The agency has selected a handful of companies to build components for its lunar gateway, a space station that will be in orbit around the moon, and it has solicited designs for a lunar lander.
In October the UN warned that humanity has 12 years left to avoid catastrophic climate change. But the report is spot-on in its mantra: The faster we switch to a world economy run on renewable energy, the better we can attenuate the consequences—stronger storms, rising seas, fiercer wildfires. So what can we do? For one, we need carbon taxes the world over: Release greenhouse gases and you pay a fee , which incentivizes the adoption of green energy.
We have to massively subsidize solar panels and electric cars. We have to bolster public transportation and redesign cities to discourage the use of cars. The drop in sequencing costs is shifting DNA testing out of the research lab and into mainstream medical practice. Population-based sequencing projects in more than a dozen countries, including the US , are expected to produce 60 million genomes by By , China hopes to add another million from its own precision medicine initiative.
The impact is hard to even imagine. To date, only about a million people have had their whole genomes sequenced. More data from all over the globe will allow for more powerful, fine-grained analyses of how genes shape health and behavior. According to media reports, some of his followers quit their jobs, sold their homes, and invested large amounts of money in publicizing Camping's predictions. When the Rapture did not occur, Camping re-evaluated his predictions saying that the event would take place simultaneously with the end of the world.
See how much time has passed since Camping's apocalypse. The experiments have caused some to believe that the energies set free by the collisions will form a black hole powerful enough to consume Earth and all life on it.
No such black hole has been sighted yet, and several high-profile studies have concluded that there are no such dangers associated with the experiments conducted at the LHC. Towards the end of the second millennium, people around the world feared that the world would end simultaneously with the beginning of the year , or Y2K. This prediction was based on the practice followed by computer programmers of abbreviating year numbers with two digits when developing software.
However, at midnight on January 1, , the world celebrated the new year, and no planes dropped out of the sky. Did the third millennium begin in or ? All the knowledge. Stewart, That was the difference between woman and man. Again he felt superior to her. Doubtless in the long run, archaeologists could restore the continuity […] but it would save a lot of work if someone merely kept the tradition. There must be others that he could find also to join with them — good people who would help in the new world.
He would start looking for people again. He would look craftily, trying to keep away from all those who had suffered too much from the shock, whose minds and bodies were not what one wanted to build up the new society.
Nirnburgs in , into a feature film by Andrei Tarkovsky in , again by Steven Soderbergh in , and into an opera by the German composer Michael Obst in , there are no new worlds that the human mind can experience and the imperative of repetition is made both literal and ontological. Solaris is a planet covered by a malleable substance able to imitate human experience exactly. In this way, Solaris imposes upon those who experience it the realization of the limits of their perception.
We can never grasp anything new or different, only that within which we already find ourselves. In Auster, however, while like in Solaris repetition is the default mode, it is also that which must at all costs be avoided, lest one should lose oneself:.
Bit by bit, the city robs you of uncertainty. There can never be any fixed path, and you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you. Without warning, you must be able to change, to drop what you are doing, to reverse. In the end, there is nothing that is not the case.
For habits are deadly. Even if it is for the hundredth time, you must encounter each thing as if you have never known it before. No matter how many times, it must always be the first time. Auster, Rowling would have it, the battle nevertheless continues:. You would think that sooner or later it would all come to an end.
Things fall apart and vanish, and nothing new is made. People die, and babies refuse to be born. And yet, there are always new people to replace the ones who have vanished. Auster, 7. In the meaningless void of a city in which slaughterhouses sustain a black market in human flesh, Anna escapes being killed but, prior to their reunion, Sam loses his mind:.
I gave up trying to be anyone […]. The object of my life was to remove myself from my surrounding, to live in a place where nothing could hurt me anymore. I said goodbye to you, Anna; […] I said goodbye to the thought of going home. I even tried to say goodbye to myself. I could imagine no more perfect solution than that. In the end I came close to living the life of a stone. Written in the first person by yet another female narrator, in this instance fifteen-year old Daisy, it narrates with adolescent matter-of-factness what might possibly have been the end of the world.
That was a bomb that went off in the middle of a big train station in London […] and something like seven or seventy thousand people were killed. That obviously went down very badly with the population at large and was pretty scary etc. That still left a whole afternoon with the end of the world about to happen […]. Rosoff, Passion, maybe. And something else. The air was suffocating, charged, the hungry plants sucking at the earth with their ferocious appetites.
You could almost watch them grow, pressing their fat green tongues up through the black earth. They emerged selfish and starving, gasping for air.
In Rosoff, too, the ending is inconclusive, leaving at best the possibility of a new beginning of sorts, but never free from the remnants of the past:.
Franz Rottensteiner, quoted in Ketterer, , Wherever man goes there are only extensions of himself. Ketterer, Less intuitively obvious, but with the same effect in what has been argued above, is the hypothesis that even after cataclysmic apocalyptic change, we can only ever imagine more of what we already know.
Writing about the possibility of absolute planetary destruction, Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, argues as follows:. Rees, The parts are separated by periods of six centuries each. The first part begins years after 20th century civilization has been destroyed by a nuclear war, known as the Flame Deluge. The war had led to a violent backlash known as the Simplification against the culture of advanced knowledge and technology out of which had sprung nuclear weapons.
During Simplification, anyone of any learning and eventually anyone who could simply read becomes the target of lynch mobs. Isaac Edward Leibowitz, a Jewish electrical engineer working for the United States military, who survives the war and converts to Roman Catholicism, founds a monastic order, the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, dedicated to preserving knowledge by hiding books Memorabilia , smuggling them to safety booklegging and, as in Fahrenheit , memorizing, and copying them.
Leibowitz is eventually betrayed, martyred and later beatified as a candidate to sainthood. A final vignette depicts the devastation left on Earth: as seabirds and fish succumb to the poisonous fallout, a shark, the oldest living species on the planet, escapes contamination by moving down into deep water, although even there, it is noted, there is nothing left for it to eat.
The knowledge preserved by the escaping flock, we suppose, would include the awareness of the nuclear possibilities that had necessitated this new exodus in the first place. Paradoxically, then, the mechanism now activated to ensure that even if the entire Earth is destroyed, its intellectual achievements are not, transplants to the new reality that which led to the destruction of the old one: at the end, what we witness is the beginning of a new but identical cycle, merely in a different place.
In the latter novel, for example, due to an engine malfunction a space ship is propelled through cycles of billions of light-years, beyond the end of the universe, and through to the early stages of a new one. There, the crew homes in on a newly-created planet where, paradoxically they find that the only vocabulary that can articulate the new reality is a risibly arcane one.
Arcane and therefore also limited by all the hallmarks of the old reality, now dead: competitiveness, hierarchy, species entitlement:.
He smiled in a way they had not seen before. Certainly not. On the contrary. If cataclysm is the starting point for a new beginning, it is also often the opportunity for the rise of new forms of leadership redolent of all that was most familiar and often most reactionary in the time before. As in George R. Let it be marked, no Changeover — Self, As in The Children of Men James, , a large portion of the population has become sterile. The underpinnings of the Republic of Gilead are derived from the Biblical story of Rachel, wife of Jacob.
Rachel was barren. After many years, she finally achieves her desire for motherhood by persuading Jacob to impregnate her maid, Bilhah, who subsequently gives birth while reclining between her legs.
And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die. And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her. And she gave him Bilhah her handmaid to wife: and Jacob went in unto her. And Bilhah conceived, and bare Jacob a son.
Genesis Thus, in pre-Gileadean society, and despite holding a university degree, Offred was a low-ranking white collar worker whose colleagues, all women working under a male boss, generally lacked full material autonomy. Stewart , Poul Anderson and many others, results in new worlds filled with compliant Stepford wives: a phenomenon itself worthy of scrutiny in a future study.
Dick and P. James, unusual intellectual gifts often represent a danger to those that possess them, and can be used as the justification for undue exercise of force on the part of a defensive status quo. In all of them, however, we find strong hints that after global events of a cataclysmic nature, authoritarian statuses quo tend to emerge as the default social organization.
Furthermore, these new autocracies, and the brands of alienation they sustain, may turn out to be quantitatively but not qualitatively different from social structures ostensibly supposed to be or to have been essentially democratic. It may be true, then, that, as suggested by these and other works, in all cases, albeit with diverse enemies in mind, and in the language of the standard film trailer, we should all be afraid.
We should be very afraid! Sometimes, even, one of those who, in Western democracies, we have selected and elected to protect us. In Shadow on the Hearth Merrill, , for example, although an unexpected Soviet nuclear attack was the catalyst for a radical world change, from the point of view of Gladys, the immediate adversary in the aftermath of the disaster is someone much closer to home.
The film, disapproved of by the Pentagon but encouraged by President Kennedy in the months before his death, opens up debate on the possibility of democracy being overthrown in the name of national security.
If the enemy is one of us, who shall I fear today? Are enemies, old or new, in fact sometimes not identifiable and controllable others, but instead part of the fabric of a self which, as urged by the oracle in the Temple at Delphi, we should seek to know? Are the atomic explosions unleashed by a homely Stetson-wearing cowboy at the end of Dr. Strangelove the precursors of real-life possibilities under the command of equally attired leaders such as Ronald Reagan and George W.
That they are already in our midst? That they are us? He is instead the Middle Eastern version of the oriental Kamikaze, the elemental high-jacker of jumbo jets flung against the skyscrapers of the New World in the first year of the new millennium, or else an enemy even closer to home: the Beardy Weirdy with a black rucksack on the London underground.
At present, the alien Muslim in our midst is ever at hand to justify the silencing of inopportune civil rights libertarians prone to condemning knee-jerk preventive reactions on the part of Establishmentarian forces of law and order. In his essay on the American s fear of Communism, The Great Fear , David Caute argues that the body politic has always used popular paranoia as a useful means for containing and controlling dissent.
The cast may change, but the plot, whether fictional or historical, old or new, does not differ in essentials. The script, whether that of sci-fi plots, real-life historical autocracies or their contemporary equivalents Pentagon neo-cons, their Whitehall fellow travellers, Middle Eastern enmities of polymorphous varieties, to name but a few remains essentially unchanged. A number of conspiracy theories, both in fiction and in reality, argue that the forces ostensibly deployed by the status quo to protect us against supposed aliens in our midst aim in fact to protect that self-same status quo against us.
Writers from Ray Bradbury to Philip K. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The reality, however, involved a limited and short-lasting nuclear war which left behind an only partly contaminated Earth, now divided into enormous quasi-feudal demesnes ruled by a happy few very few , thanks to a confidence trick that has kept the remnants of left-over humanity in bondage and servitude.
In Saramago, as well as in the other narratives mentioned, the component of decay and the resulting stench become the primary objective correlatives of a problem that is literal but also symbolic of political and social corruption. In each case the disaster not only unleashes violence and autocracy in a variety of forms but it also reveals that such tendencies were always already there, only latent.
And why not? The label of madness is a solution which has been historically tried and tested by every human autocracy whether defined by party politics, class or gender since difference began. At the spot where he found himself, he was not sure that he would be able to find the lavatories, but he decided to take a chance. He was hoping that someone would at least have remembered to leave there the toilet paper which had been delivered with the containers of food.
What could have caused such an extreme event? During the Ordovician period, the continents were one jumbled mass called Gondwana. Most life on Earth still lived in the oceans, but plants were beginning to emerge on land.
Then, near the end of the Ordovician, a sweeping climate shift left the supercontinent covered with glaciers. That global cooling alone was enough to start killing off species. But then a second pulse of the extinction ramped up as oxygen levels plummeted.
Scientists see evidence of this shift in seafloor samples collected from around the world. Some researchers think that the glaciers were responsible for fundamentally changing the layers of the oceans, which have unique temperatures and specific concentrations of elements like oxygen.
Yet, the exact cause of the oxygen drop is still up for debate. Whatever the cause, the end result is that more than 80 percent of life on Earth died during the Late Ordovician mass extinction, according to some estimates. So, it may have happened before, but could a deoxygenation event happen again? In an eerie comparison to today, researchers involved in the recent Nature Communications study say that climate change is already reducing oxygen levels in our oceans, potentially killing off marine species.
Even if a sudden spate of global cooling sparked the Late Ordovician mass extinction, what set that in motion in the first place? Over the years, numerous astronomers have suggested the culprit might have been a gamma-ray burst GRB. So far, GRBs have only been spotted in other galaxies. But if one did happen in the Milky Way, as has likely happened in the past, it could cause a mass extinction on Earth.
A GRB pointed in our direction might last just 10 seconds or so, but it could still destroy at least half Earth's ozone in that short period of time. Wiping out the ozone on a large enough scale could wreak havoc on food chains, killing off huge numbers of species.
A GRB would wipe out the lifeforms that live in the upper levels of the ocean, which currently contribute significant amounts of oxygen to our atmosphere. And, it turns out, gamma rays also break apart atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen.
These gasses get converted into nitrogen dioxide, which is more commonly known as the smog that blocks out the Sun above heavily polluted cities. Having this smog blanketing the entire Earth would block out sunshine and kickstart a global ice age. Any of the devastating scenarios above, while undoubtedly terrible for life, are just a fraction as bad as future Earth's ultimate fate.
Gamma-ray burst or not, in about a billion years, most life on Earth will eventually die anyway due to a lack of oxygen. The researchers suggest that our oxygen-rich atmosphere is not a permanent feature of the planet.
Instead, in about a billion years, solar activity will cause atmospheric oxygen to plummet back down to the level it was at before the Great Oxidation Event. To determine this, the authors combined climate models and biogeochemistry models to simulate what will happen to the atmosphere as the Sun ages and puts out more energy.
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