Mad science: Like the fist of an angry god.

In general, I like my end-of-the-world scenarios to be as wacky as possible. Our presence on this globe is so improbable that it just seems dramatically appropriate that our exit should be just as improbable. But sometimes it rewards a person to consider the classics.

Over at the UK screamsheet tThe Independent, Chris Impey revisits one of the 20th century's most enduring contributions to the intellectual dark ride of our apocalyptic imaginations: death by space object strike:

Every century or so, a 10-meter meteor slams into the Earth with the force of a small nuclear device. Tunguska was the site of the last, in 1908, and it was pure luck that that meteor landed in the uninhabited wilderness of Siberia. Every few thousand years, Earth can pass through unusually thick parts of the debris trail of comets, turning the familiar light show of a meteor shower into a deadly firestorm. Roughly every 100,000 years, a projectile hundreds of meters across unleashes power equal to the world's nuclear arsenals. The result is devastation over an area the size of England, global tidal waves (if the impact is in the ocean), and enough dust flung into the atmosphere to dim the Sun and kill off vegetation. That could ruin your day.

Then there's the "Big One". About every 100 million years, a rock the size of a small asteroid slams into the Earth, causing global earthquakes, kilometre-high tidal waves, and immediately killing all large land animals. Creatures in the sea soon follow, as trillions of tons of vaporised rock cause drastic cooling and the destruction of the food chain based on photosynthesis. There's good evidence that this happened 65 million years ago and our tiny mammal ancestors were the beneficiaries as the giant lizards were extinguished.

Mr. Impey also considers such we're-screwed scenarios as "fried by the high-energy radiation of a distant hypernova," "Sun eats the Earth," and one of my new favorites: "the Big Rip." This is the term for the hypothesis that the expansion of the universe might eventually reach a crisis point and the whole darn thing could just unravel. That's right, the universe could break.

So enjoy the weekend like it may be your last! It's always later than we think!

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Mad science: Dead man's hand.

Everything old is new again. Remember when the global nightmare scenario of choice was Soviet nukes? Prepare to get nostalgic for the good old days of mutually assured destruction. From Wired magazine:

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn't matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret. With the demise of the USSR, word of the system did leak out, but few people seemed to notice. In fact, though Yarynich and a former Minuteman launch officer named Bruce Blair have been writing about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, its existence has not penetrated the public mind or the corridors of power. The Russians still won't discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels—including former top officials at the State Department and White House—say they've never heard of it. When I recently told former CIA director James Woolsey that the USSR had built a doomsday device, his eyes grew cold. "I hope to God the Soviets were more sensible than that." They weren't.

The system remains so shrouded that Yarynich worries his continued openness puts him in danger. He might have a point: One Soviet official who spoke with Americans about the system died in a mysterious fall down a staircase. But Yarynich takes the risk. He believes the world needs to know about Dead Hand. Because, after all, it is still in place.

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Stuff: Choose and perish.

Slate contributor Josh Levin surveys 144 scenarios for the collapse of the United States of America. From his article intro:

If and when America expires, we probably won't agree on the cause of death. For proof that autopsies of empires are inconclusive, consider the case of Alexander Demandt, the German historian who set out in the 1980s to collect every theory ever given for why Rome fell. The final tally: 210, including attacks by nomads on horseback, blood poisoning, decline of Nordic character, homosexuality, outflow of gold, and vaingloriousness.

In tribute to Demandt, I've gone looking for every possible reason why America could fall. I've paged through the work of scholars who have studied the characteristics of declining and failed societies. I also collected theories from futurists, doomsayers, separatists, economists, political scientists, national security experts, climatologists, geologists, astronomers, and a few miscellaneous crazy people. The result: a collection of 144 potential causes of America's future death.

Levin's list of calamities includes such trendy new apocalypses as doom-by-EMP-device, rightwing-nutjob faves like a demographic death spiral caused by the legalization of gay marriage, and leftwing workhorses like a theocratic takeover.

I'm especially please that Johnny-come-lately doomsdays, such as the 2012 dealie, haven't replaced long time personal favorites such as robot uprisings or "gray goo" nanotech-driven death.

You can even select five favorite doomsday scenarios as and track progress towards midnight using Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" Tool!

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