Worrying About the End of The World I am usually not one to talk about gloom and doom, but there is so much threating the earth right now it is probably worth talking about. Some of the threats are being denied by many people, but that certainly doesn’t make them any less of a threat. Some others see threats under every rock and it is almost a mental illness with them. Speaking about rocks, a little while ago a meteor the size of a bus passed the earth at a close cosmic distance, and NASA had no clue until the next day after it passed us. This is not what I call detection, but in truth it doesn’t matter, because even if it was detected the day before, we could have done nothing about it. We need time to destroy, or alter the course of these things and the bigger they are the more time we need, maybe years. NASA’s detection abilities, when it comes to these things, leaves a lot to be desired and we might even have had close calls without ever knowing about them. Perhaps some day in the future a zone can be set up around the earth, and anything that crosses it will set off an alarm and if it is far enough out it will give us time to defeat these objects. Maybe I can understand this worry, but I still feel if you cannot do something about an event in the future, why worry because it does no good. Global warming has a lot of people worried, but there are some who still deny it is happening. Personally, I don’t get that, it is obvious the earth is warming up and every year it gets a tiny bit hotter. We have to remember it is the temperature of the entire earth we are talking about. Some of the deniers say it can’t be warming up, because there are still some very cold days in places. What they don’t understand is the ice at the poles is melting from the bottom up, and the cold air it creates lowers temperatures where that cold air passes over, but as the ice gets thinner and is finally gone this phenomenon will stop, and those cold days will be gone. Deserts are getting hotter and these are places where the cold air from melting ice never reaches, and this proves global warming. Another worry I see being complained about from time to time is over population. The total population of the earth is approximately 8 billion people, and there are a lot of articles claiming as more people are born and need more land, there won’t be enough land left to grow enough food to feed everyone. It is estimated the population will increase by about 17% by 2050. I wouldn’t worry too much about feeding people, because new techniques in food production should take care of that problem. Laboratory grown meat should not only reduce land use by animals, but this will help in global warming since animals like cows put out a lot of methane gas which in turn reaches the atmosphere. There are also high-rise farms being built where a building similar to a skyscraper has plants being grown on every floor along, and will probably use other techniques which are being studied. I said I would talk about threats people perceive for the earth, so I have to mention the fact there are quite a few people worried about an extraterrestrial attack. It is mentioned a lot on social media, and on sites on the internet. All the sightings of unknown objects in the sky do nothing to quell this fear. There are also stories about abductions, murders and all sorts of other things which are being committed by aliens in these craft. If one were to go into a mental institution, they would probably find a good portion of the patients are in there because of excessive worry about alien spying and alien attack. Remember there has never been any credible news released about anyone seeing an alien. Sure, there are plenty of stories about this and even whistleblowers who claim they are here, but there has never been any authority which stated they are true. Perhaps this one worry should have been first. Many people worry about a nuclear war. They worry about the Russians building up their military, they worry about China doing the same thing, and they worry about North Korea building rockets with nuclear warheads. They worry about a nuke being smuggled into the United States, and set off and not only the death and destruction it would cause, but also the fact it could ignite a nuclear world war which could even destroy the earth. There are some lesser players they are worried about, some of which have nukes and some which don’t YET! They worry about Israel using a nuke against an Arab country, Pakistan and India getting into a nuclear war, Iran somehow getting a nuke. There is a lot to worry about. They even worry about the nukes we lost, which are near cities somewhere and they are afraid one of them can go off, and even we might cause retaliation against another country by mistake thus starting a nuclear war. The countries of the world have become a lot closer, because of air travel and a person with a cold in China can come here and in less than a day not only give that cold to people on the plane they could also give it to someone here. Substitute a major disease in place of that cold, let’s say Ebola. This is a deadly disease and easily spread. Airplanes are a closed environment where everyone is breathing the same air. Diseases love this. Disease is a big worry. It is also a worry for astronauts, and us in the future when we go to new planets. There is no way of knowing what disease might exist on an alien world, or if we could ever cure it. Another thing we have been hearing about is mass extinctions. If there are enough of them or some of the animals, or insects which are needed to maintain balance on earth go extinct, it would cause a global catastrophe and this is another worry for people. When some people heard about the decreasing number of bees they realized this could be a real problem for the earth since the bees pollinate many crops and some scientists even went to work creating robot bees to replace them. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact there are some volcanoes on this planet which have the ability to destroy most life on it. They could do this by spewing enough matter into the atmosphere to block out the sun for many years, and there are people who worry about that. I for one have decided not to worry about any of this, life is just too short.
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