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May 09, 2006
I'm worried
Things that worry me.
How to destroy the Earth.
Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.
You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.
Fools.
[...]
This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I (Sam Hughes) can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems.
If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.
This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.
Via the WSJ's Avian Flu Tracker comes this disturbing news.
A leading bird-flu expert says H5N1 is the worst flu virus he's ever encountered, and that far too many gaps in planning and knowledge persist for the world to handle it in the event of a pandemic.
The virus is a virulent killer in poultry, moving into the brain and destroying the respiratory tract, said Robert G. Webster, a virologist at the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. "I've worked with flu all my life, and this is the worst influenza virus that I have ever seen," said Mr. Webster, who has studied bird flu for decades. "If that happens in humans, God help us."
Can you use chicken soup to combat avian flu? I'm just asking. Seriously, it seems prudent to stock up on food and water; if this thing becomes human-to-human transmissible, quarantine may be the best shot we have at limiting its spread -- and the risk to our families.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, this made-for-TV movie does a decent job showing us what a worst-case scenario will look like.
This chilling made-for-TV pic that's designed to look and feel like a contemporary nightmare docudrama a la "The Day After" delivers the goods with a wallop to the gut . . .
It's almost immediately clear that the folks behind the film did their homework to make for a wrenchingly credible scenario. They also smartly utilized as a consultant a fellow named John M. Barry, author of the New York Times best-seller "The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History" (about the 1918 Spanish flu that wiped out tens of millions).
[...]
Playing like a page-turning thriller, "Fatal Contact" opens with a depiction of Patient Zero in the depicted outbreak: an American businessman who flies to Hong Kong to meet with his Asian manufacturers and winds up falling violently ill. It's traced to a new strain of avian flu virus discovered by the World Health Organization in a Hong Kong marketplace. More than a million birds suspected of infection are destroyed to eradicate the strain, to no avail. The virus leaps from its bird hosts and is suddenly communicable via human-to-human contact.
This is pretty much the ultimate health catastrophe, a virulent disease that's so contagious and spreads with frightening speed via microbes that take to permeating the atmosphere.
[...]
Balancing the gloomy prognosis in the meticulously researched "Fatal Contact" is the single encouraging, if ironic, footnote: that even if this actually came to pass and the country was woefully short of adequate vaccine for four to five months, that could wind up as a blessing in disguise. Why? Because the longer the virus is around, the less lethal the strain becomes. But the film doesn't exist to reassure us. The actual H5N1 virus is working its way through the wild bird and poultry populations of 48 countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. And while properly cooked poultry kills the virus, the capacity for mutation is no long shot. Thus, we minimize vivid and intelligent movies like this one at our peril.
It airs Tuesday night at 9 on ABC.
Posted by Mike Lief at May 9, 2006 12:37 AM
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