Asteroids, radiation, frigid vacuums, and hostile aliens—let’s face it: space sucks, sometimes literally. Space doesn’t bring you flowers, or nurture abandoned puppies back to health. Space doesn’t provide delicious sandwiches at the company picnic or help old ladies across the street. It doesn’t do one damn nice thing for you; it basically just plots your death from the abyssal void of nothingness. Sinister threats from outer space may seem like science fiction to you, but it’s only science fiction until it’slanding on your damn head. Also, if you really stop and think about it, there’s a lot more of space than there are of us.
My God… don’t… don’t look now, but I think it’severywhere. Space has got us surrounded!
AN EXTINCTION-LEVEL Event (ELE) is a massive die-off of the majority of life on our planet, and they often seem to be caused by a particularly devastating asteroid impact. It’s not exactly a subtle or mysterious phenomenon. In a nutshell: big rock, big explosion. There’s not much to do but die as hard as you possibly can. When most people think of major meteor strikes, they typically think of distant prehistoric events, like the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago when an asteroid roughly six miles in diameter struck the Earth at a place called Chicxulub, which we now call Mexico, and began the most dramatic extinction in history. (It was not the largest extinction period: That dubious honor falls to the Permian-Triassic extinction event. But while the P-Tr event killed off most of the world’s insects, the Chicxulub event managed to slay every single real live dragon at once, and that’s the kind of dramatic flair that squashing a trillion bugs just does not possess.) Because we associate ELEs with such disasters in the long-distant past, the tendency is to think that catastrophic asteroid strikes are strictly relegated to ancient history when, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Meteors hit the Earth like your dad hits the bottle every time you disappoint him, which is to say very often, and very, very hard.
For example, see March 22, 2008, when a one-thousand-foot diameter asteroid passed within four hundred thousand miles of Earth—missing us by only six hours. To us, numbers like four hundred thousand seem vast, but in terms of space travel that’s basically like being in Earth’s pocket, and while missing something by six hours may seem like a lot to you, in astronomical terms that’s practically already inside of you: easing just the tip of its disaster member in to see how you like it before the full-fledged catastrophic shafting begins.
But even if it hadn’t missed us, Earth’s atmosphere typically protects us from a good deal of the debris that space is constantly trying to murder everybody with, and when a meteor enters the atmosphere it usually results in little more than a pleasant shooting star. Wishes are made, boys become real, and everybody learns a little lesson about love, right? Well, those dramatic shooting stars typically come from objects no bigger than a grain of sand, and if a grain of sand can light up the night sky—while simultaneously giving life to the hopes and dreams of optimistic children throughout the world—you can probably imagine what might happen when something a thousand feet across comes barreling through the atmosphere. (Hint: It ain’t granting wishes. Unless you’re wishing for a painful and fiery death.)
“I wish that was not a meteor about to kill everybody I love.”
If that asteroid does enter Earth’s atmosphere, a variety of things can go down, depending on its specific construction. The heavier bodies, like iron-laden rocks, are the ones most likely to actually impact the planet. That impact would throw up insane amounts of debris, release levels of destruction akin to several nuclear bombs, and leave a permanent terrain-changing impact crater for thousands of years. The more loosely constructed dust and ice asteroids, however, can’t always take the increased pressure from Earth’s atmosphere, and usually explode before impacting. That kind of sounds like the preferred scenario between the two: If it doesn’t hit, that’s like we’re getting off light, right? Not really. An object detonating in the air can actually do quite a bit more damage than a physical impact. The asteroid that missed us by a blink of an eye, for example, was a loosely constructed object; if it had entered our atmosphere, it would have detonated with a strength estimated at seven to eight hundred megatons. That’s about fifteen times the strength of the largest nuclear blast ever recorded! With that in mind, it’s probably safe to say that if a medium- to large-sized asteroid ever does make it through the atmosphere, we’re all pretty well fucked, because our best-case scenario in that situation is for the meteor to hit us so hard that it changes the very Earth itself. It gets a little hard to be optimistic when that kind of destruction is the most you can hope for. But if you think you can still see a bright side in all of this, be careful; it could just be a blinding flash from the largest explosion in history.
Unfortunately, if an asteroid is on a direct collision course with Earth, that very fact makes it less likely we’ll be able to see it until it’s far too late. Typically, we track asteroids by virtue of their movement parallel to us. But when they’re coming right for us, we can’t see them moving. They just look like beautiful, harmless specks of light. But even more worrisome are the asteroids already inside Earth’s orbital path—the ones whose path the Earth is intersecting with regularly, the ones closest to us, the ones most likely to hit; we can’t see those asteroids because they’re so close to us that they’re backlit by the sun. Remember the old campfire horror story about the babysitter trying to trace the threatening phone calls she’s been receiving? Well, that babysitter is us, and that serial killer is the asteroids, and good lord! I—I hate to break it to you, but… those phone calls are coming from inside the house.
• “I alw—”
• “Get u—”
• “Oh go—”
• “Whatthefuckisthat?”
To give us a better shot at avoiding secret, invisible, flaming space death, a team of researchers in Canada is launching a small satellite telescope to help us spot these near-orbit asteroids better, but it’s a low-budget venture and it could do only so much. And while something is always better than nothing, keep in mind that there are more than five thousand asteroids dangerously close to Earth that have already been discovered using just our meager existing technology—it’s kind of hard to get stoked about the mere possibility of the potential to maybe spot a few more. Launching a satellite to slightly extend our sight range is like wearing a bulletproof vest when more than five thousand guns are pointing at you—yes, a few of those bullets are gonna be stopped, but any way you cut it, somebody’s winding up as meat Jell-O in this situation, and we’re a planet-sized target.
But hey, don’t worry, the government is totally on this one: A more official (well, more official than Canada anyway) approach is already under way. The U.S. Congress has introduced the NEO Preparedness Act, a bill mandating that we create a special program called the Office of Potentially Hazardous Near-Earth Object Preparedness, which would develop the technology to track 90 percent of all near-earth objects (NEOs), even those as small as 140 meters, by the year 2020. You better believe NASA’s on that shit too; they’ve decided that we would need a much larger version of Canada’s tracking satellite in place, preferably near Venus’s orbit, to achieve this Congress-mandated goal. Unfortunately, it would cost about 1.1 billion dollars for fifteen years of operation, and that’s just not in NASA’s budget. Also unfortunately, Congress is far too busy asking if baseball players are really as strong as they seem and trying to choke bankers with wads of cash to grant more funds to such trifling matters as the avoidance of space bullets, so they won’t give NASA the money. NASA scientists have stated that they intend to get to work on pursuing other, less costly plans, but seeing as how Congress is probably scheduling appointments to review whether wrestling is real and appointing a committee to decide exactly how awesome the last season of LOST is going to be, NASA probably shouldn’t hold their breath on this whole “averting Armageddon” thing.
But maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The last one of these asteroids to initiate an extinction-level event was more than 65 million ago, so how present is this danger, really?
Well, in 1908 we had a little practice drill for an ELE when a chunk of rock half the size of a football stadium exploded over Siberia, initiating a blast with the strength of about fifteen megatons—roughly one thousand times the strength of the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. With temperatures reaching 5,000 degrees, the impact destroyed two thousand square kilometers of forest—literally laying the trees out flat on their sides in enormous radial circles like a satanic Spirograph.
One witness, stationed at a local trading post, described what he saw:
Suddenly in the north sky… the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire.… At that moment there was a bang in the sky and a mighty crash.… The crash was followed by a noise like stones falling from the sky, or of guns firing. The earth trembled.
This man witnessed an event so traumatic that he could only speak in biblical terms afterward.
It was ominously phrased prophecies of doom delivered by traumatized, grizzled old Russians like that that spurred interest in the NEO Preparedness Office, which would not only track future potential meteor impacts through orbital telescopes, but is intended to help research and fund a plethora of solutions. Apparently operating under the Kitchen Sink philosophy of panicking and throwing everything we have at any potential threat, NASA proposes to use everything from “gravity tractors” to “a shit-ton of nuclear missiles” to deter impacts. That gravity tractor idea sounds pretty crazy, but really it’s just a plan to send a spaceship to tow the asteroid away. Some other proposed solutions, like firing a solar laser at it, or wrapping it entirely in plastic like a planetary Hot Pocket, are far more bizarre. The most practical solution on the table is that aforementioned nuclear blast, but there’s a major problem that prevents us from even nuking the damn thing: Blasting an asteroid apart preimpact could just fragment it into thousands of smaller but still Earth-impacting meteoroids. So now instead of a punch to the face, we’ve turned it into a shotgun blast. A nuclear shotgun blast aimed right at us. And that’s our best option!
• Blow the fucking thing up.
• Divert it.
• Like, push the Earth out of the way somehow?
• Last idea is stupid. How can you push a planet?
• Bigger gravity tractor.
• Invent Hulk, have Hulk punch.
• Ask Jesus.
But one possible solution to this problem is the concept of nuclear pulse propulsion—essentially, using nuclear blasts as a kind of engine to push the meteor away from us without damaging it. They want to use nuclear explosions as the fuel in a gargantuan space engine that they’ll attach to an incoming planet-killing asteroid. So really, if you can gauge the level of a threat based on the truly, epically insane lengths people are willing to go to prevent it, then you should probably start burrowing underground and asking every woman you see if she’d like to repopulate the Earth with you, because the only thing crazier than the plot of a Bruce Willis movie coming to life and ending the planet is the psychotic ways the government is trying to stop it.
And even if nature, fate, and God don’t conspire to seal our fates with a giant rock kiss, we just might do it ourselves. Carl Sagan, in his book Pale Blue Dot, reasoned that any method capable of turning meteors away from Earth could ultimately be just as effective at rerouting otherwise harmless asteroids toward us. Sagan thought that since political leaders are all basically batshit insane, Earth will be at greater risk from a man-made impact than from anything naturally occurring. So he believed that by introducing ideas meant to avert disaster, we would actually give the bad guys some ideas to invite that same disaster. As if to prove his point, the Soviet Union read his theories and immediately set about work on Project: Ivan’s Hammer, a military operation whose sole purpose was the complete weaponization of space by steering incoming asteroids toward specific global targets. Sagan was immediately struck dead by the irony. May he rest in peace, though he’s far more likely spinning in his grave.
So even if the randomness of space doesn’t kill us, there are people on Earth more than willing to take up the slack? I guess it’s really only a matter of time before it happens. It could be any minute… it could happen… right… now! Ah, just kidding.
You’ve got until 2029.
Oh, I’m sorry, what? You didn’t know? That’s when the next one might hit. It’s named Apophis, and it’s very excited to meet you. It would shake your hand, but it prefers to say hello more the old-fashioned way: with explosions. But after that, shall we say, warm welcome, the conversation might turn chilly when the impact winter sets in! That is, assuming you don’t die from awesome pun overload first… ahem. So anyway, Apophis is expected to pass dangerously close to the Earth in early 2029—closer even than our own geosynchronous satellites! And though leading scientists say it’s unlikely to hit based on their projections, with a probability of only about 1 in 45,000, they also mention that their projections at this point are “not an exact science,” which, when you think about it, is a pretty shitty thing to hear from an astrophysicist. Add the fact that these trajectories are easily influenced by any and all outside force—from planetary pull to space junk (you know, like those geosynchronous satellites it will be passing straight through)—and it’s still somewhat unlikely that Apophis will hit in 2029. But any alteration of its course resulting from those satellite impacts could result in it hitting the Earth the next time it comes around… in 2036.
• Stubbing both toes in the same day on the same thing.
• Finding a $20 bill on the street.
• Winning fifth prize on Scratch-it.
• All life on Earth being blown to holy shit by an asteroid twenty years from now.
Apophis isn’t going to be an asteroid one-night stand, scaring you just the one time and disappearing forever. No, this is more like an asteroid relationship, and my friends, I’m sorry to say that it is a dysfunctional one. If you’re the kind of person who likes to look on the upside, though, you could think of it this way: It’s like a bonus! You looked in the box expecting only one, but now you’ve got two free, heaping scoops of explosive death in every box of your terror flakes. There’s also a supersecret prize inside. (Hint: It’s more explosions.)
THE EARTH IS A gun, and your country is a bullet. No, those aren’t poorly translated Japanese metal band lyrics, nor are they the pseudo-poetic mewling of jilted emo children; those words could be, terrifyingly enough, a completely true statement. It’s all because of something called a Verneshot, and though the theory is still under debate, it is the only one so far that explains why mass extinctions, severe geological damage, and volcanic eruptions often occur simultaneously all throughout history. Not content to simply state that “some shit went down,” scientists have instead begun pointing to the Verneshot. And then probably screaming. And then dying.
That’s just what the Verneshot does.
The big extinction that we all know about—a meteor killed the dinosaurs—is referred to as the Cretaceous-Tertiary, or K-T, extinction. New theories suggest that that disaster could have been caused by a Verneshot rather than a meteor impact. A team of scientists led by Jason Phipps Morgan at the GEOMAR Earth Science Institute at Kiel University first proposed the theory, which goes like this: Huge volumes of volcanic gas slowly build up beneath layers of impenetrable rock, called cratons. When those rocks start splitting apart ever so slightly, the built-up gases explode through the weak points—blowing the craton into a suborbital trajectory. The expelled chunk of rock is launched into the air, orbits the Earth briefly, and then crashes back to the planet with nearly the force of a meteor impact. Meanwhile, the tube that formerly held all the gas has emptied, pouring its noxious contents into the atmosphere. It then collapses in upon itself, causing an earthquake.
• “So much gas is released, it’s like the Earth ate a seven-layer burrito.”
• “More gas is released into the atmosphere than your grandpa’s La-Z-Boy.”
• “So much gas is released, it’s like somebody punctured Michael Moore.”
It sounds like just a more extreme version of a volcanic eruption—big rock, gases, seismic activity—but the twist is in the scale of the thing: See, cratons are usually gargantuan. About the size of a country, to be exact, and that’s a bad size for something that’s being shot at your face. But the rock isn’t your only worry: The tube that launched it—also hundreds of miles wide—causes devastating earthquakes upon its collapse. Estimates show that these earthquakes are off the current charts, estimated at an 11 on the Richter scale; the scientists in charge of measuring this would have to create a new notch on the dial just to do so, making them the Spinal Tap of the earth sciences. So much gas is released that it poisons the entire atmosphere for thousands of years, blotting out the sun and corrupting the air itself.
But hey, let’s not get distracted here; there’s still a small continent in the sky that wants you dead. Let’s get back to that, shall we? Upon impact, the blast would be akin to 7 million atomic bombs going off in the same place, and at the same exact time. That’s too big a number for too bad a thing for most of us to fully comprehend. So if it helps, picture this: The city of London has a population of roughly 7 million. So imagine that the entire city of London is populated by atomic bombs. Atomic bombs in place of secretaries, gas station attendants, and schoolchildren—everybody. Exactly the same as London in every respect, but instead of each individual person living there, there is a device with exactly enough power to destroy Hiroshima. And then one of them trips.
1. Don’t live on a continent.
Charmingly enough, the Verneshot was named for Jules Verne, whose book From the Earth to the Moon posited that space travel could be accomplished by loading astronauts into a giant cannon and just firing them at the lunar surface, presumably operating under the theory that the moon is made out of pillows. And it is, after all, a pretty fitting name. Because in light of all we’ve learned, it is technically possible for a huge cannon to shoot you into space; it’s just that you’ll be screaming particles of horror and guts when you get there. That probably would have made a much shorter book, though.
Charles straightened his protective impact derby, mounted the atmos-cannon, and bid a formal farewell laced with restrained emotion to his most loyal and loving children. There was a sound like the bellow of Gabriel’s trumpet upon God’s return, and my dear beloved Charles ventured forth into the cosmos. As something akin to hamburger. In retrospect, this idea was poorly thought out, at best.
Some scientists dramatically explain the Verneshot as being akin to the Earth “shooting itself in the head.” But perhaps that analogy could be more accurate: It’s more like the Earth chopping off its own hand and then punching itself to death with it. Because bullets are for pussies.
But the scientists aren’t just pointing at the possibility of a Verneshot because it would make an excellent premise for a Michael Bay movie. They actually have this thing they call “evidence.” The Kiel University scientists say that the K-T isn’t the only massive die-off possibly caused by a Verneshot. There have actually been four major mass extinctions that coincide with potential Verneshot scenarios since life first appeared on Earth: the Late Devonian extinction event about 364 million years ago, the Permian-Triassic event 251 million years ago, the Triassic-Jurassic event 200 million years ago, and the aforementioned K-T event 65 million years ago.
The bizarre thing that first tipped off the Verneshot scientists is that these extinctions all have something in common: Available evidence seems to indicate that they were not only preceded by a massive meteor strike, but that there was always a simultaneous appearance of continental flood basalt, which coats great swathes of the Earth in liquefied basalt lava, forming dramatic landscapes and releasing massive quantities of poisonous gas in the process. I shouldn’t need to tell you that the odds of two mass-extinction-causing events are extremely low (about one in 3,500), but it looks like I just did, doesn’t it?
A lone extinction linked to the one-two punch of a meteor strike and a flood basalt flow? That’s unlucky, sure, but shit happens. However, four instances of species-destroying simultaneous disasters? Well, clearly a new theory is required to explain when two such large-scale disasters seem to be occurring in concert. Because the only other sensible explanation, that global disasters like to gangbang the Earth like an aging porn star desperate for rent money, just suggests a God too perverted and cruel for the human mind to comprehend. So, rather than believe that God uses double-header disasters to fuck life out of existence, there are some scientists who would like to politely suggest that the Verneshot, not a meteor strike and flood basalt flow, is the more reasonable explanation, if only to retain one’s sanity.
Of course, it is just a theory. Most ideas in science technically have to be labeled “theory”—which you can see in everything from relativity to evolution. Absolute proof is such a tricky thing to come by in the best of cases, much less when you’re trying to prove the existence of something that not only would have exploded most of its evidence, but shot half of it into space afterward, then buried whatever scraps were left under continent-blanketing lava. Regardless, some hard evidence is being turned up that helps validate the Verneshot theory: Beneath almost all of the continental flood basalt, scientists are finding concentric circles engraved in the earth on a scale so large that it defies comprehension. Enormous furrows that get both deeper and narrower the closer they lie to the center, creating an inverted cone leading to one central point in the sea floor. A focal point of impact surrounded by the debris of a gargantuan collapsed tube. Sounds a lot like the exploded barrels of Earth-shatteringly huge cannons…
1. “India murdered Mexico.”
2. “Where my dick at?!”
3. “Japan is a concealed weapon.”
4. “They take your thoughts out like recycling!”
5. “The United States is ammunition.”
Answer key: 1—Verneshot, 2—hobo, 3—Verneshot, 4—hobo, 5—both.
And though the most definitive proof of a Verneshot would be, much like in normal forensic investigation, to find the actual bullet, I should remind you that oftentimes it’s enough simply to produce the gun in court. Considering that people are currently living on the murder weapon, it shouldn’t be too hard to find. And so the Verneshot theory is gaining ground in the scientific community—ground that it probably just loads up and fires into space—and it could happen anywhere, at any time, though according to Jason Phipps Morgan, that may be sooner rather than later: Northern Eurasia is just starting to rift, and with the immense pressure built up beneath the Siberian Craton ever increasing, the right preconditions exist for a catastrophic Verneshot event to occur. The Yellowstone Caldera, as well, could present some signs of a potential Verneshot… that is, if the impending supervolcanic eruption doesn’t vent the pressure first. And when a life-destroying volcanic eruption of unseen proportions is your best-case scenario, you’re pretty well fucked. Russia and the United States engaged in a race to see who gets to space first; this is like the Cold War all over again, except it’s not so “cold” this time and “getting to space” would be done in tiny gooey pieces.
But hey, look on the bright side: You could literally shoot an entire country in the face with 100 percent pure America. That’ll show all those pinko commie terrorists, assuming that they don’t fire themselves at you first.
SOMETIME IN THE very near future, the Earth’s magnetic field will reverse. North will literally become south, and the consequences of this shift are not yet fully known. Experts cite potential side effects that range from the lovely sounding “northern lights in Cuba” to the slightly less endearing “everybody gets cancer and the Earth spits you into space.”
But while nobody is really certain what will happen when it comes, what is sure is its imminent arrival: Earth’s poles reverse every quarter million years or so, and it’s been around 700,000 years since the last one. Like an unwed, pregnant, teenage library book, we are both long overdue and seriously fucked. The Earth’s magnetic field is caused by the rotation of the molten metal in the upper core, just below the Earth’s surface. That magnetic field diverts harmful particles and radiation from space (everything from dust to gamma rays) away from the bulk of the Earth. Most of us probably don’t have a solid idea of what the various fields and layers of atmosphere actually do for the Earth; to your average Joe, it’s all just so much invisible space magic. That could particularly describe the magnetosphere that surrounds the whole planet and reaches far out into space. The poles, being the strongest points of the field, work like giant magnets, dragging foreign particles toward them and depositing them at the extreme ends of Earth. You can even see this process happening: The light reflecting off of these particles is why we have the aurora borealis, or for those who you hate excessive vowel usage, “the northern lights.” Setting aside the somewhat disturbing realization that those pretty green ribbons in the sky are actually a perpetual rain of tiny space bullets, this means that the purpose of the pole is to protect the rest of the world from harm at the expense of the northern and southern extremes. Considering that the southern extreme is Antarctica, which is sparsely populated at best (save for adorable penguins, but do try to avoid thinking about radiated particles giving cancer to baby penguins; it’s just too sad to fully contemplate), and considering that—according to the stereotypes that make up my entire base of knowledge—the northern extremes are exclusively populated by Canadians, Eskimos, and Santa Claus, depositing all this space death at the poles isn’t really affecting anybody that matters (sorry, Santa).
Troposphere: Really warm, sandy sphere.
Stratosphere: Planes go here, also guitars.
Mesosphere: Me so sphere-y?
Thermosphere: Where nuclear power comes from.
Exosphere: A sphere with its bones on the outside like a bug.
But that magnetic field is long overdue for a flip, and that could mean some very bad things for us. While the shift is happening, the protection offered by the magnetic field will be drastically weakened—if not absent entirely—during a process known as a “fade.” And with that field gone, expect cancer and mutation rates to rise dramatically. If it helps, think of the magnetic field as a sort of space sunblock… except instead of shielding your pasty ass at the beach, it shields the entire planet, and instead of getting sunburned if it fails, you get supercancer and flipper children.
• Eskimos
• Canadians
• Children
• PETA (unrelated)
Thus far this has been a “wouldn’t that suck if that happened” scenario and, though the timing dictates that it should be happening soon, that “soon” could well be anytime over the span of the next thousand years. The odds of the shift happening within your, or your children’s, or your children’s children’s lifetimes has to be pretty low, right? Living through something as rare as this is so unlikely it would be like winning a particularly shitty cosmic lottery of death. But then, this is a book about the end of the world, so you probably see where I’m going with this….
That’s right! You’ve won the cosmic shit-death lotto!
The magnetic field has been fading at an ever-increasing pace for the last three hundred years or so, and right now it’s already down to about three-quarter strength. Just judging by the numbers so far, even if it continues at this rate, it shouldn’t really matter to you: We should all still have a few hundred years minimum before it’s low enough to affect life on Earth. But that mentality, in addition to being relatively dickish to your great-great-grandchildren, also isn’t entirely accurate. We can’t rely on the rate of change to be slow and steady. There’s an anomaly that exists right now in the south Atlantic called the South Atlantic Anomaly (because they’re scientists, not advertising executives; sexy names ain’t in their repertoire) that has already started the shift. It is a huge chunk of Earth beneath the ocean where the field is not just absent, but actively switching its magnetic polarity. Apart from fucking up all the mermaids’ computers, this particular anomaly isn’t going to really do anything, but it does confirm that the shift is going to happen in pieces, and in a nonlinear fashion.
So the rate the field is decreasing has been roughly mapped out. It will be completely gone—as in everywhere—in less than a thousand years, but vast swaths of the planet will also be losing their field in chunks well before that time. But even the areas with still-functioning magnetic fields will be operating at partial strength, and partial protection is just that: incomplete. Every percentage point that the field weakens makes it just a little more likely that you’ll be catching tiny molecular comets of radiation with your major organs. So instead of having full protection, like a Kevlar vest, right now you have a Kevlar tube top: spotty coverage at best. Soon, you’ll be down to a Kevlar bra as the field drops further in strength, and then before you know it all you’re left with is Kevlar pasties: It’s still protection, technically, but unless your nipples have some serious enemies, it may not be where you need it, when you need it. It’s a pan-global game of strip poker against space cancer, and the game is rigged against you.
While the more reasonable theories argue that the flip is a long and intricate process taking thousands of years to fully complete, a few people insist that the only way a magnetic shift this large can occur is from a huge planetary body passing so close to the Earth that the torque from its influence literally shifts the geographical locations of the poles—sending Sweden to South Africa and vice versa. The continents themselves would shift on the liquid base supporting them, sliding like gargantuan air hockey pucks across the molten interior of the globe. Obviously, this would be catastrophic. It would be exactly like pulling the rug out from underneath somebody… if by “rug” you mean planet, and by “somebody” you mean everybody. We would hurl across entire hemispheres at the speed of sound, or be spit out into space like watermelon seeds… if watermelon seeds were capable of feeling intense terror and incredibly brief but fantastic confusion. Several notable psychics and New Age philosophers have said that this scenario is “incredibly likely in the very near future,” while respected scientists and geologists have gone on record as saying that this situation is “so retarded” that it has actually “cost them valuable IQ points just hearing about it.”
But the New Age dipshits do have a little something right: They cite the timeline for this event around the year 2012. As mentioned in the introduction to this book, 2012 is the last, best hope for apocalyptic fanboys and fangirls out there just jonesing for some rapture. This is on account of the Mayan calendar, one of the most bafflingly accurate and intricate calendar systems of the ancient world, which ends abruptly in the year 2012. The Mayans believed that the current “phase” of life will end in 2012, and that nothing will ever be the same afterward. Now, as apocalyptic prophecies go, that particular foretelling of the end-times is downright flirtatious when compared to apocalypses prophesied by the other major religions. From Christianity to Scientology, most major religious texts set up the end of the world like it’s an opportunity for a special effects bonanza: Blood, lightning, explosions, plagues, demons, spaceships; it’s like an ’80s metal video come to life, and God is going to play a bitchin’ solo before he trashes his instruments—those instruments being all life on Earth.
• Poorly outlined
• Not plausible
• Not possible
• Not unretarded
• Fuck that noise
So while some interpret it as the end of the world, others believe it’s merely the end of the world as we know it (see: Michael Stipe). It could just herald a new era of knowledge and peace unforeseen in the history of mankind, and that’s what the Mayans meant by “the end of the current cycle of life.” Some people—good, hopeful, optimistic people—would agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly. You know who doesn’t believe that? Science. For once, science and religion agree; if anything big does go down in 2012, it’s probably not going to be an interplanetary group hug.
It just so happens that 2012 very neatly syncs up with the sun’s own regular pole shift. Like clockwork, the sun’s magnetic poles shift every eleven years, peaking with an increase in electromagnetic solar storms, and if you were paying attention at the time, you’ll remember these periods as being responsible for everything from mysterious fires to fucking with your television reception. But if a sun flip occurred when the Earth’s magnetic field was weakening, the energy released by the sun could act like a catalyst, thus kick-starting the process.
It’s comforting to operate under the assumption that pole shifts take thousands of years to complete, but other evidence has recently been turned up to the contrary. Samples taken from the Steens Mountain lava beds in Oregon indicate that at the time those lava flows were active, the geomagnetic poles were moving by as much as 8 degrees a day! If it kept up at that rate, the poles could’ve completely flipped in a month. Still others believe that the field does more than turn over in chunks, as was indicated by the South Atlantic Anomaly. They think that for thousands of years during the transition, the bipolar nature of the Earth actually splits into several rogue, roving poles that wander at random across the surface of the Earth. Eight norths! Moving souths! Navigation will be useless and constantly changing! One day you’ll wake up in North America, the next day South! Brazilians will enjoy Budweiser while Wisconsinites guzzle Fanta by the case! Anarchy!
• Motorcycles
• Soccer games
• My heart
• Hungry lions
• Your crotch
• The Earth
And finally, one of the more credible theories for pole shift revolves around something called the Jupiter Wind. Though it sounds like a particularly hackish John Grisham novel, it refers to the influence of Jupiter’s “winds” on the Earth’s magnetic field. Astrophysicist Frances Bagenal has shown that “magnetospheres of rapidly rotating planets with strong magnetic fields [e.g., Jupiter and Saturn] are dominated by rotation, while the solar wind controls the plasma flow in smaller magnetospheres of slowly rotating planets [e.g., Earth].” This just means that Earth’s magnetic field isn’t large enough to be completely independent, so a huge factor of its stability is outside influence, namely the sun.
And here comes that troublesome date again, 2012: Not only is it the next cycle of solar magnetic activity, but it also takes place in a window where Jupiter, the Earth, and the sun are all in perfect alignment. Jupiter’s self-generated electromagnetic field is normally pushed into the far reaches of the solar system by the constant solar wind; with Earth blocking the sun’s influence, Jupiter’s magnetic field would respond to the lack of pressure from the sudden absence of solar winds by sending a massive surge of its electromagnetism in the direction in which that pressure was blocked. That’s Earth.
Think of it like this: You’re a skinny asthmatic nerd child (with a weakened magnetic field), already extremely prone to beatings on the best of days, but today you’ve accidentally picked a fight with the biggest, baddest motherfucker on the playground (that’s Jupiter). As long as the teacher is watching, exerting an external pressure on both of you, you both keep to yourselves. Your magnetic field (in this analogy that’s your face) remains intact only because the teacher is suppressing the bad motherfucker. Now the teacher leaves for a smoke break, creating a sudden lack of restraint in the behemoth, and he’s pointing right at you… with his fist (or the Jupiter Wind).
Now we have a space tsunami hitting a weakened magnetic field from one side at the same time that the Earth is under assault by the powerful solar winds generated by the sun’s own pole shift on the other side. It’s a perfect storm that batters the Earth with unbelievable force and could potentially wipe out our planet’s weakened magnetic field instantly. So let’s go back to our metaphor one last time: You’re a weak, feeble child, and the teacher is nowhere to be seen. What is to be seen, however, is the giant fist (or electromagnetic wave) hurtling at your face. You cannot dodge this fist; you can only take the hit and all of its consequences. That would be bad enough, but hey, you’ll live, right? Well, no, because this time a miracle happens: This time an errant delivery van (in the form of solar storms) comes careening through the playground fence and heads straight for the bully. As the bully swings his fist at you, the van slams full speed into the elbow of his punching arm, sending the already devastating blow at you with unimaginable force (both solar storms and Jupiter winds hitting simultaneously). Due to freak coincidence, you’re no longer just getting punched; now you’re getting punched with a truck.
Now that we know we can’t avoid it, we should at least know some of the expected consequences. For starters, because a pole shift can happen in stages, we could have a series of temporary magnetic poles wandering the Earth at random. So not only would people have no idea where north is, but even more confusingly, there could be multiple norths. Obviously this would play havoc with all modern navigation, and anything relying on compass directions would be little better than a confused, lost male stereotype, unable to ask directions even if they wanted to.
This means that all migrating animals would also lose their direction, which could lead to such wacky scenarios as Canada geese migrating to the Bahamas for the summer! And the subsequently less wacky following side effects of that migration:
The total extinction of Canada geese.
Reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field would also affect the electrical conduction of the Earth’s molten outer core, which in turn might lead to heretofore unseen volcanic activity. It wouldn’t necessarily lead to supervolcanoes, but everything that might be about to erupt would immediately do so. The shift could also act as a catalyst for earthquake activity, but really, at this point? It’s just showing off. Everybody’s already on fire or flying their planes into the ground. You don’t have to be a dick about it, geomagnetic field.
Kicking you while you’re down, then putting you down lower while continuing to kick you, then burying you and digging you back up just to kick you some more.
But hell, even if we survive the Earth self-destructing, the magnetic field can have serious effects on the human body all by its lonesome.
With our atmospheric shield down, all the harmful space particles are allowed through at full strength. Gamma rays, cosmic rays, and solar radiation will all come blasting right in and—aside from sounding like ammunition for supervillain weaponry—all of these particles have one thing in common: They’re potentially deadly. They can cause genetic mutation, cell death, and cancer in any and every little thing, just by their mere presence. So when the pole shift happens, we will no longer have any defenses left against the cancer-causing, DNA-mutating particles from outer space spawned by the cosmic forces plotting our demise. OK, so that may be a bit overblown; space doesn’t necessarily want you dead, but it will kill you regardless. At least you can pretend it’s got a motive, and maybe give your impending murder a little meaning.
And remember those wacky Canada geese who basically lost themselves out of existence? They did that because they have extremely small amounts of a mineral called magnetite that syncs their brains with the magnetic field, thus giving them their sense of direction. What other animals have this same direction-giving mineral in their brains? Why, you do! One researcher, focused on the effects a changing magnetic field can have on the human body, found that by varying the strength of or entirely removing the magnetic fields from her subjects, serious coordination problems arose. The subjects immediately became disoriented and clumsy, falling down more easily. They couldn’t even complete simple body tasks, like touching their fingers to their noses or standing on one foot. Some became motion sick, and all reported serious difficulty concentrating.
The decreasing magnetic field, the one we’re living with now, could very well have similar, if not more profound, effects. After all, the subjects in this study were subjected to weakened fields for only a short time, whereas the real pole shift could take hundreds of years to complete. How many generations of a stumbling, half-retarded human population tripping comically down stairways can occur before we, as a species, just cease to exist? It could be death for us all. Death, by mass pratfall. But hey, on the plus side, if there is an America left after all of this, America’s Funniest Home Videos will have material until the end of time.