5 Sci-Fi Apocalypses The Government Is Actually Planning For
The government has to plan for every contingency: disease, famine, political instability, drought, weather, aliens, the plot of
Armageddon
coming true and protecting super-evolved man from his primitive
cousins. There are actual plans for every one of those scenarios. There
are entire real government programs devoted solely to thinking up ways
to counter weather-themed supervillains and other outlandish threats
normally relegated to the realm of science fiction. Like these:
#5.
Talking to -- or Covering Up -- Extraterrestrials
Are we alone? If not, what will happen when we finally meet creatures
from another planet? Will they be peaceful? Hostile? Will we be able to
mate with them, Captain-Kirk style? If not, why not?
Seriously. Why not? One reason.
These are questions movies and television shows have been asking for
decades. And, somewhat inexplicably, the government has been as well.
It's not so far-fetched: After all, while the chance of finding life out
there other than ourselves is infinitesimal, we have been trying it for
years. We've been sending radio waves into space with SETI, Voyager 1
has reached the
edge of our solar system
and is still moving out into deep space, and we pretty much call all
alien life forms pussies in countless movies that we then beam out in
every direction. It's practically inevitable that they're coming.
This film will be the blackface of the 24th century.
So what is the government doing about it?
Way back in 1960, when Americans were first getting a boner for all
things to do with space (hereby shortened to "the Space-Boner era"),
Congress commissioned an official report on what sorts of things could
happen once we launched ourselves out of Earth's atmosphere. This was
called "Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space
Activities for Human Affairs," or the
Brookings Report (because PSIPSAHA is kind of a sucky acronym).
It sounds kind of like the noise you make when you stub a toe.
Most of the report was pretty snooze-worthy, but there was
one section, called "Implications of a discovery of extraterrestrial life," that made people
sit up and take notice. And then void their bowels, upon reading such reassuring findings as:
"If superintelligence is discovered, the results become quite
unpredictable." "[There are] many examples of societies, sure of their
place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they had to
associate with previously unfamiliar societies." "How might such
information ... be presented to or withheld from the public?"
Yep, the whole thing pretty much reads like an X-file. All it's
missing is a righteously indignant Mulder screaming about the truth
while giving sultry looks to the camera.
Doo-dee-da-da-dee-doo.
But America is far from the only nation worried about meeting ET.
Even the Vatican is devoting serious thought to an idea formerly
relegated to trailer parks and hill-folk. Father Jose Funes, speaking
for the Vatican after its official conference on astrobiology (wait,
what?), stated that the church has concluded that the existence of life
on other planets
would not invalidate anything in the Bible. And Guy Consolmagno, one of the pope's astronomers (wait,
double what?) said that he would be delighted to baptize any extra terrestrial life that comes his way, but "
only if they asked."
And promised to put the probe down first.
#4.
Leaving Warning Messages for Humans of the Far Future
Major civilizations come and go over the course of history. Even ones
that dominate for thousands of years will eventually fall into dust.
But they always leave shit buried in the dirt. Since the statute of
limitations for littering is probably just short of a few thousand
years, we accept that fact and use these leavings to study them. One
day, in turn, somebody will be studying us the same way.
"... What our early ancestors needed with one-fingered gloves, we may never know."
And we're probably going to kill them for it.
See, unlike previous civilizations, where the biggest worry was
uncovering somebody caught rubbing one out while Vesuvius erupted, our
society is capable of leaving things that will stay dangerous basically
forever. Like Yucca Mountain, the giant, soon-to-be glowing mound in
Nevada and America's possible storage facility for nuclear waste. If we
do end up dumping tons of radioactive material there, any future people
(or aliens) who dig it up are going to seriously regret messing with the
past. Hey, it's like we're setting up our own mummy's curse! Awesome!
"Bjorn, no one would go to the trouble of hollowing out a mountain if they weren't hiding some real cool shit."
So what is the government doing about it?
Assuming that we are an altruistic people and don't want the people
of the future to all die horrible deaths (although they do kind of seem
like dicks, all smug with their hyper-cars and stupid transmogrifiers),
we need a way to warn them where not to dig. So it's a good thing the
U.S. Department of Energy
has been paying people to think about this issue for years. What's so
hard about that, though? Just slap up a sign explaining the damn thing
and be done with it. The only problem being that the Environmental
Protection Agency has demanded that the warning signs be visible and
understandable by anyone who might seen them ... for the next 10,000
years.
Iconography, cultural touchstones and
language
will all be entirely different in 10,000 years. Communicating anything
to people of the far-flung future is nearly impossible. For example,
according to the government, our current nuclear waste symbol sort of
looks like an angel. It could be misconstrued as a religious sign, or a
message of peace, right up until they start digging into all of our
poisons.
Eh, either an angel or Lady Gaga's Tomb Palace.
So we can't mark nuclear waste sites with that sign, lest we want
future-us's children doing snow-angels in rotten plutonium. That's why
the Department of Energy gathered a group of intellectuals from a huge
variety of backgrounds, including history, risk analysis and
engineering, to brainstorm solutions to the problem.
Dubbed the Futures Panel,
they came up with ideas like the "landscape of thorns": a visual
warning made up of gargantuan, 50-foot-tall concrete pillars with spikes
jutting out of them. That, or else just littering the place with human
bodies. Because subtlety does not translate well over millennia.
Of course, as with most government projects, the bad-ass ideas were
discarded for cost restrictions. If the Yucca Mountain project goes
through, the current plan is to build large "earthen berms" (in layman's
terms, piles of dirt) to warn people of the future. Because large piles
of dirt might not be foreboding, understandable or long-lasting, but
man are they DIRT cheap. Ha-ha! (But seriously, you'll die if you fuck
with that dirt, Future.)
"You guys know what this would be good for? Storing drinking water."
#3.
Fighting Asteroids with Robots
Asteroids fly past Earth with a slightly worrying frequency,
especially since we don't know most of them are even there until they
pass us. The sun literally blinds astronomers to their presence, so the
chances of us knowing that one is on a collision course is
infinitesimal. So what do we do if we ever actually have a window of
time when we know the Big One is coming? Personally, we're going to go
with "big drunken orgy of crime" followed by "panic and crying."
Stock up on tear gas and Molotov mixins early, to take advantage of the best deals.
Fortunately, the government has a different plan.
So what is the government doing about it?
Unfortunately, it's straight from the plot of
Armageddon.
A
group of concerned astronauts
from the U.S. and Canada have presented the U.N. with a report
detailing the need for an asteroid-impact contingency. Indeed, the
astronauts claim that we already have all the technology necessary to go
all
Armageddon on any bitch-ass asteroid fool enough to step
to us ... given enough time, that is. What's enough time? An
astonishingly unlikely 20 years' heads-up, in some cases. That's how
long scientists would need for the safest plan, which involves using
mirrors or lights to deflect an asteroid off course just enough to miss
us.
Currently, the shall we say "less-safe" plan is to land people or
robots (if they're advanced enough for the task by then but not advanced
enough that they realize it's a batshit insane plan) on the surface of
the asteroid. Then, yep, it unfolds exactly like the movie: The
astronauts drill inside the rock and detonate a bomb to slightly change
the massive rock's trajectory, in theory saving the human race. Of
course, if the bomb is too effective, we'll just get lots of smaller but
still deadly asteroids, changing the space bullet into more of a space
shotgun blast -- but hey, there are always kinks to work out. The big
downside (there's a bigger downside than "space shotgun blast"?) is
that, even with the resources of the most advanced countries in the
world at their disposal, scientists still predict the human race needs
at least 10 years to prepare.
In that case, it's a good thing they're working on it now. We already
know there is a possible contender for the plan headed our way in 2029
... and again in 2036.
