You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [76]
3. DISASTER AT SEA!
What they told you to worry about: rogue tsunami!
In The Day After Tomorrow, New York City residents are blind-sided when the Statue of Liberty disappears into a gray-green mist of surging seawater. The Poseidon Adventure opened with a rogue wave flipping a cruise ship like a bathtub toy. The actual tsunami in 2004 seemed to come out of nowhere, wiping out entire swaths of Thailand. While the causes of the real and fictional waves were all different, one thing that seems to be clear is that tsunamis can rise out of the sea without warning and ruin your shit. Hey, at least there’s no sense in worrying about something we can’t see coming, right? Right?
What you should worry about: the collapse of Cumbre Vieja
If a volcanic ridge in the Canary Islands falls into the Atlantic Ocean and no one is around, does it make a noise? Well, not at first. The surge of furious seawater still has to rush across the pitch black ocean floor at the speed of a fighter jet. About six hours later, however, East Coast residents would begin to hear something like a thousand freight trains rushing up out of the ocean, followed by all 110 million of their uniquely ridiculous accents merging as one to scream, “Oh shit!”
After that, not much sound.
Cumbre Vieja is a cantankerous little volcano that’s erupted seven times in the last five hundred years. A group of British scientists predict that a future eruption may crack the volcano in two, sending an avalanche of rock “the size of the Isle of Man” (translated into American: Chicago) hurtling into the ocean. The resulting shockwave would reach speeds of eight hundred kilometers per hour and submerge the East Coast under fifty-meter waves (five hundred miles per hour and, “Holy shit, run!” respectively).
So Hollywood got a few details right: the Statue of Liberty being blinked out behind a surging wall of green-gray water, for instance. But it won’t be some one-in-a-million rogue wave or fixable environmental selfishness. Just physics.
In everyday terms, the entire East Coast is sitting next to a pool telling the kids in the shallow end to watch their damned splashing while a giant fat guy bounces up and down on the diving board, screaming, “Cannonball!” at the top of his lungs.
2 AND 1. DISASTER FROM SPACE!
What they told you to worry about: asteroids and comets!
When discussing asteroids, comets, and other celestial debris that pass close to our planet, scientists use the bland, awkward term near-earth objects. In early 2009, NASA published a fourteen-page document detailing how it would stop an incoming earth smasher. The paper reads like stereo instructions, but the big points get across: we’d have plenty of warning time to pull the object away or deflect it, just like in Armageddon. This is the rare case where Hollywood actually proposed a reasonable solution. Probably because the really terrifying shit wouldn’t make such a good movie since there’s absolutely dick that we could do to stop it.
What you should be worried about: solar ejections!
Take for example, the solar ejection. It could be poor self-image, or heavy space drinking, but every once in a while the sun starts projectile vomiting. Instead of chunks of HotPockets and Jello shots, though, the sun spews radiation, often giving off the equivalent of a few million atom bombs in an hour or two. Usually, by the time the radiation reaches the earth, all that’s left is a harmless light show. But in 1859, a huge solar ejection disrupted all the high technology of the day. Luckily, it was 1859, so the damage was limited to telegraph lines and countless monocles dropped in surprise. If they’d been so foolish as to build a fancy global economy that required information technology to function, power lines would have been fried, satellites destroyed, and cell phones rendered useless. It would have frozen civilization