He is author and co-author of more than scientific research articles in astronomy and astrophysics. For many years he wrote the Life, Unbounded blog for Scientific American. Follow Caleb A. Scharf on Twitter. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options.
Go Paperless with Digital. Globally, the year tied with as the hottest on record. At the same time, they also warned of the worsening spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories, which would serve as a multiplier to the worsening threats of nuclear conflict and the climate emergency. Doomsday Clock: seconds until the end of the world Since , the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists annually adjusts its symbolic Doomsday Clock, which indicates how close humanity and the planet are to complete disaster.
Subscribe to our newsletters Subscribe. A wide-ranging, surprise nuclear attack on the US in the late s memories of World War II and Hiroshima at that point still fresh on the mind is narrated entirely from the point of view of a woman, Gladys, her two young daughters, and their maid, confined at home while the men are absent in the field of action.
The brief glimpses Gladys gets of events in the outside world remind her of her memories of both world wars. Men do not feature significantly, other than those marginalized feminized or at least female-identified by circumstances: a school teacher on the run because, having previously played the role of Cassandra, opposed nuclear armament by the West and warned of the possibility of a nuclear attack on the US, he is now an undesirable; a young doctor too junior to have fully absorbed the lesson of unquestioning obedience to the authorities; and, at the end, the returned husband, wounded, incapacitated and in need of nursing.
Although their outsider status lends these three men a certain amount of charisma, overall the women and girls are left to cope by themselves. These, improbably, in the end succeed where the emergency measures put in place semi-authoritarian, vigilante-style policing, high-tech medicine did not.
As the men go and subsequently come back, the only sustainable reality is that of a domesticity maintained by stubbornly clinging to a familiar routine. When the men return, it is to be supposed, so will the old order. The latter was first broadcast on BBC 2 on 1 August as part of a week of programmes marking the fortieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In The Purple Cloud Shiel, , Adam Jefferson, the last man on Earth, a hero whose name counter-intuitively resonates with the possibility of new beginnings Adam in Genesis named the world, Thomas Jefferson in the newly born USA laid down the outlines of the new nation , travels around the planet setting fire to cities already partly destroyed by poison gas from a volcano which had extinguished life on Earth. He acts therefore both as witness to the disaster and as participant in the thorough implementation of its final stages.
In his travels, however, he meets a second Eve — not a first but a last woman — who may however although this is never confirmed offer the possibility of a new beginning. The Crakers, also known as the Children, are renditions of the Noble Savage and do not understand the dangers of the world. They also do not understand technology even in its simplest of forms. In his futuristic republic, Crake, somewhat like Plato before him, sought to eliminate the disruptions of emotion: love, lust and jealousy.
He designed the Crakers to mate every three years, a frequency calculated to be sufficient to sustain population size. No old age, none of those anxieties. The novel is narrated from the point of view of the last man on Earth, Jimmy, now referred to as Snowman, an unlikely holy son chosen by Crake as guardian of the new species following the extinction of himself and the rest of the human race. At the end of the novel, Snowman, abandoned on the beach like a reluctant St.
Jimmy delays an encounter with what may be the only other surviving humans on the planet. The following morning he seeks out the unfathomable trinity. Civilization has been destroyed, and most animal and plant species have become extinct:.
They were moving south. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God, God never spoke. McCarthy, There is no sun, the atmosphere is suffused with ash, the climate has been radically altered and plants no longer grow.
In a mockery of earlier consumerist societies, the remnants of humankind now consist mostly of cannibals, who, in a world where there is nothing left and no means of production, capture and eat their own species, in the form of refugees and travellers, themselves driven to scavenging for food.
When the time comes? Can you? Following her departure, the man and the boy set off on their journey in search of the sea in warmer southern climates. In a world of extreme danger in which what is left of humanity has given way to the law of the jungle, they learn that survival may require that they too abdicate their humanity. In due course the father dies, but after a symbolic three days awaiting almost certain death, the boy encounters not the feared stranger-danger but a family of four including one son and one daughter.
They live in a relatively undamaged environment and invite the boy to join them, thus setting up the beginnings of a community at least as promising or even more so than that of the first family in Genesis. In this instance, and circumventing the unanswered Biblical quandary as to whom, other than their own siblings, were the mates available to the children of Adam and Eve, the boy in The Road will at least be able to reproduce with a girl who is not his blood relative.
Life goes on. When Spring comes, If I am already dead, Flowers will bloom as usual And the trees will be no less green than last Spring. Reality does not need me. If that is the right time for it, when else would it come, other than at the right time? Therefore, if I die now, I will die happy, Because everything is real and everything is right. They can pray in Latin over my coffin, if they like.
If they like they can dance and sing around it. I have no preferences regarding a time when I will no longer be able to have preferences. Whatever will be, when it is, is the thing that will be. Caeiro, Something also expressed with no need for further words by the Germanic nineteenth-century Romantic imagination in search of new worlds of Caspar David Friedrich.
In The Time Machine the protagonist, a scientist identified simply as the Time Traveller, sets off on a journey into the future. His experience of time travel and the spectacle he witnesses of the evolution of the planet are told in the first-person in a narrative within a narrative.
During his time-travel adventures, the first-person narrator tells of how he observed the sun and the moon traversing the sky and the changes to buildings and landscape around him as he travels through time to the year AD ,, when most of the story takes place, and briefly even further in time.
In AD , he finds an apparently peaceful, pastoral community of humans who call themselves the Eloi. The surface perfection of their playful, carefree existence is however shadowed by an inexplicable fear of the night-time hours of darkness.
This, it is revealed, is caused by regular nocturnal attacks by the Morlocks, dwellers in underground caves, who occasionally turn against their masters and literally devour them. The eventual achievement of this goal had led to a state of stagnation characterized by unimaginative and incurious contentment.
With no work to do, humans also become physically weak and small in stature and intellectually disabled. It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane.
I thought of the physical slightness of the [Eloi], their lack of intelligence, […] and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived.
This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and eroticism, and then come languor and decay. Wells, [] As the world begins to grow dark, life on Earth comes to an end. I looked about me to see if traces of animal life remained.
Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. He recounts his experiences to his disbelieving friends, one of whom returns the following day to find that the Time Traveller had left again, this time taking a camera, presumably with the intention of collecting evidence for his claims.
Having witnessed the end of the Earth on his first trip but having omitted to check on the date of his own death, however, he does not return from his second foray into time. An equipment malfunction results in her arrival twenty years later than planned. As twenty-first century Oxford succumbs to a deadly influenza epidemic, Kivrin finds herself in England, the year of the arrival of the Black Death.
While in the twenty-first century medical resources are eventually able to gain control over the flu bacterium, back in the fourteenth century Kivrin is powerless to do anything other than watch as an entire community succumbs to a disease which she knows in the future will be curable. Jane Waterleigh wakes up in what appears to be a hospital, trapped in a gigantic body she knows is not her own, but with no memory of her past. As her memory gradually returns she recalls taking part in a scientific experiment using a drug thought to trigger alternative states of consciousness.
As she gathers more information, she realizes that she has been propelled into the future, to a society consisting entirely of women, most of whom have never heard of men. In due course she meets a historian who gives her enough information to allow her to deduce that she is now living approximately one and a half centuries after her own time. She learns that shortly after the time of the experiment that led her to where she is now, a scientist, Dr.
Perrigan, unintentionally created a virus that killed all the men in the world, leaving only women. After a period of chaos, famine and widespread social breakdown, the small number of women who at that point had attained an advanced level of education found mainly in the medical profession , had assumed control. Global social reconstruction leads to the formation of a Christian, four-tiered caste-based society: doctors, mothers, servitors and workers.
Upon returning to her own time the narrator seeks out Dr. Perrigan, just then embarking on the experimental work that in the future will lead to the accidental creation of the virus. Failing to persuade him of the disastrous consequences that his research will have in the future, she resorts to murder and burns his research papers. The story concludes with a conversation between two of her colleagues who having succeeded as expert witnesses at her trial in sparing her a charge of murder, saw her placed in a psychiatric hospital on a lesser charge of diminished responsibility.
While lamenting the insanity triggered by the experimental drug and commenting in wonder at the intensity of the hallucinations it induced, one of them ponders as an afterthought that Dr. Waterleigh had never discovered that Dr. Perrigan had left a son, also a biologist and also called Dr. Particularly notable is a lengthy argument between the first-person narrator and the historian as to whether the new all-female society is better than the old one.
The narrative voice in the novel alternates between the third and first persons, the latter in the form of the diary kept by Dr. Theodore Faron, whose name is normally shortened to Theo. The date is , the year when the last human being to be born on Earth was killed in a pub brawl in Buenos Aires. The year before, in , for reasons unknown, the sperm count of men had plummeted to zero world wide.
The last generation of children are called Omegas, after the last letter in the Greek alphabet. Thereafter, as discussed in chapter 5, and as is often the case in end-of-the-world narratives, democracy is abolished in response to global cataclysm, and dictatorship is established.
An eventful plot unfolds with the revelation that Julian is pregnant not by her husband but by the now deceased Luke. Following the deaths of both Xan and Rolf the demiurgically named Theo takes control of Council. The Woman of the Apocalypse appears in Revelation And there was seen another sign in heaven [ And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to be delivered: that , when she should be delivered , he might devour her son.
And she brought forth a man child , who was to rule all nations with an iron rod. And her son was taken up to God and to his throne. Thus, as M. Keith Booker remarks with regard to Philip K. Although victory at the end does not come with an absolute guarantee in the monster is frozen by being sprayed with fire extinguishers and transported to the North Pole, but there is always a vestigial possibility that in the future it may defrost and come back to life — another twist to our current fears of global warming , within the diegetic time span of the film, harmony reigns at the end, even where none had prevailed before.
Paradoxically, however, this is the very status quo in which dissent had prevailed and that in some way had initially invited the visitation of Nemesis in the form of the arrival of the Blob. And what is not addressed is the question of what it might have been about the nature of that particular society that brought about the punishment in the first place. Whatever it might have been, in any case, the possibility of the return of a defrosted Blob seems much more likely in a reinstated order largely unchanged and defined by business as usual.
Another day, another Blob. When he travels back to America after his long absence, Martine is horrified to discover that what remains of the world after widespread nuclear destruction is now ruled by the culture of Immob immobilization , which involves voluntary amputation as a somatic form of disarmament, aiming to control human aggression. Martine ultimately understands that voluntary amputation, while presented as a radical strategy for preventing war is in reality a betrayal of that objective since it itself involves violence.
Remember when the possibility of nuclear war seemed remote? The Global Challenges Foundation , which works to reduce the global problems that threaten humanity, compiles an annual report on global catastrophic risks. The group released the edition in September, and the litany is harrowing: Chemical warfare, supervolcanic eruptions, asteroid collisions, and the looming effects of climate change threaten to cause everything from civilizational collapse to human extinction.
Some of these risks sound like science fiction, but so did weapons of mass destruction and climate change years ago. So the report, overseen by a team at GCF but with each section written by leading experts, combines historical evidence and scientific data to determine the biggest threats.
The good news for us is that scientists think the world will be habitable for at least a few hundred million more years. This is when the clouds of dust and smoke released shroud the planet and block out the sun, causing temperatures to drop, possibly for years. A big worry here is the arsenal of nukes.
While numbers have fallen over several decades, the United States and Russia have just under 7, warheads each, the largest collections in the world. Hundreds of nuclear weapons are ready to be released within minutes , a troubling fact considering that the biggest threat of nuclear war may be an accident or miscommunication. Unlike nuclear weapons, which require complex engineering, biological and chemical warfare can be developed at a relatively low cost and with relatively attainable materials.
In the past few years, the Syrian government has used chemical weapons in the civil war that has ravaged the country. These chemical attacks using sarin and chlorine have appalled the international community, and underscored the damage chemical weapons can do.
Weaponized toxic chemicals could do tremendous harm to a localized target — say, if the toxins were released into the air or into the water supply. Biological weapons represent a greater catastrophic threat. Advances in synthetic biology have made very real the possibility of malicious actors creating harmful pathogens for weaponization — or innocent researchers accidentally releasing a lethal infectious bug out into the world.
In the event of a fast-moving pandemic, the world would be pretty vulnerable. A United Nations panel of scientists released a report last week saying that we only have 12 years to keep global warming to moderate levels.
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