Lifehavens – A secure shelter from natural disasters.

Tags

asteroids, CERN, Chicxulub, Chixulub, comets, disasters, Doomsday, Homeland Security, human survival, population, supernovas

This is an impact simulation of Chicxulub asteroid

I don’t worry about natural disasters destroying humanity and here’s why:

1. There are really big asteroids striking Earth occasionally like the one at Chicxulub which killed off the dinosaurs, but these are very rare. That one was 65 million years ago. There was an even longer period before the previous mass extinction, so with a human life expectancy of about 65 years there is a rate of about one in a million that a cosmic calamity will even have a chance to bring about our demise. Furthermore, we humans are much more resourceful than the other beasts and could retire to shelters for months or even decades if given a little time to prepare. Since some beasts did survive the previous extinctions it means that humans could have easily survived, at least as a species. There is an ongoing survey of the sky by the Spaceguard Foundation which is 80% complete looking for giant impactors, and there have been none found which are a threat in the next one hundred years. With another few years of searching they will be able to say with 99% accuracy there are no threats for a thousand years. And if is something found there are means for guiding the impactor away from collision given enough time. If nothing better is found it could be blasted apart with an H-bomb, and we could probably cope with any of the fragments that still happened to be coming our way with a second blast.
2. There are the possibility of comets hitting Earth, like the Tunguska event, every hundred years or so, made up of cometary debris, and they might destroy a city size area, but probably no more. They might cause an earthquake, and tsunami, but it is unlikely to be even as big as the December 26, 2004 one in Sumatra. Even a comet one hundred times bigger than Tunguska would be no threat to humanities survival. Some comets come in quite fast directly from deep space, and could hit us directly quite hard but with far less than one per century coming within a million miles of Earth the chance of being hit is vanishingly small.
3. There are all sorts of powerful things that happen out in the heavens, supernovas, gamma ray bursters, pulsars, microblazars, poisonous gas clouds, and other strange things. It is not that it is impossible for such things to destroy life on Earth it is just that these events are so rare astronomically, and generally so very far away that they probably won’t be a threat even once in the entire geological life of the Earth.
4. The sun exploding is a problem, but you are going to have to wait for billions of years for that event. It is not totally impossible for the sun to do something temporarily unexpected, greater than usual fluctuations or its normal breathing pattern might vary a bit more than usual but it is unlikely that these are a major threat to humanities survival.
5. The scientific experiments at CERN are exploring incredibly powerful phenomena, but it is at a submicroscopic scale, and of itself won’t be a problem. However, what they discover might become a problem because they might find a way to make even more potent weapons than H-bombs. That is unlikely, and it is unnecessary as the bombs are potent enough already, and a new variety of one probably wouldn’t change the balance of weapons terror by much. Where the real danger lies in this particular type of research is in the possibility of discovering a really cheap way to make an A-bomb or perhaps a way to refine explosive materials out of existing materials cheaply. For example, a method of setting off chemical explosives with some particular, and unexpected frequency of light radiation inside of a reflective can.
6. Of course the Earth and even the Universe will eventually die, and there is no reason to worry about these events because they are incredibly far off in human terms. Furthermore, you can’t do anything what so ever to change those one iota, and one shouldn’t concern themselves overmuch with things which you can’t have any modifying input in.
7. The 15 potential Homeland Security Disasters were discussed on May 1, 2008, and found not to be a threat to humanities survival. The worst of these disasters being a natural disaster like a bad pandemic flu. The other disasters were more local in their effects.
8. The real threats to human survival continue to be a total thermonuclear war precipitated by error or simply by the accumulation of stresses which trigger a war which goes really bad. The ultimate driving stress is excess population over stressing the carrying capacity of the resource base both in providing and cleaning up after human exploitations.

Lifehaven – How bad are the 15 Homeland Security Disasters?

Tags

CO2, farming, Lifehaven, survival, transportation, war

Homeland Security – The Scenarios List – July 2004

— — — [DISS — Disaster, defined, measured and charted]
1: Nuclear Detonation – 10-Kiloton DISS~4
2: Biological Attack – Aerosol Anthrax DISS~4
3: Biological Disease – Pandemic Influenza DISS~5
4: Biological Attack – Plague DISS~4
5: Chemical Attack – Blister Agent DISS~2
6: Chemical Attack – Toxic Industrial Chemicals DISS~2
7: Chemical Attack – Nerve Agent DISS~4
8: Chemical Attack – Chlorine Tank Explosion DISS~4
9: Natural Disaster – Major Earthquake DISS~3
10: Natural Disaster – Major Hurricane DISS~3
11: Radiological Attack – Dispersal Devices DISS~2
12: Explosives Attack – Bombing Using IED DISS~2
13: Biological Attack – Food Contamination DISS~3
14: Biological Attack – Foreign Animal Disease DISS~0
15: Cyber Attack – Financial Infrastructure DISS~0

After the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center the United States got more serious about what came to be referred to as Homeland Security. It has been much publicized, and perhaps they do a lot of preparation, and training for the level of disasters listed above. However, the Lifehaven project isn’t concerned with any of these disasters because none of them have but the remotest possibility of annihilating humanity or agricultural life on Earth. It is possible that if it were believed that any of these things were precipitated by willful terrorist or national malice that it could precipitate a DISS~10 or worse response. But, the 15 scenarios on the list by themselves are not a profound danger to the survival of humanity. All of these estimates are very arbitrary, and intended only to give a working approximation, but a simple addition of the numbers published in the list above gives a total of “only” 294,000 fatalities. That number is every one of the terrorist attack methods being deployed one time which is unlikely. That is a lot of people being killed, but considering that since WW II there has only been one attack on US homeland, 9-11-01 Trade Towers we should divide by at least 60 to get a yearly threat rate. That calculation gives us 4,900 per rate per year which has only happened one time. By that measure the terrorists are way behind the Homeland Security rate. In fact the unrealized published terrorist rate is only one tenth of the automobile fatalities rate which is realized every year, year after year. So, I say again, these things are terrible, but they are not humanity threatening, and therefore are not of much concern for the Lifehaven Project. There are things which are an annihilating danger, but none of the items in the scenario list above are among them.

The Real Threats to Human Survival

Total Thermonuclear War North, and South Hemispheres – DISS~15 Everyone is gone.

Total Thermonuclear War mostly Northern Hemisphere – DISS~12-14 Only well prepared Southern Hemisphere, and Lifehaven inhabitants survive.

Major Thermonuclear War Northern Hemisphere – DISS~10-11 Moderately prepared Southern Hemisphere people survive.

Limited Thermonuclear War – DISS~9 All targets of 50,000 and more people are destroyed, and nuclear winter covers the Northern Hemisphere for a year.

Limited Thermonuclear War – DISS~8 A high percentage of combatant nations people killed, and food crops ruined for a year by dislocations, and haze.

A separate issue: Advanced bioweapons unleashed – DISS~1-15 It is impossible to know what can happen with carefully designed biology, but probably it would be self limiting by killing off its hosts before it was transmitted to everyone. Or, if it wasn’t quite so contagious, or virulent it probably wouldn’t kill off everyone, and would be self-contained, and adapted to by the host bodies. We have been fighting off biological invaders for a billion years, and have gotten pretty good at it, or we wouldn’t be here now.

Natural disasters of the magnitude necessary to annihilate humanity probably are even rarer than the 65 million year old event at Chicxulub. We humans have more methods of coping with that type of disaster than alligators or rodents, and they survived. So, it is unlikely that any natural event of any type experienced in the last half billion years is likely to kill all humans.

The stress factors which bring on the war.

The human population explosion is continuing right on past the carrying capacity of the planet. By my calculation the ability of Earth to easily digest CO2 was passed in about 1850, and its current ability is to sustain only 10-100 million modern high tech people’s pollution. The argument is rather like Thomas Malthus’s, which is still basically correct, we just haven’t reached the limit he proposed, but it has only been ten generations and we are now very close to his limits in terms of generation time. Probably one more doubling of population will bring on the collapse, and that is roughly a maximum of fifty years. Those figures are based on running out of food, and don’t take into account the ongoing destruction of the carrying capacity of the Earth which will bring it on even sooner.

A major crop failure of even one of the basic cereal foods. rice, wheat, or corn would bring on an immediate world wide famine. At first it might be spotty, but it would increase the price stress on everyone. This was recently shown when American farmers shifted a portion of their crop yield to the manufacture of ethanol for transportation usages. This brought about an instant mini-famine in Mexico among the poor people who eat a lot of corn based tortillas. But, if this disruption in corn supply is brought about by uncontrollable disease, or even by some unexpected economic disruptions, or some military, or terrorist conflict which prevented the easy shipping, there would be real famine somewhere and quickly.

Continuing climate change towards hotter, and more variable weather, and with that a change in what will grow in previous farming locations or which is planted, but is somehow killed off before it can be harvested by the unpredictable weather.

Water failure both from floods, and droughts will increase stress.

Land erosion decreases land availability for crops.

Destruction of the productivity of the irrigated land by the toxic mineral salts precipitated out by evaporation of the rain water percolated through mineral rich, and salty soil in the mountains, and then brought onto the farms where it evaporates. This process according to The Atlas Of World Population, has brought down several civilizations.

Oil price rise from various lacks will cause crop failures from lack of the ability of farmers to pay for the price of the creation of fertilizer or pay for the fuel to operate machinery necessary for cultivation.

What forecast indicators should we watch for?

Rising expectations of what is deserved, and a willingness to take it by force, is an indicator of world wide problems of supply.

When large groups of people start demanding, and then taking food from other groups of people by force it is a sure sign of serious trouble is about to crash in upon the entire system. The instability these actions will create will run the price of everything up rapidly, because all of the near infinite lines of supply will have to be protected. When this moves from difficult to impossible to accomplish then a collapse will ensue fairly quickly.

It is impossible to predict or possibly even post-dict the real causes of any specific war, because it will be a complex mix of many things, and ultimately it doesn’t matter much, because it could be any of them or some unusual combination of them or even just chance finally tipping something over some unseen edge into catastrophe. However, chance, and risk can be observed to some degree, and preparations can be made for their various possibilities based on their likelihood. Or, perhaps take the Black Swan approach, and develop ones robustness to cope with the unexpected. So ultimately preparing for a Chicxulub like event doesn’t make sense, but preparing for the possibility of rain on a cloudy day does make sense and preparing for transportation disruption may prove to be the most critical one which can be helped with planning.

Lifehaven – What to do about usual disasters and terrorism?

Tags

flu, Homeland Security, Lifehaven, pandemic, terrorism

I don’t worry much about the 15 disasters on the official “List of Scenarios” from US Homeland Security Preparedness Activities because, as horrible as these are they are not likely to destroy all humanity. If, or when, they do happen they will be coped with by existing social mechanisms. They listed pandemic flu as the most deadly, and most likely. It is possible that the flu may be vastly worse than what Homeland Security predicts because they appear to base their analysis on the 1918-19 events which killed one in a hundred. But the current bird flu last January killed 11 out of 13 — generally it kills only 2 out of 3 — and that rate was with excellent hospital supportive care, of constant help with appropriate drugs and oxygen, which will not be available in a pandemic. New flus are inevitable, but that ghastly pandemic event, when it comes, will probably be from a weak mutated virus, and will probably not be as humanity annihilating as it appears it may be at present. Unless, perhaps, these diseases have been militarily enhanced by Ken Alibeck or his unrepentant bio-weapons developing ilk. People born before 1958 will have been vaccinated against smallpox, Alibeck’s favorite agent, and might survive, but those born later are unlikely to survive. Of course such a military style biological attack would be a mix of many deadly pathogens not just smallpox, so the multiple attack would probably get almost everyone. If the flu was really, really bad and killed 9 out of 10 people, out of a current population of 6.7 billion people that would still leave 670 million people. That is approximately the total world population back in 1730 when the industrial revolution was just getting started, and no one was complaining about lack of people at that time. Quite the contrary that is when Jonathan Swift made his Modest Proposal – For Preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public, by eating them. This is painful, if comic, reading even 280 years later. The mindset that could think such a way even in satire is upsetting. My point is that even so appalling a flu event, a DISS~10, would not be humanity destroying. Also, a flu event would strike in the Southern hemisphere as well as the Northern, and the Lifehavens would not be helped by their southerly status, but they would be much better off by being on very remote islands, and isolated from the infection. Because of modern radio communications they would be completely aware of the problem, and could close up their facility to the outside world, for over a year.

Humanity’s survival after a disaster leaving 1 million people.

Tags

Apocalypse, Armageddon, Doomsday, human survival, million survivors, survival, WW III

A surviving population of only one million people would probably be the result of a disaster DISS~11 such as a major atomic war. This type of war would strike the Northern Hemisphere much harder because that is where ninety percent of the people live, and where much greater than ninety percent of the targets of atomic bombs would be found. There are presently about 6.700 billion people, so in this scenario with 1 million surviving it means that only 1 person in 6,700 would survive. Or if 10% of presently living people are Southerners then, even there, of the 670 million people, only 1 person in 670 would survive. With the radiation that bad in the south it means that it would be much worse in the north, and would have killed everyone, and virtually everything within a meter of the surface.

Since even in the rather optimistic hope of 10 Lifehavens of one thousand persons each being in place there would be only 10,000 prepared survivors. The rest of the other million unprepared survivors would have to be those (1 of 670) who had the wherewithal to improvise in less than a month enough food (~500 Kg/1000 pounds, each), and secure shelter to survive for a year or more. Where are these people to be found? Some rich people might be able to buy, and stockpile the food for each person in their group, and stash it in a mine. But they must also get water, and other necessities into their haven. In remote farming areas there are warehouses with food destined for shipment which could sustain many local farmers if those farmers could be sheltered from the radiation. But, these same type of warehouses when  located in a city would soon be emptied by the local people; thus the survivors of this type of catastrophe would probably be in remote farming areas, possibly high in the mountains because it is easier to store food where it is high and dry. Potato storage cellars might prove to be near ideal preexisting shelters, because they are sometimes large buildings with a layer of soil on top of them to stabilize the temperature. These would form natural radiation shelters, and be large enough to live in. The mass of the potatoes themselves would add radiation protection. Bringing in trailer houses would make them quickly available for habitation especially if there were some form of electrical power available from outside.

Humanity’s survival after a disaster of a billion deaths.

Tags

Apocalypse, Armageddon, billion, Doomsday, human survival, survival, WW III

How would we cope with a billion people suddenly dying? On the Probaway Disaster Scale this is a DISS~9. The most likely precipitating cause of a disaster of this scale is a major war or a major disease pandemic, but there will probably be secondary causes such as famine or lack of resources such as water or oil, or tertiary causes such as society making it too easy for some small group or even an individual to create a really deadly weapon. These causes will probably be overlain with a large dollop of human blather and silliness.

A disaster of this scale where a billion people died has never happened before, in part because the population of the Earth wasn’t that large until 1825. Before that time that number of people dying would have been a DISS~15 or total human extinction. However, there have been examples where 1/6.7ths — that fraction of the Earth’s current population would be about 15% — of the population of very large areas have suffered destruction of that magnitude. For example see Wikipedia list: Mongol invasions, Thirty years war, China floods in 1300s, Black Death, smallpox, the extermination of native Americans 8000 BC and the near extermination of native Americans following 1492. However, in all of these cases there were populations of people from outside of the devastated area that were ready, willing and able to move into and repopulate the countryside relatively quickly. Note how often China has endured massive loss of life, and yet rebounded.

It appears that the population will rebound from a really horrible devastation if the technology exists for planting the land, and it will support the production of food. People have the capacity to ramp up their population numbers very quickly when there is unlimited food. The usual example of this is the populating of America in the 1800s but this was aided by a huge influx of immigrants. Another huge population explosion was that of a small group of Aztecs who after being forced off of a small hill into a swamp to die instead, in the face of fierce local opposition, built a impregnable city in the swamp, and in two hundred years built it into the largest and most beautiful city in the world at the time. Furthermore they conquered all of the peoples around them to the limit of their transport technology.

If there were a billion deaths in a world disaster that would drop the population from 6.7 billion to 5.7 billion but 5.7 billion is the world population in 1997. The world bounded from that lower number to the higher number in only ten years and therefore we might expect that it would rebound to the higher number in a similarly short amount of time. Perhaps, it would rebound even quicker if the infrastructure such as housing, and transportation systems were not destroyed in the disaster. By a similar admittedly rather callous logic, if the loss had been two billion people that would drop us back to the population in 1982, and it would take twenty five years to recover the higher population. These are terrible, terrible ordeals for humanity, but by thinking through them clearly, even in these extremely general ways, it may become possible to avoid them altogether. But how?

One thing is obvious, the population cannot grow forever. Even if things are perfect now, and getting better by the day it cannot continue growing as it is forever. The limiting thing in the past has been the food supply, and ultimately food will be critical, but that limit will be brought upon humanity by other factors — weather and climate, soil quantity, and quality, air purity, and clarity, energy and equipment availability — and other unexpected things. There are always other unexpected things. Ultimately the population might grow until there was standing room only, but more likely it would be the various forms of pollution choking us and limiting our fecundity. But, because we live in a world with other creatures who are forced to live exposed to these deteriorating outdoor elements they will be the first ones to suffer health problems. Those things we eat and depend upon for our very lives will become sick, and not very plentiful because of our pollution. The poorest humans will be the first to be forced to eat this limited quantity, and quality food, and will be the first to be malnourished, and sicken, and even starve. But, they will not die willingly, and they will fight to maintain their place on this planet, and thus we come back to the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse – War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. The processes we anthropomorphize as Mother Nature are simply the sum of many inputs of many factors, but one of the most predictable is what happens with runaway population explosions — they crash!

Disaster – compare the magnitude of worldwide human disasters.

Tags

disaster, Environment, future, global warming, greenhouse gases, Health, pollution, population, solutions

Human disaster is talked about a lot — global warming, CO2, famine, local wars, genocide — but there hasn’t been a general measure for disasters, like a Richter Scale for earthquakes, or a Fujida Scale for tornadoes, until now. Now there is the Probaway – Disaster Scale by Charles Scamahorn.

This is too small to read so click here for a nice printable PDF.

The Disaster scale begins at DISS-0 which is a single person’s death and maxes out at DISS -14 with a single person surviving. It goes up by multiples of ten to DISS-9, which is a billion people being killed. Then there is a break when going to DISS-10 because 10 billion would be more people dead than are presently alive. The scale shifts from number killed to number surviving, going from DISS-10 to DISS-14 by multiples (actually divisions) of one hundred, based on the number of survivors. This change of scale works much better than trying to do some weird decimal between 9 and 10 and conveys the magnitude and meaning of the disaster better.

This disaster scale is important, because it gives people a better intuitive feel for different magnitudes of disasters, and hopefully will give them, and their decision makers more flexibility in avoiding such disasters. The news media seems to make today’s top story into the greatest tragedy imaginable no matter what the scale. For example, a child trapped in a well will create more media interest than the report of a historical fact like the population of China having 150 million people missing in a population gap. See page 141 of Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race by Richard Rhodes. This is a tragedy of previously inconceivable proportions, though even those directly involved, and right in the middle of the worst of it would be unaware of the magnitude. They can only see what is before them, and no one has an appropriate overview. In our daily lives we have no sense of proportion for really large scale world events, and we tend to see them in the same way we see our daily lives.

Hopefully — this Disaster Scale will help people see more clearly and find their way to a better understanding of world events.

No Blade Of Grass – After the disaster unfolds.

No Blade Of Grass is a 1970 Cornel Wilde movie about a London, England family trying to escape a deadly crop destroying catastrophe. The premise of the movie is quite good because it is possible for some virus to attack all of our grass based crops such as corn, wheat, rye, rice, barley etc.. They do it all the time, and it is possible that a truly devastating virus could emerge from absolutely natural causes. Of course today we have war planners, and they have devised even more dreadful things aimed directly at human frailties, so why would they not aim at some enemies food crops. It could happen, and it probably has happened there just hasn’t been an opportunity to use this particularly insidious weapon just yet.

We are introduced to a decent upper middle class British family living a typical 1970s style urban existence, and are soon informed by a small screen black and white TV that a crop virus is devastating China, and because of world wide airplane travel this virus is cropping up everywhere even in England. The family decides to flee in their car to the ancestral farm, but of course they have problems. Of course, no problems no movie. But, in this case, the problems are utterly predictable – crazy poorly acted riots in town, crazy marauders stealing their cars on the highway, crazy poorly acted rape scenes in the country, crazy motorcycle gangs with Nordic horned helmets circling their over-night camp, and crazy encounters with essentially identical groups trying to walk to some difficult to get to place. Of course with every encounter there is a crazy poorly done gun fight, and our heroes end up killing a bunch of individuals every time. The motorcyclists were killed quite spectacularly many times over.

Everything is crazy because there is not a glimmer of motivation as to why people are behaving as they do. Didn’t the director Wilde ever see or understand a single scene of a Hitchcock movie? There was no dream like quality, no horror quality, no choice dialogue – nothing. This movie is far worse than Plan Nine from Outer Space which is considered the worst movie of all time. That movie is fun and has lots of campy quotable dialogue. But not this one, its just unbelievably badly acted, one dumb thing after another until the last scene where the father finally makes it to the ancestral farm, and has to kill his identical twin brother whom we can identify because he has white hair wig and isn’t wearing a giant black eye patch.

Although every situation about the movie is potentially terrifying, and real extreme emotions would be percolating up all the time, there is none of that here. Instead, you can almost hear the director say – Action – and on cue the actors start flailing their arms and legs about, in meaningless gestures while staying firmly rooted on their stage marks.

I watched this movie because it was on a list of important disaster movies which is my current theme but it was boring, boring, boring.

Disasters and the long term survival of humanity.

Steven Hawking said, “I believe that life on Earth is at an ever increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space.”

Well, all of those disastrous things were perfectly obvious way back in 1959 when I resigned from being a bomber pilot for the Strategic Air Command, but the question then as well as now is what to do about it that will work in the long run. But let us consider for a moment what can be meant by the long run. It may mean four years because that seems to be an average term of political office. It may mean my (or your) maximum life expectancy – say, about thirty years. Or alternatively the maximum life expectancy of a baby one personally knows. Or perhaps, say, two hundred years because that is the maximum of two lifespans, the baby you personally now know living to one hundred years and knowing someone who may be personally affected. Long term is an arbitrary definition. Perhaps five hundred years – the length of time books have been published, or perhaps ten thousand years – the length of time agriculture and city life has been possible, or perhaps a hundred thousand years – the length of time our species has been recognizably us. Or perhaps fifteen billion years – the length of time that matter has been in existence. Different definitions will give different responses as to what we should consider to be the optimum strategy for survival.

One thing about long term solutions is that they will be unpopular! And the longer term the solutions that are sought after the more unpopular the solutions will be! Politicians are limited by what they can sell to their constituency at an election time and their future orientation may be limited to only a few days because whatever they propose will be challenged by their opposition. If they can’t make something look desirable to half the public then their chance of implementing their ideas is nil. Selling something as desirable as seat belts on cars or cars that get better gas mileage took many years and proved almost impossible.

But before I outline some of the various solutions, it would be helpful for you to look at the Disaster Scale chart to help adjust your thinking to the various magnitudes of human suffering. This chart begins at level DISS-0 with a single person dying unnecessarily, to DISS-14, a disaster so great that there is only a single person surviving.

Earth Arks can have many sizes and shapes

This is a Claude-3-Opus Poe rewrite of my essay, with me proofreading and correcting some ideas.

An Earth Ark is a concept that involves preserving current life forms and information for future use in the event of a catastrophic event. It can take various forms, ranging from small-scale solutions like seed preservation to large-scale projects such as DNA banks. The primary goal of an Earth Ark is to ensure the survival and potential resurrection of life and knowledge after a global disaster.

One example of a small-scale Earth Ark could be a Coca-Cola bottle filled with various garden seeds, buried this year with the intention of being discovered by humans a thousand years after a hypothetical collapse of civilization. Another approach could involve coating seeds with a material that decomposes when exposed to sunlight and water, allowing the seeds to sprout and grow. These coated seeds could be buried on frozen mountaintops, where some might survive and flourish after global warming has melted the ice.

Medium-sized Earth Arks could include specially designed bottles that break open when exposed to specific natural elements, and tailored to local conditions. These bottles could be as large as quart-size or gallon-size containers, fitted with durable glass screw tops. Larger Earth Arks might consist of standard barrels or shipping containers filled with useful items and strategically placed to remain hidden until a designated time after a catastrophic event.

The most ambitious Earth Arks would involve boring tunnels into Antarctic mountaintops, which would remain very cold for an extended period. These tunnels could store samples of every currently collectible DNA. All these Earth Ark examples are meant to be concealed from daily discovery by burying them in remote locations, where they would erode out of their hiding places at a predetermined time in the distant future.

Who benefits from moving toward Armageddon?

Everyone loses everything if World War III or global warming crosses a tipping point and actually occurs. Unfortunately, many people, perhaps most, benefit from their current lifestyle. From the following lists, it appears that we are all gaining advantages from living in the modern world. The world’s economic engine produces goods that everyone, to some extent, consumes. Our personal consumption of money is proportional to our consumption of the earth’s resources, which are creating pollution.

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List in order the factors making World War III more likely to occur.

Claude-3-Opus

Poe

Several factors are contributing to the increased likelihood of a potential World War III. Here is a list of these factors in order of significance:

1. Geopolitical tensions and conflicts

• Escalating tensions between major powers (e.g., US-China, US-Russia)
• Regional conflicts and proxy wars (e.g., Ukraine, Syria, Yemen)
• Territorial disputes (e.g., South China Sea, Kashmir)

2. Proliferation of nuclear weapons and advanced military technology

• Modernization of nuclear arsenals by nuclear-armed states
• Development of hypersonic weapons and other advanced military tech
• Increased risk of nuclear conflict or accidents

3. Breakdown of international arms control agreements

• Collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty
• Uncertainty surrounding the future of the New START Treaty
• Lack of progress in nuclear disarmament efforts

4. Rise of nationalism and authoritarianism

• Increasing popularity of nationalist and populist ideologies
• Erosion of democratic norms and institutions
• Heightened risk of conflict due to nationalist rhetoric and policies

5. Climate change and resource scarcity

• Intensifying competition for resources (e.g., water, food, energy)
• Climate-related disasters and mass migrations
• Potential for resource wars and climate-driven conflicts

6. Cyber threats and information warfare

• Increased use of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns
• Potential for cyber conflicts to escalate into physical confrontations
• Erosion of trust in information sources and institutions

7. Economic instability and inequality

• Growing economic disparities within and between countries
• Potential for economic crises and social unrest
• Increased risk of conflict as a result of economic grievances

8. Weakening of international institutions and alliances

• Declining influence of the United Nations and other multilateral organizations
• Strained relationships within NATO and other military alliances
• Reduced capacity for international cooperation and conflict resolution

It is important to note that these factors are interconnected and can interact with one another, amplifying the overall risk of a global conflict. Addressing these challenges will require a concerted effort by the international community to promote diplomacy, cooperation, and risk reduction measures.

List, in order, the most common creators of carbon dioxide pollution,

Claude-3-Opus

Poe

Here is a list of the most common sources of carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution, in order of their contribution to global CO2 emissions:

1. Electricity and heat production

• Burning of fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and oil) for power generation
• Accounts for approximately 25% of global CO2 emissions

2. Industry and manufacturing

• Burning of fossil fuels for energy in manufacturing processes
• Production of cement, steel, and other materials
• Accounts for around 21% of global CO2 emissions

3. Transportation

• Burning of fossil fuels (gasoline, diesel) in vehicles (cars, trucks, ships, planes)
• Accounts for about 14% of global CO2 emissions

4. Agriculture, forestry, and other land use (AFOLU)

• Deforestation and land clearing
• Livestock farming (methane emissions from cattle)
• Agricultural practices (e.g., fertilizer use)
• Accounts for approximately 24% of global CO2 emissions

5. Buildings

• Energy consumption for heating, cooling, and lighting in residential and commercial buildings
• Accounts for roughly 6% of global CO2 emissions

6. Fossil fuel extraction and processing

• Fugitive emissions from coal, oil, and gas extraction and refining
• Accounts for about 6% of global CO2 emissions

7. Waste management

• Decomposition of organic waste in landfills (methane emissions)
• Incineration of waste materials
• Accounts for approximately 3% of global CO2 emissions

It’s important to note that these percentages are global averages and may vary by country or region depending on factors such as energy mix, economic structure, and land use practices. Additionally, some sources may have a higher share of emissions when considering other greenhouse gases (e.g., methane from agriculture and waste management) in addition to CO2.

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“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Says Pogo

This silly little one-liner seems to be the unalterable truth. That being the case, and there being no solution to the problem, the only solution is to survive the coming disaster, no matter which form it takes. However, those two disasters are so profound that the only survival will be Earth Arks, which will bring back to the surface of the earth some of the abundance we now enjoy and are destroying.

We are the enemy, but we are also the saviors if we choose to be.