AND REJOICE FOR THE SHORT AND HORRIBLE LIVES YOU KNOW WILL BE SWEPT AWAY BY GIBBERING TERRORS FROM THE DEEPS OF THE UNIVERSE!

Y’AI’NG’NGAH

YOG-SOTHOTH:H’EE-L’GEB

F’AI TRHODOG\

UAAAAH

As good will and cheer spreads across the globe during this festive season, it’s only fitting that I, a bitter and twisted soul, should point out yet another way in which our world is going to come crashing down around our oblivious ears.

You probably haven’t heard much about this because it mostly involves black people far away, but Zimbabwe is currently in the grip of a cholera outbreak. Over 1100 people have died and the World Health Organisation belive as many as sixty thousand others could be infected.

Cholera is a nasty disease, with symptoms including violent diarrhea and vomiting, cramping in the abdomen and legs, and pale skin. It’s transmitted easily in areas with large populations and poor sanitation, and Zimbabwe definitely fits that bill.

The trouble is, I don’t believe it for a second. There’s another disease which spreads rapidly among a densly packed population with poor sanitation which is far more worrisome- zombification.

It’s one of the first things they tell you in any good survival guide dealing with zombies- if you see a news report saying there’s been a cholera outbreak, lock down those bunkers and start hoarding tinned food.

Hopefully they can contain this current flareup in Zimbabwe, but if they can’t it’s going to spread rapidly. That’s why the olilolo team have all bought copies of Left 4 Dead and have been playing them religiously for the last week or so. Not only is it sweet zombie-killing action, it’s perfect training for the real thing. When the undead hordes shamble across the globe, we’ll be ready for them.

A little while ago I wrote about how we were all going to die due to an acute case of hot molten death from space. That article proved so explosive (if you’ll pardon the expression) that the UN got involved. All down to me, baby. The UN is all about half-assed comedy blogs. Oh, sure, there was some guys called the International Association of Space Explorers involved but who the hell are they? Seriously, who are they? They sound cool, I think I’d like to become a member.

Anyway, they’re calling on the UN to do more to develop anti-asteroid technology, pointing out the ball-shrinking statistic that there are over 5000 “Near Earth Objects” zipping around. That’s a very PC term. Lets call a spade a spade here- they’re big fucking rocks which could end life as we know it if they hit us.

The UN responded to this threat with the utmost urgency, which for the UN means they harrumphed a lot and drank wine. But at least the issue’s out there. Hopefully the recruitment drive for salt-of-the-earth deep-oil-drillers will begin by next year.

A lot of attention is being given to global warming at the moment. Scientists are divided on the cause and the actual mechanics of it all, but the consensus seems to be that the earth’s climate is changing. Governments around the world are scrambling to do something about it, like drunk teenagers who have just heard the garage door going up announcing their parents are home. The party is over.

So we see clean coal tech being announced, and carbon offset schemes, and mammoth overblown concerts filled with ageing rockers who flew there on a private jets urging us to “do our part” for the environment. We seem to be on the right track in terms of curbing our polluting behaviour.

Of course, it doesn’t help if the Earth is doing everything it can to negate our efforts by spewing huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere.

See, as the Earth’s temperature rises, the polar ice caps begin to melt. The trouble is that in the arctic there are enormous pockets of methane trapped in those ice sheets. Once they start to melt, the methane is released into the atmosphere.

This is a problem because methane is approximately 20 times more dangerous as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, which is the main focus of most global warming initiatives. And so it should be, as it’s produced by most of the world’s nations as a waste product. The trouble is, much smaller amounts of methane have the same or worse effect. It has such an effect that some scientists are seriously worried that the methane from cows farting is contributing to global warming.

Cows produce fairly small amounts of methane. The arctic has just bubbled up hundreds of tonnes in fresh supplies.

Basically, it works like this. Did you ever have a roomate who farted a lot? Like, a lot? and they were always stinkers? It would get so bad sometimes that you had to go outside for some fresh air? Well, now imagine you’re living IN your roomate. And outside is SPACE.

That analogy may have broken down, so let’s use another. The Earth is farting, and we’re all caught in the dutch oven.

That’s why I’ve called it the “Dutch-Oven Scenario”. The scientific community has largely snubbed me and chosen to call the phenomenon the “Clathrate-Gun Hypothesis“, which just goes to show that being smart doesn’t mean you can name things worth a damn.

Whatever you call it, it’s something which should concern you, because scientists say events like this have been responsible for several extinction events over the history of life on the planet, including the “Permian Event“, not only a cool band name but an extinction which saw 96 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of all verterbrate land animals disappear from the face of the earth. Because the temperature rose a few degrees.

I should point out at this stage that my fallout bunker is fully equipped with air-conditioned life support systems. So I don’t need to worry about any of this. But you should be informed.

I was very relived the other day to read that scientists from Brisbane were working on a way to stop a massive asteroid that’s headed straight for the planet. “We’re totally on this,” the scientists say. “We’ll wrap it in tin foil and the solar radiation will push it off the collision course it’s currently on. With Earth.”

And then I reread the article to see if there was some mistake, but no, there it was, printed in black and white pixels. AN ENORMOUS FUCKING ASTEROID IS HEADED STRAIGHT FOR EARTH.  It’s due to hit in 2036. Well, maybe. There is the possibility that it might just pass us by. Scientists have to wait till 2011 to find out for sure.

If I do my sums right, I’ll be about 56. Which is much, much earlier than I planned on checking out. I mean, you can live a full life in that period of time, but I always wanted to reach 112. I don’t know why. It just seemed like a good, round, and especially faraway number.

2036 seems very very soon in comparison. Fatally soon. I mean, there’s a massive rock that is very likely to hit earth and we’re planning on wrapping it in tinfoil? BUST OUT THE NUKES, GENTLEMEN. Get some salt of the earth types to fly a rocket at this thing and give it the old one-two welcome to earth combo. This is not a fucking baked potato.

What makes it even worse is that we know about this one, and are planning for it. What about the ones we don’t know about? Space is infinite, and it’s not all on a level plane like most diagrams or science fiction shows would have you believe. There’s a full spherical 360 degrees of space out there and rocks are hurtling through it at speeds which would make you shit a goat.

So you can understand why one of my many ulcers is caused by news reports like this recent one which gleefully informs an increasingly damp-panted populace that a medium sized asteroid hit Earth and broke up, and that scientists didn’t know anything about it until it was streaking through out upper atmosphere.

That was a small one. We’re very, very lucky. What if it had been a hundred times that size? Like the one which nearly hit the Earth back in 2002? Oh sure, you say, that one was six hundred thousand kilometres away. A near-miss in cosmic terms but still a fairly comfortable margin. So what about this one back in 2004 which passed so close it was closer to the earth than some communications satellites?

If your pants aren’t filled to bursting at this point, you’ve got serious mental problems (or you can’t read English). The sheer fact of the matter is, if one of these bastards hits us, we’re done for. Gone. Life as we know it ceases right then, and one of them could be headed for us right now. And there wouldn’t be a damn thing any of us could do to stop it.

And the buggerance of it all is that this has never, ever worked for me as a pick up line.