Читать книгу Apocalypse 2012: An optimist investigates the end of civilization - Lawrence Joseph E. - Страница 5

On the first day of freshman writing class, the instructor told us that good writing was all about emotions—portraying them, eliciting them, unraveling them, being true to them. I stuck up my hand and stammered out something to the effect that, to me, emotions were just the details, and that what really mattered was whether or not people got to stay alive in order to have any. Happy, sad, angry, diffident, deep or shallow, shared with a loved one or burning from within—that’s all very interesting, but of secondary importance compared, say, to whether or not one is poisoned to death, or burnt to a crisp.

So when I first heard about how the world might end in 2012, I took to the idea right away. Except that no one in his right mind believes the world is really going to end. That’s the kind of thing weird men wearing sandwich boards and giving out smudgy pamphlets with lots of exclamation points on them like to claim. Theoretically, of course, the world must burn, freeze, crumble, or existentially wig out one day, but that’s billions of years down the road, right? Who knows, maybe by then we’ll all have moved to another planet, or even figured out a cure for time. But for all practical purposes, the unfathomable concept of the world coming to an end is used mostly to put things in perspective, as in “it’s not the end of the world” if your pants don’t get back from the dry cleaners until Monday.

There are any number of end-time scenarios, from Hitler/bin Laden/Pol Pot getting his finger on the button, to an asteroid the size of Everest cracking the Earth like an apple, to the Lord God Almighty saying enough is enough. But our planet does not have to literally disintegrate, or all its inhabitants perish, for our world to come to an end, or close enough. If civilization as we know it, that burgeoning and magnificent social, political, and cultural entity, were damaged to the point where its evolution was retarded, where normal relations between nations were disrupted, where a significant percentage of human beings lost their lives and most of the rest faced a future of hardship and horror—that would count.

Since the early 1990s, I have been involved with a company that has sought to help save the world from poisoning itself. Aerospace Consulting Corporation (AC2), of which I am currently chairman, has begged, borrowed, and blood-from-stoned about $10 million to develop the Vulcan Plasma Disintegrator, U.S. patent #7,026,570 B2, a portable, ultra-high-temperature furnace that will completely dissociate highly toxic wastes, including but not limited to lethal biological and chemical weapons that cannot otherwise be disposed of. The Vulcan, when it is finally produced, will be a fifty-yard tube with a robotic arm sticking out at one end. The arm grasps a fifty-five-gallon drum of hazardous, nonnuclear waste, samples its contents to prepare the right settings, sticks it inside the tube, which then heats up to 10,000 degrees, and zaps that sucker, container and all, into nothing: zero toxic residue.

There was always plenty of office space available at the Inhalation Toxicology Laboratory, out on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For next to nothing, our company had a nice suite and complimentary coffee station in the building out behind the kennel with the hundred identical dogs. True, the commute was an ordeal. After going through various security checkpoints, you had to drive all the way around the Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Testing Center, a giant wooden platform held together without a single metal nail or screw, on which they would zap, say, a specially shielded 747 jumbo jet, to see if its instruments would fry. Next was the Big Melt Laser Laboratory; no one would ever tell me what it was they melted. Then mile after mile of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in their silos, dug into the hillside. The temptation to speed past them all had to be resisted because that part of the base is shoot-to-kill for vehicles violating the 30-mile-per-hour speed limit or any of the other traffic laws.

Over the past five years we have received considerable support and encouragement from Kirtland Air Force Base, a Department of Defense facility, and from Sandia National Laboratories, a Department of Energy facility responsible for, among other things, the construction and maintenance of every nuclear warhead in the United States.

For the record, neither AC2, Kirtland Air Force Base, nor Sandia National Laboratories, nor any employees or contractual workers associated with those entities are known to take any position whatsoever on predictions concerning the year 2012.

YOU DON’T NEED dire predictions about Apocalypse 2012 to freak out a little about all the weird stuff we’ve invented that could destroy the world. More than enough biochemical weapons are stockpiled around the globe, starting with mustard gas, a deadly paralytic agent left over from World War I, on through anthrax, sarin, and a variety of other classified compounds, to keep the Vulcan incinerating for many years to come. And the good news/bad news is that there will be even more incredibly toxic stuff to burn up in the future, at least according to those who share the fears voiced by Stephen Hawking, who believes that humankind will extinguish itself from the face of the planet through the misuse of biological weapons:

“I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet,” Hawking told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, expressed the opinion that the threat was not so much from a Cold War-style nuclear holocaust as from a more insidious form. “In the long term, I am more worried about biology. Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab.”

What manner of vile pestilence will renegade eggheads concoct with their gene splicers? They might try to “improve” upon the worst Nature has to offer. For example, some of the latest strains of superbacteria have an enzyme called VIM-2 that breaks down antibiotics. Genetically enhancing the VIM-2 enzyme could give the resulting superorganism a head start so big that antibiotics could never catch up. Perhaps the gene-splicing sociopaths will create “priobots.” By bolstering the already formidable self-replicating abilities of prions, these new predatory proteins could turn our brains into useless sponges through Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, also known as mad cow disease. The priobots might also cause an epidemic of kuru, a brain disorder in which cannibals have been known to giggle themselves to death. How’s that for an evil genius’s last laugh?

Even if we catch these malefactors before they can do harm, the poisons that they cook up will have to be disposed of. But there’s no furnace hot enough to burn up such compounds without leaving toxic residue. That’s the niche that Vulcan seeks to fill. It just might save the world after all. That is, as long as it doesn’t explode. Since it’s planned as the hottest furnace in the world and filled with deadly waste materials, we’ve had to make damn sure the device is stable and secure. In fact, Vulcan’s underlying plasma containment technology has potential applications as a rocket thruster: basically, you just take one end off the containment tube, and zoom, the unit takes off. Upon command, presumably.