Facing fears

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, forecasting, social trends

What makes you worry, or at least wonder, "What if THAT happened?" Mike Pearl, with his column in Vice, "How Scared Should I Be?", is the professional worry wart we all need to take a whack at such questions. His book The Day it Finally Happens: Alien Contact, Dinosaur Parks, Immortal Humans—and Other (im)Possible Phenomena tackles nineteen such questions.

In the Acknowledgements Mr. Pearl confesses to suffering multiple panic attacks while writing the book. For someone who is disposed to think things through, then realize just how plausible many of these things are, the occasional panic attack is justified.

There is only one chapter that touches on a concern I also have, "The Day Antibiotics Don't Work Anymore". The author doesn't delve into the troubles antibiotic resistance is causing already (in the US, almost 3 million resistant infections and more than 35,000 deaths in 2019: on a par with auto accidents). Rather, his focus is what happens when every infectious pathogen is fully resistant, when getting a paper cut becomes a life-threatening event. Every chapter begins with a scorecard. For this one:

Likely in this century? Yes
Plausibility Rating: 5/5
Scary? Extremely, but probably not the Apocalypse
Worth Changing Habits? Yes

The follow-up question I have is, "Will alternative biocides such as bacteriophages be developed (re-developed) soon enough?" I say re-developed, because bacteria-eating viruses (bacteriophages) were in use and effective, and research into developing more of them was a growing technology when antibiotics were discovered and effectively torpedoed phage research. It is ramping up again.

On another matter of which I am rather fond, the author's take on our getting a confirmed signal from intelligent ET's posits a radio reception from a star 13,000 light-years away. In the early days of the first science fiction boom in America, some 60-100 years ago (the days of "Doc" Smith and R.A. Heinlein and a great many others), the universe was usually imagined to be full of alien species, some vaguely similar to us, and others more like semi-familiar animals, and others quite fanciful. This was almost taken for granted by Sci-Fi readers, but few others gave it any thought. The pendulum has swung in a more pessimistic direction since then, with a brief pro-"lotsa aliens" swing brought on by Star Trek and Star Wars. Pessimism rules at present. More and more people realize that stars are far away, very far; that getting somewhere in less than years to centuries or more is about as possible as learning to pole vault a mile; and that life like that of Earth might be so rare that no other planet in the Milky Way is likely to have living things bigger than E. coli. This is actually a pretty good time for an alien signal to be intercepted and verified.

Here's one for keeping Digital Natives awake at night: "The Day the Entire Internet Goes Down." Here is the scorecard:

Likely in this century? Yes
Plausibility Rating: 4/5
Scary? About as scary as it gets
Worth Changing Habits? It would be a disaster. How up-to-date is your disaster preparedness kit?

The only thing he finds more scary is the prospect of nuclear annihilation (Plausibility 2/5), to which he devotes 20 pages, the longest chapter. The "Internet" chapter and one about the closing of the last slaughter house (also 2/5) are tied for second, with 18 pages. He dwells at length on the way the Internet works, and what it would really take to bring it all down. One of the next books on my reading list is 2034 (Stay tuned), about WW3 (or 4?), with China, which reveals just how dependent we are on the Internet, even the military (BIG mistake, Generals!): in the novel China selectively "blinds" the U.S. This leads me to consider that an attempt to destroy the Internet is the most likely scenario at present for triggering a nuclear attack or exchange.

Personally, total annihilation is less scary than almost-annihilation. My wife, born just after WW2 ended, can tell you a thing or two about growing up in a country whose capital (and hundreds of square miles around it) was fire-bombed into oblivion. I have read quite a number of post-apocalyptic stories and novels. None of them seems grim enough to be realistic. I guess I'll leave that right there…

I'm not the sort to fret nearly as much as Mr. Pearl. Reading his treatment of things that must represent his greatest fears was enlightening and enjoyable. Really! He is clearly laboring to allay his own fears and in so doing he makes each of them, if not less fearful, a bit more comprehensible.