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 Asteroid Impact
What are the chances of as asteroid hitting Earth? The Earth is hit on a regular basis, but almost all of the asteroids burn up in the atmosphere leaving a nice light show behind as they cross the sky. What if one large enough to survive the atmosphere hit the planet? What would that be like?
Watch "Last Days on Earth" - asteroid hit
First, an asteroid hitting Earth would release a tremendous amount of energy 10 million times the energy of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima during WWII. A typical mile-wide asteriod hitting the earth at roughly 3000,000 MPH would wipe out much of the life on the planet. Any survivors would have to next live through...the aftermath...impact winter.
Watch "Cosmos: Heaven and Hell"
An impact winter is a period of prolonged cold weather caused by the impact on the Earth of a large asteroid or comet. If such an impact occurred on land or the floor of a shallow sea, it could cause large amounts of dust or ash to be thrown into the Earth's atmosphere, blocking the Sun's light and dramatically lowering the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface. Impact winter is one of the mechanisms proposed for extinction events, such as the asteroid impact at Chicxulub in Mexico which supposedly led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
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 Resource Depletion
The conservation group WWF said in 2008 that the Earth's natural resources are being depleted so quickly that "two planets" would be required to sustain current lifestyles within a generation. The document warns that our demands on natural resources overreach what the Earth can sustain by nearly a third. “Reckless consumption of natural capital is endangering the world's future prosperity, with clear economic impacts including high costs for food, water and energy,” the report said.
Watch Video: "Endless Famine - Ethiopia"
The world's global environmental "footprint" or depletion rate now exceeds the planet's capacity to regenerate by 30 percent. The countries with the biggest impact on the planet are the US and China, together accounting for some 40% of the global footprint. The five countries with the largest footprints per person are the United States and Australia along with the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Denmark. The lowest five are Bangladesh, Congo, Haiti, Afghanistan and Malawi, WWF said. Regionally, only non-EU Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean remain within their "biocapacity."
The earth’s natural resources are finite, which means that if we use them continuously, we will eventually exhaust them. This is the situation with the western and third world today which takes the luxurious food for itself leaving hardly enough basic food or resources for the third world which in return continues to proceate beyond it's capacity. The rapid growth of the world's population and the excessive use of the earth's resources have drastically changed the face of the earth. Each year more forests and grasslands disappear. Every day our rivers are clogged, our oceans are poisoned and the air is polluted. |
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 Global Warming
Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans since the mid-20th century and its projected continuation.
This figure shows the difference in instrumentally determined surface temperatures between the period January 1999 through December 2008 and "normal" temperatures at the same locations.
Increasing global temperature will cause sea levels to rise and will change the amount and pattern of precipitation, probably including expansion of subtropical deserts. The continuing retreat of glaciers, permafrost and sea ice is expected, with the Arctic region being particularly affected. Other likely effects include shrinkage of the Amazon rainforest and Boreal forests, increases in the intensity of extreme weather events, species extinctions, and changes in agricultural yields.
This image shows the instrumental record of global average temperatures as compiled by the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The eight warmest years on record (since 1850) have all occurred since 1998, with the warmest year being 2005. Most of the warming in recent decades is very likely the result of human activities. Other aspects of the climate are also changing such as rainfall patterns, snow and ice cover, and sea level. If greenhouse gases continue to increase, climate models predict that the average temperature at the Earth's surface could increase from 3.2 to 7.2ºF above 1990 levels by the end of this century. Scientists are certain that human activities are changing the composition of the atmosphere, and that increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases will change the planet's climate.
Watch Video: "Last Days on Earth: Global Warming"
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 Nuclear War
"Message by Carl Sagan"
Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would he an unprecedented human catastrophe. A more or less typical strategic warhead has a yield of 2 megatons, the explosive equivalent of 2 million tons of TNT. But 2 million tons of TNT is about the same as all the bombs exploded in World War II -- a single bomb with the explosive power of the entire Second World War but compressed into a few seconds of time and an area 30 or 40 miles across …
Watch Message from Carl Sagan - Nuclear War
...the detonation of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that now sit quietly, inconspicuously, in missile silos, submarines and long-range bombers, faithful servants awaiting orders. Concentrating always on the near future, we have ignored the long-term consequences of our actions. We have placed our civilization and our species in jeopardy.
Watch "Life After People" - Nuclear Winter
Nuclear explosions, particularly groundbursts, would lift an enormous quantity of fine soil particles into the atmosphere (more than 100,000 tons of fine dust for every megaton exploded in a surface burst). In addition, the amount of radioactive fallout is much more than expected. The cold, the dark and the intense radioactivity, together lasting for months, represent a severe assault on our civilization and our species. Civil and sanitary services would be wiped out. Medical facilities, drugs, the most rudimentary means for relieving the vast human suffering, would be unavailable. Any but the most elaborate shelters would be useless, quite apart from the question of what good it might be to emerge a few months later. Synthetics burned in the destruction of the cities would produce a wide variety of toxic gases, including carbon monoxide, cyanides, dioxins and furans. After the dust and soot settled out, the solar ultraviolet flux would be much larger than its present value. Immunity to disease would decline. Epidemics and pandemics would be rampant, especially after the billion or so unburied bodies began to thaw.
Watch Video: "Why We Fight"
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 Global Pandemic
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a pandemic can start when three conditions have been met:
1) emergence of a disease new to a population:
2) agents infect humans, causing serious illness
3) agents spread easily and sustainably among humans.
A disease or condition is not a pandemic merely because it is widespread or kills many people; it must also be infectious. For instance, cancer is responsible for many deaths but is not considered a pandemic because the disease is not infectious or contagious.
Watch "The 1918 Flu Pandemic"
The 2009 outbreak of a new strain of Influenza A virus subtype H1N1 created concerns that a new pandemic was occurring. In the latter half of April, 2009, the World Health Organization's pandemic alert level was sequentially increased from three to five until the announcement on 11 June 2009 that the pandemic level had been raised to its highest level, level six. [2] This was the first pandemic on this level since 1968
Watch: Last Days on Earth: Pandemic
A pandemic is an epidemic of infectious disease that is spreading through human populations across a large region; for instance a continent, or even worldwide. A widespread endemic disease that is stable in terms of how many people are getting sick from it is not a pandemic. Further, flu pandemics exclude seasonal flu. Throughout history there have been a number of pandemics, such as smallpox and tuberculosis. More recent pandemics include the HIV pandemic and the 2009 flu pandemic.
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 Pole Shift
The pole shift hypothesis is the hypothesis that the axis of rotation of a planet has not always been at its present-day locations or that the axis will not persist there; in other words, that its physical poles had been or will be shifted. The Pole shift hypothesis is almost always discussed in the context of Earth, but other bodies in the Solar System may have experienced axial reorientation during their existences.
Watch Video "Doomsday 2012: Pole Shift"
According to some sources, in 2012 the next polar reversal will take place on earth. This means that the North Pole will be changed into the South Pole. Scientifically this can only be explained by the fact that the earth will start rotating in the opposite direction, together with a huge disaster of unknown proportions. With clock-like regularity, sudden reversals and pole shifts are natural to the Earth. The result is worldwide destruction, and is supported by paleo-magnetic evidence and early manuscripts. 
Solar Storms can cause the a pole shift. Some astronomers say that the particles of a solar storm can compress the earth's magnetic field and temporarily speed up the power of the earth's field. When the solar particles reach our planet, the electromagnetically-loaded particles will move in a spiral along the magnetic lines: from the magnetic north pole to the magnetic south pole and back. While passing this north-south axis, they will move into the direction of the equator. |
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