It's Armageddon Week!

This week the History Channel is featuring the end of the world. Tonight we're watching "Last days on Earth," which looks at the world's greatest threats. It says the top 4 threats (starting with greatest) are global warming, biological war/pandemic, nuclear war, and an astro event. Interesting that 2 and maybe 3 out of the 4 extinction threats are of our own creation.

Googling a quote from Stephen Hawking led me to find a transcript of this interesting interview. This is the quote I was looking for:

Hawking: Up to now, aggression has been an attribute with definite survival advantages. So it has been hard-wired into our genes by Darwinian evolution. Now, however, it may destroy us all by nuclear or biological war, if we cannot control our instinct by our reason.

Fascinating comment. Our natural state of (male) aggression, when paired with the absolute destructive power of our new weaponry, will likely kill us all. Ponder that one for a few moments in the context of our most recent evolutary turn, sexual androgyny. I intend this term in the cultural sense, in the way that some might refer to as the 'sissification' of men ("not enough guns and football and too much talk about feeeeeeeeelings"). If the male is aggression and the female is reason, then perhaps it is natural that our evolutionary journey would, at this juncture, begin to shift value from one to the other. Maybe instead of fighting the trend as unnatural we should be embracing it as an entirely natural progression. Interesting theory, whether it's true or not.

Regarding the threat of global warming, I have been slow to recognize it -- not because I don't believe it's happening but because I haven't been sure we're the cause of it (weather patterns being cyclical over the millennia, and all). I've been starting to come around lately, however. In the same interview I referenced above, Stephen Hawking had this to say on the topic of GW:

Hawking: The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate once one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere.

The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide, trapped as hydrides on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect, and so global warming further. We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can.

Scary stuff. It makes me sad for Al Gore, who has been one of the most prescient thinkers of our time regarding the potential of the Internet, saving social security, and now global warming, and yet has such a difficult time being heard above the Republican smear and jeer machine. I think I'm going to make a point of seeing his movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

Here's another quote I'll juxtapose with the others, just for fun. This one is from Fox's Sean Hannity:

Is global warming real or is it just a liberal scare tactic?

They report. We decide.