We tragically find that Hawking Radiation does not exist when Fermilab inadvertantly creates a black hole that swallows up the planet.
I actually lose sleep thinking about this.
Check out this BBC docu-drama. They give five fun Doomsday scenarios. In brief:
Mega-tsunami, as mentioned upthread
Killer asteroid, as mentioned upthread
Global pandemic - a rapidly spreading virus, a la 28 Days Later.
Super volcano - the one in Yellowstone, as mentioned upthread
Strange Matter - similar to my paranoia, but actually somewhat realistic. A new type of matter is created in a particle accelerator, and it swallows up all the matter around it. Like a big nerdy blob.
Pah. Every single nuclear event in history put together (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki) has killed fewer people than died on the roads last year. 1.2 million road fatalities per year and 50 million injured is a pretty good benchmark.
If you can’t come up with a plausible scenario to out-score the motor car then you’re not in the running for a Doomsday scenario, and nuke plants simply don’t have enough oomph.
I seem to remember hearing that one of the Yellowstone eruptions covered the whole of the US in a layer of volcanic ash averaging 3 metres in depth - I’d have thought that would be pretty much Game Over for entire population, and it’s tough to top that.
You will be happy to know that a committee of ludicrously smart people has declared the risk of this happening to be pretty much nil.
As far as I understand it (which is not very far at all), similar events happen so many gigazillion times a second in nature that if this was going to destroy the world, it would have done so already.
I’m with slaphead on this one – even a complete meltdown with release of tons of fission products into the environment would never even come close to the carnage coming from one of the true Mega Disasters. Though it would be a catastrophe, a nuclear accident is certainly not on the same order of magnitude of the true doomsday scenarios.
Well, my boss ran a nuclear facility in California (I believe) when he was in the Navy. Now he’s an electrical engineer. And an officer in the Naval Reserves. And a good boss for that matter.
A very large accretion of stupid gains critical mass and collides with the Straight Dope Message Boards. When the two masses occupy the same space, they instantly annihilate. The resultant explosion results in a crater three miles wide centered on the former server room at the Chicago Reader. Millions of people and three hamsters instantly die.
Those not killed by the shockwave or the intense heat either freeze to death or starve over the course of the next several months, as stupid fallout blots out the sun and causes a mass die-off of plant life.
Curiously, the cows survive. No one is around to hypothesize as to why.
Well, that and the bottom half of your state is currently on fire.
For me, on the Gulf Coast, the worst possible disaster would be another Katrina/Rita type hurricane. I just don’t think Houston could handle another flood of refugees like that.
I read a cyberpunk novel many years ago that predicted a string of mega-hurricanes (too powerful to be measured on our current scale). Put that together with some global warming and/or maybe the La Palma tsunami, and Florida is a gone puppy.
I’m almost sure I read this in a disaster book but maybe it was a movie. Anyway, a falling meteor hits Alaska and the Ring of Fire goes active triggering eruptions of 70%-80% of the worlds’ volcanoes. The sunlight would be choked off and those the ash didn’t kill will slowly starve to death. But I’m pretty sure chaos, riots and cannibalism would happen first. Turn to CNN and fire up the popcorn popper.
I would be happy to die if I could see an f-10 tornado in action.
The don’t actually exist, but the Fujita scale is just a matter of wind speed, and the scale I think has f-12 as a tornado with mach1 winds. F-5 is the highest commonly known, with f6 theorized and sometimes hypothetised about non-recorded tornados.
But just the though of that devistation if you could watch an f-10. I’d imagine it would strip the earth to bedrock, then use the accumulated sand and debris to sandblast and pulverise everything else into a fine powder with 500mph winds. It’d be sweet.
I am SO voting for supervolcano! Although I am a big fan of meteor strike as well.
My husband says I’m unnaturally obsessed with super-disasters. But I’ll be the one laughing when the big one (earthquake, tsunami, supervolcano, hurricane, or meteor strike) hits. For about 1/10th of a second, before I die in a (heap of rubble/crushing ocean wave/glorious hail of fire/shrieking gale force wind/big BOOM)!
In the Niven/Pournelle book about a comet strike, one of the characters surfed through Los Angeles on a mega-tsunami. Worked fine until he ran into the 100th floor of some building.
