This is going to be a mite depressing, but to put it in perspective it’s probably not as bad as the collapse of the false vacuum, so I’ll talk about that first and then it may even seem quite cheerful.
Some physicists have managed to construct themselves a bit of a nightmare scenario about the Universe. This involves the possibility that the Universe as we know it, i.e. the one we’re living in, is in a higher energy state than it could be in. It’s like a diamond or the metal tungsten, in that it isn’t stable but is quite durable, to the extent that we’re fooled into thinking it will last forever due to human life being much shorter, and in tungsten’s case the whole age of the Universe so far being much shorter than the period it needs to break down significantly. Regarding the false vacuum, all the energy in the entire Universe might not be as low as it could be. It is in fact all the energy because if it wasn’t, i.e. if any tiny region of space was actually in a lower state, that would immediately drag everything around it into a lower state, destroying all matter and structure around it and spreading out at the speed of light until the whole Universe ceases to exist, i.e. it would become a true vacuum, in which nothing could ever exist, so it isn’t even like it could be replaced by anything other than eternal emptiness – endless nothingness. If this is true, we wouldn’t see it coming because it would move out at the speed of light, although it might end up looking like a cosmic mirror for a while. We might see our own beautiful planet reflected in that mirror for a few seconds knowing that we and it and everything we have ever done was about to wink out of existence, so maybe it’d be better if we didn’t have any warning. If any intelligent life form, or other intelligence, or for that matter any kind of blind unthinking process like something to do with black holes or something, ever manages to lower any point anywhere below the energy level of a false vacuum, it will trigger this series of events which will end everything forever, with nothing ever able to replace it.
I sometimes wonder if this is what would happen if we ever tried to exploit zero-point energy. That is, there is energy stored in empty space which can sometimes be detected. For instance, if two metal plates are placed microscopically close to each other, this energy will pull them towards each other. Much energy can be extracted from this, and at first this might seem to be a marvellous solution to the energy crisis which would perhaps lead us to fume and rail against the fossil fuel industry – more about them later by the way – but if you think anthropogenic climate change and the like is a bad thing, just imagine comparing it to this extraction of zero-point energy which, well, would be very clean indeed, with no radioactivity or pollution whatever, so that sounds absolutely great, except for one thing: it might bring about the collapse of the false vacuum and the end of everything. If this happened as a result of an experiment on Earth, it would destroy the whole planet within about a twentieth of a second, go on to destroy our moon a second and a half later, the Sun eight minutes after that, every planet in the Solar System a few hours after that and so on. The Galaxy would be gone after seventy millennia, but nothing living in it would be able to stop it and after a few billion years the whole observable Universe would be gone.
So that’s not good. On the other hand, it might not be true. I personally suspect that if it could happen it already would’ve done, because given the size of the Universe it’s hard to imagine that somewhere, some form of alien life would’ve experimented this and caused this to happen. On the other hand, maybe it can happen but hasn’t because the whole Universe is absolutely empty of any intelligent being at all beyond this planet and one day we’ll just do something silly and all go fring like a dying filament light bulb.
The collapse of the false vacuum into the true vacuum is one of the worst things that could ever happen, but there are many worse conceivable things. For instance, the infinite and eternal suffering of all consciousness would probably be worse, and if that was the alternative it would be a kindness to cause it to collapse. But this collapse into nothingness works quite well as a comparison to what I’ll eventually be talking about in this post.
While I’m at it, there’s another bad thing which constitutes a cognitohazard and isn’t really connected. A cognitohazard is a set of sensory or mental phenomena which harms someone physically or mentally who experiences it. This idea became prominent in 1988 in David Langford’s ‘Interzone’ story ‘BLIT’, which was about an image which destroyed the consciousness of anyone who saw it. Later on, another science fiction story called ‘Basilisk’, I think, told of a world where all online images had been banned because of the possibility of this cognitohazard being posted by bad actors.
Unfortunately, it turns out that something similar to this image definitely exists in the form of the McCollough effect. This is going to sound incredible but it isn’t. It’s also a bit difficult to describe because I’ve decided not to risk it, but it involves something like looking at a series of horizontal green stripes for several minutes, then a series of vertical red stripes for several minutes. If you do this, and I really don’t recommend it, the result is apparently that any series of black and white stripes will then look pink for up to three months. This is obviously a lot milder than the fictional image in ‘BLIT’. Personally, and at this point I’m going to mention something which leads into a whole world of personal stuff I never talk about but I’ll hint at it here, I have very good reason to suppose that if I ever tried this the result would be a lot worse for me than it would for most other people. This probably sounds like one of those game-playing things which people do to intrigue others, but, again unfortunately, I can assure you that it’s anything but.
Somewhere out there in conceptual space, there could be some other kind of visual or other sensory cognitohazard which is worse than this, which exploits a vulnerability of the human mind but has not been discovered yet.
I’m going to ask you now not to search for the following idea: Roko’s Basilisk. I’m not going to say what it is. Once again unfortunately, I do know what it is. It’s probably nothing to worry about but just in case it is and you don’t already know it, please don’t try to find out. It’s another cognitohazard. Maybe it’s nothing.
That, then, is another category of bad stuff, but it’s quite cerebral and more something which might worry you but can probably be set aside without it being much of an issue. I’ve mentioned these things because they’re pretty bad, and enable one to contrast them with a much more realistic, possibly inevitable and very worrying possibility which it doesn’t seem likely that we can stop happening well within a human lifetime, which will affect all of us.
You might think anthropogenic climate change is bad enough, and of course it is pretty bad. Sadly, the same processes involved in climate change could also have a much more serious and urgent set of consequences next to which global warming is a picnic in the park. I can’t really overestimate the seriousness of this possibility. It’s been haunting me for months now. Maybe the very seriousness is causing people not to want to think about it and put it out of their minds. I don’t know how someone could not be motivated to do something about it.
Here it is. You might not want to read on. You might wish I hadn’t told you about this, so feel free to stop at this point, but on the other hand please do continue, because this really bothers me and I don’t want it to happen.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening. I realise there are deniers out there so I’m briefly going to spend time showing why we can be confident this is going on. If you still have questions, please look online for more information. Basically, the position is this. Most elements occur in atoms with slightly different weights because their nuclei have different numbers of neutrons. With carbon, there’s carbon-12, carbon-13 and the radioactive carbon-14. These are called isotopes. Biochemical processes prefer a particular ratio of these isotopes, and carbon-12 and -13 are stable, so they don’t turn into anything else. Volcanoes and other non-living processes don’t have this preference. Therefore it’s always possible to tell where carbon comes from – whether it was processed by living things or not. Fossil fuels are from coal, natural gas and oil, which used to be living things, so it has a particular ratio of carbon isotopes. The extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has this ratio of isotopes, so it’s from life, and in fact from fossil fuels. It isn’t from volcanoes or other non-living sources. Some people suggest that the Sun is heating the planet as part of a cycle, and this cycle does exist. However, the upper atmosphere is getting cooler and the lower atmosphere hotter, so it isn’t the Sun which is causing this heat. Water vapour is a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. This doesn’t help us though, because carbon dioxide heats the lower atmosphere and increases its humidity by increasing evaporation, so there will be more heating because of the water vapour due to the carbon dioxide causing it to form. There was a cluster of weather events early in the history of climate records which were unprecedented, making it seem that there was an extreme climate in the nineteenth century. This, though, was because it was easier to break records when there hadn’t been many kept. Today’s records are still records even though climate has been recorded for well over a century now. Other stars said to be sun-like are less like the Sun that they seem to be, so the fluctuations in their brightness are not comparable to ours. Climate change is actually milder than it would be if this was happening at a time when the Sun was giving out more radiation.
That’s very brief and sketchy of course, but climate scientists are generally satisfied that anthropogenic climate change is real, now and dangerous. I don’t want to focus on this right now though, but something much more threatening that’s connected to carbon dioxide and not to climate change.
Some time ago, a marine biologist collected living shelled molluscs on an ocean exhibition and kept them in an enclosed container. Unsurprisingly, she found that carbon dioxide built up in this container and it dissolved in the sea water. On looking at them again, she found that their shells had dissolved in the water because the carbon dioxide had made the water more acidic, by forming carbonic acid. This observation, I’m afraid, is absolutely crucial and has absolutely catastrophic consequences.
We already know that carbon dioxide is rising in the atmosphere, and it’s also dissolving from the atmosphere into the oceans, making them more acidic. This means that marine organisms with calcium carbonate shells, i.e. rather a lot of them, will have those shells dissolve, which will usually kill them in one way or another. For instance, it makes them more vulnerable to predators, which is often what caused the shells to evolve in the first place. It doesn’t even seem to take much acidification to cause this to happen. This does very obviously imperil coral and shelled molluscs such as whelks and oysters in the sea, and this is not good, but that’s not the main issue. The main issue is this: the marine food chains are very often based on calcium carbonate shelled plankton called foraminifera. There are thousands of these per cubic metre in the seas on continental shelves for instance. If these are killed en masse, the very specific dietary needs of many of the other species eating them will not be satisfied and they will starve, die and not reproduce. This does not, however, mean that their biomasse will disappear or affect all other organisms equally, and that might sound cheery and a relief, but it really isn’t, because of the nature of the organisms that will survive, and it’s not good at all.
Algal blooms and red tides are two phenomena resulting from anthropogenic environmental imbalances. Algal blooms are often misnamed, as they’re actually caused by blue-green algae, which are not actually algae but more like bacteria capable of photosynthesis. The excess of dead animals and plants floating in the sea will effectively fertilise it with nitrogen and phosphorus and due to the lack of shelly organisms able to consume it, this will feed blue green algae, causing deeper water to be blocked off from sunlight, leading to lack of oxygen further down. Anoxic oceans are usually a major factor in mass extinctions, as in, if they happen there just will be a mass extinction.
We think this planet is ours, and when I say ours, I mean that we think it belongs to plants and animals. It’s actually more like microörganisms grudgingly allowing us to exist provided we aren’t too much trouble to them. Blue-green algae have been around for thousands of millions of years and probably initially evolved because their colour allowed them to fit in between all the purple bacteria which did most of the photosynthesis at the time. They incorporated themselves into the cells of algae and still exist inside them as chloroplasts. They aren’t really algae – they’re the older organisms. Likewise, mitochondria, found in both plant and animal cells, have a similar history, having been microbes which became part of more complex cells, including our own. They run the Krebs Cycle, which is how we use oxygen to extract energy from sugar, and are the reason we breathe oxygen, just as blue-green algae produce that oxygen in the first place.
So they produce oxygen, sounds okay right? Well no, because that’s not all blue-green algae do and the fact that they deprive the deeper sea of oxygen is not the only problem. Firstly, yes, they use up the oxygen and this will cause fish everywhere in the ocean to suffocate, causing what they call a “dead zone”. That isn’t all. They also produce powerful toxins. One of these was a cause célèbre among biological sciences students when I was at uni because if you come in contact with it, it makes you cry blood within a few seconds and will kill you in two minutes. It’s spectacularly poisonous. And there’s another one, which I need to move on to red tides to talk about.
Red tides are another likely consequence of ocean acidification, and they happen for the same reason. These are the so-called “red tides”. Not all red tides are harmful, and they aren’t all red either, but they’re called that because of dinoflagellates. The “dino-” prefix should be attended for because it means the same thing here as it does in “dinosaur”, i.e. “terrible” or “monstrous”. Dinoflagellates come in all sorts of forms, but the ones to worry about are those which produce saxitoxin, which is also produced by blue-green algae. Saxitoxin is the substance which causes paralytic shellfish poisoning and is one of the most powerful organic toxins in existence. It’s basically a bio-weapon. Incidentally, the pufferfish which don’t produce the notorious tetrodotoxin sometimes produce this instead. Saxitoxin can’t be inactivated by heating or acid, so it will stay active in the water. It kills by paralysing the skeletal muscles, which of course include the muscles mammals, birds and reptiles use to breathe, so it leads to suffocation.
That sounds bad, but actually it’s worse. This won’t just be something happening in the oceans which we can find a way around. Saxitoxin is, as I’ve said, a particularly powerful toxin, to the extent that there will be enough to make the atmosphere itself toxic even though it starts in the sea. If we breathe it, it will kill us, and those people left around when this happens. Anyone who wants to go on breathing after about 2065 is going to have to be choosy about their air. Sorry to be flippant.
This will be followed by a mass die-off of the algal blooms and their composition, which will consume more oxygen. This process is part of what happened at the end of the Permian, which apart from the oxygen catastrophe and snowball Earth is probably the worst thing ever to happen to life on this planet and killed off 96% of all life. The extinction of the dinosaurs was pretty trivial compared to that.
If this happens, it will mean the extinction of humans, all other mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, most molluscs, coral, various types of plankton, brachiopods and a lot of other animals I haven’t thought of. Insects, actually, might be okay. And if this happens, children born today will only be in their early forties by then. And you can also easily imagine that in this situation where atmospheric air is poisonous, some megacorp will start charging us to breathe. I mean, there’s profit to be made and people will be very motivated to buy their product, so why not?
I want to point out that this wouldn’t be good. It can be prevented of course, but nobody seems to want to do that. In fact nobody seems to want to think about it or take it seriously. I don’t know why this is. It seems quite important to me, and I thought people cared about their children and grandchildren. Maybe I was wrong.
A Box Of Chocolates 