Motherboard

Pretty much anyone who tried to get a flight heading out of New York over the holidays has experienced the unsettling realization that society’s infrastructure is a single, paltry snow storm (or an unscreened passenger) away from complete collapse. This is even more disturbing when you take into account that snow is pretty much a given. It’s something humankind has been expecting every year since we pulled ourselves up out of the primordial muck, and we still can’t plan accordingly.

The situation doesn’t inspire a great deal of confidence in our ability to fix things, and in fact you could probably argue that neither has much of anything that’s happened in the last decade. Whether or not you believe that modern humanity is doomed to destroy itself or if you’re still holding out hope (and notwithstanding a shit load of bad pop science) it’s undeniable that decades of futuristic innovation has helped make the multitude of ways that we could possibly annihilate everything are far more exciting than ever before. And we haven’t even built a real-life Death Star yet. In the wake of a decade that made those happy-go-lucky, relatively affluent ‘90s seem as quaint as a duck-and-cover drill, here’s a fun list of ways that the human race could conceivably engineer its own demise – not with a whimper, but with a bang (or a series of bangs).

The Grey Goo Problem
Grey Goo, though it sounds like something you might pick up from a truckstop toilet seat, is actually a theoretical problem of nanotechnology that is neither gooey nor gray.

Though scientists aren’t quite there yet when it comes to nanobots (functional microscopic robots that could provide humankind with a potential slew of benefits, medical and otherwise) you might be able to look forward to them soon. When the powers-that-be get these little fellas up and running, you’ll have one more far-out hypothetical to lose sleep over, and thus one more good reason to drink.

In a Grey Goo doomsday scenario, because of either the crazed delusions of a mad scientist or the equally-likely boner move of a happy scientist, some nanobot gets a bum instruction to start consuming the resources around it in order to fuel its reproduction. For the technologically sophisticated out there, the program in question would look something like this:

10 PRINT “Hello nanobot, start eating everything in sight and reproducing”
20 GOTO 10
30 END

After getting this directive, the nanobot would quick have a few gazillion babies, all of which would be programmed with that same unchecked, inexorable hunger. Pretty soon, the planet would be nothing more than a swirling mass of microscopic robots. Where that scenario leaves you, dear reader, is pretty obvious.

Level of Suckiness: Depends on how fast a nanobot can eat
Chance of Happening: Probably not going to happen, but not something you want to jinx, either.

Electromagnetic Pulse Wipes All Digital Data and Destroys Power Grid
EMP-related doomsday scenarios appear to be a fan favorites on scare-mongering right-wing news websites, at least the more secular ones, which is not to say that an EMP attack is not an upsetting prospect. Picture this; you wake up one afternoon (assuming you’re laid off, like 50% of the people reading this), walk into your bathroom, and start making a cup of coffee. A moment later you hear a deafening electronic hum. It is not your coffee maker.

You rush to your computer and it’s not working. Neither is your television, nor your phone, nor anything electronic in your entire apartment, or anyone’s apartment anywhere. You go back into the bathroom to grab your cup of coffee and realize that your coffee maker, too, has stopped working. You just got burned by an Electromagnetic Pulse, and you are totally screwed. But you are not alone.

While the EMP is not a new phenomenon (it is, from my limited understanding, a by-product of a high-altitude nuclear explosions that we’ve known about since Santa invented nuclear warfare) the excitement surrounding it is sui generis to the early-oughts. The more we rely on technology, the more that having all of our electronic data wiped out appears to be the stuff of nightmarish catastrophe.

You meditate on this for a moment as you finally put on a pair of pants. You no longer have a bank account. You no longer have electricity. You probably don’t even have running water. The few cans of baked beans that have been sitting in your kitchen cupboard for the last two years are now the most valuable things you own, and you’ve got an angry mob gathering outside to try to take them from you. This is a less than ideal situation. Then it hits you: Terrabytes upon terrabytes of precious Internet pornography, our nation’s only export, have been wiped from the face of the earth. You pick up your computer and start shaking it violently. You begin to scream. And where was that cup of coffee? You scream again.

Level of Suckiness: Depends on your ability as a trained fighter.
Chance of Happening: Don’t want to know.

Black Hole Caused By Large Hadron Collider
Transposing two letters in “hadron” to spell “hard-on” was funny in 11th grade chemistry, and it was still funny a decade later when the Large Hadron Collider was introduced to the popular media as a massive particle accelerator with the theoretical capacity to suck all of creation into a hole the size of a pinprick.

In an effort to find the “God Particle”, known to scientists as the Higgs boson (named after Dan Higgs, singer of Lungfish) CERN (The European Organization For Nuclear Research) constructed a massive particle accelerator beneath the border of France and Switzerland.

Despite clearly being the coolest thing ever built and deemed safe enough for Rock and Roll (and perhaps even essential to the continuance of the human race, and thus the future of Rock and Roll) by such celebrities as Steven Hawking, a small minority of scientists expressed concern. Their contention was that the tiny theoretical black holes the LHC may or may not produce would, rather than being unstable and dissipating like a handful of sand thrown in the wind, suck the whole planet into it like a giant Slurpee being consumed by a thirsty, vengeful God.

Though this appears to have been a non-controversy among serious scientists, it sold a lot of papers, because as soon as you start talking about black holes, lay-people shit their pants. Can you blame us? Luckily for all of you reading out there, Hawking, the majority of other particle physicists, and at least a dozen Discovery Channel documentaries have been right thus far.

Level of Suckiness: At best, Jodie Foster’s mind-bending trip through the multiverse in Contact. At worst, the experience of sitting in the movie theater and watching Contact.
Chance of Happening: The greatest scientific minds in the world say it isn’t going to happen, and it hasn’t happened yet, but as a person who knows absolutely nothing about particle physics, I am not convinced.

Humanity Overthrown by Artificial Intelligence
I’ve never built a neural network, but I’d like to think that I understand the general idea behind one (mostly just because I read Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers; a book in which everybody is so excruciatingly depressed that, when they nearly teach a computer to think, the computer gets too bummed out and unplugs itself).

The basic idea is that, in order to get a computer to act like a human, you don’t program it to exhibit human-like behaviors: you program a bunch of computers to mimic the processes undertaken by a human mind as it learns things. That is to say, you have a network of nodes between which connections are strengthened and weakened in response to stimuli, approximating the relationship between neurons and synapses within the human brain. In fact, something like this is going on in your head right this moment as you realize that I have only the vaguest understanding of what a neural network is.

The upswing of this kind of technology is that it might lead the way to creating an Artificial Intelligence that is self-aware. This would allow for unprecedented inroads not only in the world of technology, but in philosophy and epistemology as well. It would raise all sorts of questions, and maybe provide some answers, about what it means to be human. The down-side is that once an AI is self-aware, you’re probably going to have to bomb the shit out of it if you don’t want to cede society to the robots.

Level of Suckiness: Pretty sucky albeit undeniable cool at the same time, and not so bad if you can get a job selling out groups of uncooperative humans and putting them to work in the mines.
Chance of Happening: This is probably going to happen.

Environmental Catastrophe Humanity Brings About Because We Don’t See It Coming
If you’ve noticed that you don’t see honey bees around like you used to, it’s because the bees are rapidly disappearing. If you’re wondering why, your guess is as good as anyone’s. Some suspect that the cause might be a mite that was accidentally introduced to the ecosystem in the early ‘80s. Others blame an accumulation of pesticides. Cell phone towers, too, have come under suspicion. Regardless of what’s doing it, the point is that we’re somehow managing to kill off the one being on the planet which produces edible excrement that tastes like candy. Typical.

The implications of a bee-free world aren’t immediately apparent, but then, that’s kind of a problem. A catastrophic domino-effect in the food chain ain’t a sure thing, but it ain’t a good thing either. And so even as we try, pathetically, to stop doing all the harmful things we already know we’re doing (can you say Copenhagen?), it’s much more difficult to stop doing that which we don’t know we’re doing. Don’t think about that one before bed tonight.

Level of Suckiness: Inconclusive
Chance of Happening: Varies

— Matthew A. Stern