There’s Nothing to Fear but Famine and Cordyceps

Ranking end of the world scenarios on their likelihood of occurrence

by Connor Doyle (Managing Editor) & Kevin Pare

Let’s begin with the end.

We are all going to die. Eventually, I mean. We don’t like to think of the absolute end of the world on a day-by-day basis because, if we really thought about, we’d never get anything done. We know that one day humanity will have to go extinct and yet we have to reconcile that thought with washing the dishes or getting to work in the morning or logging in some private time with the special someone.

Perhaps, if we don’t blow ourselves up before then, we’ll live long enough to see the sun burn out. We’ll see the stars one by one twinkle out of existence. The universe will expand ad infinitum until even the protons cannot reach one another, and all the energy that’s ever been will settle into a dormant state at the heat death of the universe.

And that is the best case scenario.

Some people use a doomsday clock to measure how close we are to the end. Others mark their calendars based on some pastor’s interpretation of obscure Biblical numerology. Still others watch reports of bizarre weather conditions around the world—such as Hurricane Patricia slamming into Mexico this weekend, becoming the most intense tropical cyclone ever observed in the Western Hemisphere—and figure it’s already too late.

But we here at The Runner are the gambling sort, and thought it might be fun—or at least existentially comforting in an absurdist sort of way—to take a crack at guessing what might bring about our ultimate demise. We’ve decided to rank apocalyptic scenarios on their level of likelihood, so read on and try not to let your mortal angst bring you down.

Happy Halloween!

Nuclear War

According to KPU History Prof. Tom Thorner, war and disease are historically the two primary causes of death for humankind. War in particular has reigned supreme over the 20th century—what with two world wars, the large-scale failure of global politics, and the advent of more impressive killing machines than ever before—leading some conservative estimates on Necrometrics.com, a website dedicated to figuring out death statistics, to place the number of 20th century wartime dead in the hundreds of millions. And that’s not including all of the people who died in “unofficial” wars, or were killed in peacetime leading up to or coming out of sanctioned conflicts.

War has been the most effective mechanism of death in the last 100 years, so it’s not surprising that the most obvious way we’d all meet our maker would be at the business end of a weapon. Maybe a series of nuclear explosions. It’s almost happened a number of times, and would’ve already happened if it had not been for one guy doing his job.

On Sept. 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov saved the world five different times by reporting that a small symphony of distress signals set off by the Soviet’s nuclear early warning system was, in fact, a false alarm. The reflection of sunlight from high clouds was interpreted by Russian computers as a United States nuclear ballistics launch. Not just once, but five times, each of which Petrol classified as nonsensical.

His logic was simple: Why would the USA just launch so few missiles toward Russia? If nuclear war was coming, the sky would be littered with nukes to insure that everyone was hit at once. It made no sense to Petrov, so he concluded it was a systems error based on no additional evidence. Had another man been on post that night he might have reported the “attack,” leading the Soviet Union to retaliate with their own strike against a US President they saw as trigger happy. Such scenario would have created a full-scale—though incredibly short lived—nuclear war between the Soviet bloc and NATO, which would have obliterated North-America, Russia, most of Europe, and part of Asia. Almost all surviving earthlings would have been left with radiation poisoning, and soon after only the cockroaches would be left to inherit the Earth.

Could this happen again? Global nuclear annihilation isn’t as likely as it was during the Cold War, but straining relations with Russia and the continued proliferation of nuclear arms around the world could soon spell disaster. Oh and Petrov? He was reprimanded by his superiors for not filling out the proper paperwork. No good deed, I suppose.

Nuclear War: 3 Horsemen out of 4.

A Super-Virus

What if we could achieve the widespread extinction of mankind without all the fuss and muss of a nuclear armageddon? That would call for the work of a super-virus, such as the ones that scientists are always reportedly “creating” or “awakening” in laboratories around the world. One particular virus that scares Brian Pegg, KPU professor of archeologist, is decidedly less science-fiction than all that—smallpox.

Now, some of you might think this a bit silly, seeing as smallpox was eradicated in 1979 after killing as many as 500 million people in its total historical run. However, much like the killer at the end of a slasher movie, some people believe smallpox might just be pretending to be dead, waiting to strike when our defences are down.

Scabs used for inoculation against the smallpox virus were found in a Civil War-era book in the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, and although they were thought to be sterile after all those years, they were still sealed in a bio-bag by the Center for Disease Control. Although the World Health Organization maintains that the disease is eradicated, the governments of the US and Russia have chosen to retain small samples of the virus for the production of vaccines, should smallpox ever rear its ugly head again.

But could smallpox reappear in a new, deadlier form? And could it become immune to treatment?

Biology lab instructor Lee Beavington is quick to disclose that things are not that simple. In order to survive, viruses do mutate, but this doesn’t always mean they become super-resistant to vaccines. Sometimes they don’t even become deadlier than they were. Some viruses become less life-threatening after mutation, which is actually beneficial for the virus as they need a host to survive.

Even if some other super virus comes out of a jungle or laboratory somewhere, there are remote areas on Earth that could potentially be excluded from a worldwide pandemic, leaving up to 10 per cent of the population alive. So we have that to look forward to!

Super Viruses: 2 1/2 Horsemen out of 4

Supervolcanoes

This one might not be as romantic—for lack of a better word—as nuclear war or a super virus, but it’s the only entry on this list that has already happened.

There’s a controversial hypothesis in biology that about 75,000 years ago humanity came closer to extinction than we’ve ever been before or after. Most scientists who prescribe to the idea point to the eruption of Mount Toba in Indonesia, which ushered in a six-year volcanic winter and bottlenecked the human population in a way that still affects our genetic makeup to this day.

If this is correct, we are already living in a post-apocalyptic world. And there’s no reason to assume it won’t happen again. There are volcanoes around the globe that hold the potential cause incalculable disaster for both the local population and the worldwide ecosystem. The temperature of the Earth could shift dramatically, plant life could wither and die as ash fills the sky.

Many of these geological timebombs are even located on our continent—there’s the Yellowstone Caldera, the Blake River complex on the Canadian Shield, and the Abitibi greenstone belt in Québec. If Yellowstone alone were to erupt it would jettison dust and volcanic ash up to 1,000 miles away. It might not take out everyone with it, but it could end society as we now know it.

Supervolcanoes: 1 1/2 Horsemen out of 4

Zombies

Possibly the most popular fictional end of the world scenario over the last twenty years has been the zombie apocalypse. Gigantic hordes of mindless flesh-eaters—representing, by turns, communist fear-mongers, consumerism, blind government allegiance, and British malaise—tear through cinemas every few years. But could they ever break off of the big screen and into reality? Is it true that “when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth?”

Well, there are iterations of the zombie threat that we can consider, such as a brain parasites. Already up to half of the world’s population is infected with something called toxoplasmosis. Sounds kind of scary right? Luckily for us this is a mostly harmless infection that’s spread largely through undercooked meat and cat feces instead of good ol’ fashioned zombie love-bites. But if there were a more harmful version of the parasite, one that, affected the actual behavior of the host and essentially turned them into a walking meat puppet designed to spread the infection to others—well, then we’d be talking about cordyceps.

Made popular most recently by The Last of Us, and before that the BBC documentary Planet Earth, Cordyceps is that fungus that grows in large yellow stalks out of a host’s head. The image of a fungal rod sprouting out of an ant’s head, and modifying its behaviour to climb onto the top of a blade of grass so as to optimally spread distribution of its spores and therefore continuing the pattern of infection, is enough to cause nightmares in even the most stoic and rational among us.

What if cordyceps could infect human hosts? Or what about a super-virulent form of mad cow disease? Or, if we want to explore a more traditional zombie apocalypse, what if some radiation from outer space awakens the dead?

Funny enough, there are a lot of reasons to believe a zombie apocalypse wouldn’t actually be that disastrous. Think about it, when a body becomes zombified, they are taking on all the worst attributes of being human—no natural weapons, inability to survive extreme heat or cold, considerable lack of predatory skills—while retaining nothing of what has put as at the top of the food chain. Zombies can’t plan attacks, they can’t protect themselves, they don’t even have a central nervous system to tell them when they’re hurt. Zombies, despite their Hollywood fame, just don’t have the chops to run with real end of the world scenarios.

Zombies: 1 Horsemen out of 4

Climate Change

Here’s a scary thought. The end of the world might already be happening—and it’s all our fault.

Last year the World Health Organization reported that in 2012, seven million people died as a result of air pollution. That’s one in eight of the total global deaths that year, 1.3-million in China alone. If no action is taken to reduce the burning of coal and biomass in major cities, that number could double over the next few decades. Not to mention the  host of other health problems air pollution can lead to including allergies, more vector diseases, and an increase in the number of mental illnesses.

But that’s only the tip of this iceberg. If we continue down the path of unchecked carbon emissions, we are inviting more natural disasters and environmental destruction than we’ve ever witnessed. Fossil fuel combustion, aerosols, ozone depletion, animal agriculture, deforestation—these are anthropogenic factors, human acts which contribute an irreversible effect on our global climate. The ice caps are melting, the sea levels are rising. The Earth is getting warmer. There’s nothing hocus-pocus about this, we’re ruining our planet.

We are also causing the devastation of certain animal populations on an unprecedented level. Some experts have taken to calling this epoch of world history the Holocene Extinction, unprecedented in 65 million years, and the sixth such extinction event since the dawn of time. While the others were the result of unavoidable, natural shifts in the planet’s ecosystem, this one is all our doing. And once a species is killed off, it is never ever ever ever ever ever coming back.

Climate Change: 4 Horsemen out of 4