When you think about the end of the world is always thinking of December 21, 2012 but there is no reasoning on the fact that there are other hypotheses about the end of the world
hypothesis end of the world
That 2012 will be the resulting pseudo end of the world "announced" by Maya weather is going to end, it will be what you want but I wanted to write this piece because people have an atavistic curiosity regarding the possible destruction of society and the world as we know it perhaps because tired and disappointed of what they experience every day, perhaps for personal morbidity but it is an interesting sociological phenomenon it is necessary to examine to try to give a risposdta, if it exists, to the curiosity that so corrupts the minds of the people, here then these writings collected on our site in the hope Runelore.it affect you as much if not more than those who have bombed over the past five years they recognized the destruction of everything we know.
We are still in the sphere of science, although this branch of human knowledge has the same percentage of success than those given to us by pseudo prophets or the like, nell'azzeccare forecasts of future events, and still have more demonstrable physical basis and compared to the span of more esoteric beliefs and pseudoconoscienze. Some scientists, however, were able to point to a future that is now revealed as true or very near such as Ray Kurzweil a scientist well known in the field as well as a brilliant inventor called one of the researchers in the top ten smartest living on earth, was able to predict in 1986 the economic decline and political disintegration of the Soviet Union as well as the advent of mobile phones and the defeat of a human being at chess by a computer which happened on time with the Russian champion Kasparov who confronted in chess with the computer IBM DeepBlue in 1997.
But we can also find Nick Bostrom Oxford University professor and founder of the Future of Umanity Institute. As far as Bill Joy, he was among the founders of Sun Microsystems considered a wizard and creator of the Java language with which our PCs today are information and media on the Internet. In 1975 he received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan and worked at the U.S. Presidential Commission for information Technology. Before you can venture into the world of possibilities destructive potential future we have to consider an important concept that is often not presented or explained that the concept of "existential risk." Think of an event such as the tsunami of 26 December 2004 that destroyed many parts of the coast in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and India, killing 200,000 people, or even suppose that may occur on the fault Californian earthquake better known as "Big One" expected to reach 7.5 degrees Richter would also in those places hundreds of thousands of deaths. Now even considering these events as catastrophic, they do not represent an existential risk as they are limited to a specific area of the planet and cause localized damage. Existential risk is something that affects humanity in the world of all social classes is and wherever you are, generating the highest level of destruction of life on the planet until the extinction of most life forms. Even if some humans survive this destruction the loss of all the technological infrastructure, cultural and energy sources would lead to a regression of humanity, probably, to a subsequent and complete extinction within a few decades. In this case, we can ask ourselves, what are the possible sources of existential risk to humanity? Here is a brief close examination of the possible scenarios most likely bearing in mind that disasters of seismic origin, or which may be generated by such a tsunami or earthquake do not represent danger of extinction for the human species since usually only interested in well-circumscribed areas of the planet and not all the planet Earth.
Atomic war thermonuclear
The first atomic bomb was tested in the field on Hiroshima and it was a "bomb" or a bomb he used nuclear fission to release energy reaching critical mass and trigger a chain reaction atomic destruction, at that time they used a core of uranium 235 (or plutonium 239) that were divided by bombardment with neutrons or other elementary particles in sub-nuclear fragments. It belongs to the category of reaction now used in nuclear reactors for power stations, but later the United States of America and the Soviet Union were able to perfect a type of bomb much more effective at destroying: the H-bomb to bomb also called hydrogen which uses a process called nuclear fusion that produces the same energy in the Sun In this process unite the nuclei of two light atoms of hydrogen isotopes (deuterium and tritium) in a heavier one. In this type of reaction the new nucleus formed and the neutron liberated have a total mass of less than the sum of the masses of the reactants resulting in liberation of a tremendous amount of energy thousands of times higher than that of that achieved by the fission process that generates the bomb A . Suffice it to say that the most powerful hydrogen bomb ever built shone out a power of 57 Megaton equivalent to 4400 times the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, which had only 0.013 Megaton. With this bomb so powerful column that usually characterizes an explosion of nuclear bomb with classic mushroom shape reached an altitude of 60 km and its shock wave made three times around the world in the next 36 hours, so you can understand how such a bomb would be able to destroy a big city like London or Paris getting to generate serious damage not only on the point of impact but also in the 30 km radius where the wave extends to both heat and gamma radiation that would fall as radioactive fallout for 90 Km radius from the center. We must remember that in the possession of Russia and America are packed in special sites, 10,000 of these devices mounted on ballistic missiles that can reach any point of the earth in just a few hours or short-range missiles carried by submarines and battleships, even if such a war scenario, at least according to the old concepts of the Cold War cloak and dagger are no longer very plausible because of the cultural and political implications that generate nowadays stibilità the markets and in the 70s- 80 had not yet been achieved. Recently, governments unstable countries such as India and Pakistan have built their Atomic bombs so if you like a fundamentalist faction of the Taliban, which has already shown in the past but still continues to show clear mental illness, devoted to self-destructive martyrdom took possession of the keys to missiles that could lead to a nuclear war even if they were using "only" a hundred in a localized war, in addition to radiation should be disseminated, explosions in the air to Earth would raise billions of tons of dust which would otherwise obscure the sun for at least five years. This would result in a nuclear winter. The uniform cloud of radioactive dust and ash would stabilize at about 1500 m above sea level, and doing it as a shield to solar energy, the global average temperature will drop to 40 degrees Celsius. The effects on life in the seas and on plant and animal life on land would be devastating and would also destroyed the ozone layer. Among the few who survive the turmoil they will soon present the problem of food shortages and the inability to grow on contaminated land. Must be recognized that a localized nuclear war, unless they are being used all the weapons available, there is an existential risk because a small percentage of human beings, in the less affected, however, be able to survive. For this reason I gave this event a degree of destructiveness of 75%. Recently, U.S. President Obama has proposed an agreement with Russia to reduce nuclear weapons altogether delll'80% on both sides. Even so I decided to give the probability of occurrence of the event a modest 5%.
Impact asteroid with the Earth
Despite the positivist thought that some of this issue by asserting that it is a possibility too far from reality to think that an asteroid could hit Earth in short, is not the case because, on average, an asteroid every 500,000 years for the large between 50 km in diameter or more, and one every 30,000 years for the size less than 1 Km this planet have always been interested in creating extinctions and death. This statistic should be reviewed on the basis of their events of the last 100 years is sufficient to see and remember the Tunguska event, a place located in Siberia, where in June 1908 he heard the impact of an asteroid, 2150 square kilometers of land area were devastated by a massive explosion of power of about 13 Megatons, were uprooted more than 60 million trees in a way that marked the center of the explosion that you think today was triggered by a meteorite of 30 meters in diameter as a result of impact with the atmosphere of our planet was practically vaporized, causing a shock wave to the surface below without leaving craters but burning all that there was in for an area of 2,000 square kilometers although this hypothesis there are divergent. The shock wave had almost derailed trains some of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which were close to 600 km from the point of impact, though fortunately there were no casualties but only because the area was completely uninhabited. The comet Shoemaker Levy 9 crashed on the planet Jupiter in July 1994, astronomers estimated that the visible pieces of the comet varied from a few hundred meters to a few kilometers and the entire comet may have had a diameter of 5 km
We are talking about an object irrelevant with respect to the planet Jupiter has a diameter of almost 143,000 km where the Earth with its 12,800 km in diameter if it were approached Jupiter would have the proportions of a golf ball near a basketball. The comet hit Jupiter before effected various orbits around the large planet and one of these in July 1992, he was attracted by the immense gravity of the planet eventually be broken down into several sections. The impact of the first fragment of the comet hit the planet on the opposite side visible from the ground but at that time was in orbit around Jupiter, the Galileo spacecraft that could take the moments of impact of the various fragments that freed a total energy equal to 6 million megatons, about 600,000 times the H-bomb so to speak, and areas of the explosion were as big as the whole of Africa. On 23 March 1989, the asteroid 4581 Apollo type of Asclepius (1989 FC) dodged the Earth of 700,000 kilometers if he had collided with our planet would create the biggest explosion in history. On 6 October 2008 the Earth crashed with an asteroid named 2008 TC3 with a diameter of 5 meters to 37 km in height above the desert of Sudan causing an explosion of power equal to less than 2 kilotons. Minor collisions occur every two to three months but are absorbed by the atmosphere that ignites and vaporizes such small objects. The astronomer P. Janninksen with his students have collected some pieces of which the largest weighed about 300 gr. Time: in just 100 years, we witness two cometary impacts in the solar system including one on Earth, an asteroid has touched, two large comets like Halley and Hale Boop have passed close to Earth and many other children we have seen. The solar system is filled with millions of stray asteroids that reside both in the Kuiper belt and in the more distant Oort cloud. It is therefore not revise the estimate of 30,000 years? What are we doing to intercept these objects? NASA had begun mapping some areas of the sky with the great project-Space Survey but saw cut funds by the Bush administration and the day oday there is only NASA's Near Earth Object that is based on a network of telescopes direct by a software program (CLOMON 2) developed by an Italian mathematician Comparetti Andrea Milani of the University of Pisa, but does not extend over the entire planet and still do not have detection systems that are able to intercept and destroy the object before the collision to take effect. TC3 was spotted as 19 hours before impact and after are not able to do more than "look" as he fell. Prof. Richard Crowther, forming part of a UN Commission on Security and leader of the Association of Space Explorer (ASE) says:
"The community 'international community must work together to prepare for the possible threat of an asteroid impact on earth."
The first major emergency could occur within 20 years when the asteroid Apophis (320 meters) will pass close to the ground with a collision probability of one in 45,000 and we currently have no way to avoid the impacts of this type or systems interception really accurate that make use of triangulation between satellites for the determination of a precise trajectory. Nick Bostrom says in this regard:
"It 's sad that humanity as a whole has not invested even a couple of million dollars to improve their own ideas on how best to ensure its survival."
Sure is saying things perfectly correct and the most serious is the risk we take every day: an impact with an asteroid with a diameter greater than 50 km would result to extinguish life on Earth forever perhaps also raising high waves 300 meters that would destroy the coasts not to mention the nuclear winter that it would be so good that those responsible thought to come up with something to be able to avoid this kind of events for the good of all without thinking to save a few billion dollars in bribes, however, should be or useless anyway. As you can appreciate that scientific theories can sketch hypotheses on the end of human civilization as we said at the beginning, and that can really risking the cancellation of mankind are not so many. Although the possibility of a future scenario of destruction not arise, futurists credited as Ian Pearson believe that the end of the world may take place between 2085 and 2095 due to changes in extreme ecosystem of the planet caused by advanced nanotechnology that is self-replicating is developing faster and faster, even if a solution has launched Bill Joy:
"The only realistic alternative I see is a slowdown: limit the development of technologies that are too dangerous limiting the search to certain areas of knowledge."