Black Blade
11th May 2010, 02:43 PM
How Is America Going To End?
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The top 144 scenarios.
1. Electromagnetic Pulse: A nuclear weapon detonated at high elevation could knock out the country's electrical infrastructure, sending us back to the Stone Age. The congressional EMP Commission says an electromagnetic pulse "is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences."
2. Foreign Invasion: The Red Dawn scenario: A hostile alliance of foreign powers dispatches a team of elite combat troops to America. They launch a coordinated assault with thousands of paratroopers on key military and communications installations, dealing the U.S. government a fatal blow.
3. Russia Hits the Button: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg says the United States should fear "a mistaken attack on our country by the huge Russian arsenal of nuclear weapons." As recently as 1995, a "retaliatory" nuclear strike was barely averted when Russian officials figured out at the last second that what they thought was an enemy strike was really a craft launched to monitor the Northern lights.
4. Loose Nukes: Taliban fighters wrest nuclear weapons from a destabilized Pakistan. Or al-Qaida acquires a small arsenal of nukes from a disintegrating Russia. The nonstate actors launch against the United States in an attack exponentially worse than 9/11.
5. Dirty Bombs: Terror groups armed with "radiological dispersal devices"-a cocktail of radioactive material and garden-variety explosives-launch coordinated attacks in a dozen major cities. The attacks destabilize the government and break our spirit. The terrorists win.
6. Abandonment: After a series of devastating attacks, Washington admits it can no longer protect large swaths of the nation. The United States contracts to a smaller core that's easier to defend.
7. Suicidal Tyrant: An Ahmadinejad-like figure strikes at the heart of the Great Satan, launching nuclear weapons at major American cities and pushing the country to anarchy.
8. Internal Guerrilla Warfare: Smugglers and street gangs join forces to contest the authority of the U.S. government-first along the Mexican border and later in pockets of major cities-in order to maintain control of lucrative illicit markets.
9. Mercenary Armies: As in the seventh season of 24, a military contractor goes rogue and attacks the United States. Not even Jack Bauer can save us.
10. Space Attacks: A coalition of malevolent nations with hyper-advanced space programs strikes at the United States from the outer limits, disrupting all of our communications and rendering our conventional Army powerless.
11. Information War: A rogue state, terror organization, or group of malevolent hackers takes down America's infrastructure by infiltrating every system that's controlled by computers: television stations, traffic signals, telecommunications, the stock market, the power grid. As seen in Live Free or Die Hard.
12. Push-Button Warfare: Nanoscale production allows anyone to make tanks and flying drones with the press of a button. With sophisticated weaponry available to all, the nation-state ceases to be an important entity.
13. Peak Oil: Petroleum production reaches terminal decline. Oil becomes too expensive to extract, and alternative energies can't maintain our fossil-fuel-dependent lifestyle. The developed world goes kaput, with gas-happy America leading the way to the gutter.
14. Peak Water: The overpopulated, overheated Southwest runs out of H20, instigating mass migration to Canada.
15. Overpopulation: A spike in birth rates-or massive levels of immigration-increases the population of the United States to 1 billion. America doesn't have the carrying capacity to support its new crush of citizens, and a die-off ensues.
16. Space Harvesting: China, Russia, and South Korea corral asteroids and harvest them for valuable minerals. As the rest of the developed world gets rich, the United States-whose space program is hopelessly behind-falls from its perch.
17. Oil 2.0: China, which produces more than 95 percent of the world's rare earth metals (materials like europium and erbium), develops a major, rare-earth-fueled breakthrough in energy production. The United States, lacking the natural resources needed for this amazing new power source, becomes impoverished and insignificant.
18. Obesity: One of the fattest nations in human history keeps getting fatter. An increasingly sedentary society beset by health problems can no longer compete with the world's fitter nations.
19. Geothermal Energy: In the post-petroleum age, we generate electricity by drilling into the Earth's interior to extract stored heat; we drill too deeply, causing massive earthquakes.
20. Nuclear Waste: Yucca Mountain and other nuclear storage facilities begin to leak radioactive waste. Everyone gets cancer.
21. End of English: Chinese economic power combined with an influx of non-English-speaking immigrants to the United States leads to the decline of anglophone American culture worldwide.
22. Media Piracy: The American film and music industries go bankrupt as piracy becomes universal. The United States ceases to be the world's leading exporter of culture, and the country declines in influence as images of America no longer proliferate worldwide.
23. Decadence: Rome had bread and circuses. America's descent into a mindless stupor, historian Niall Ferguson argues, can be seen in the popularity of pornography and NASCAR. If you think ragging on porn and stock-car racing is a bit of a cliché, please substitute mixed martial arts and reality television.
24. Mass Incarceration: Rising rates of imprisonment lead the entire country to develop the social ills of America's inner cities: Ex-offenders can't find good jobs or marriage partners, and society slowly collapses.
25. End of Homeownership: The mortgage crisis kills off the American dream. Civic pride goes down the toilet, and the GDP shrinks as the ownership society shrivels up.
26. Math and Science: American math and science aptitude deteriorates, killing innovation in the tech sector and pushing America to the back of the line of post-industrial economies.
27. Intelligent Design: Creationists succeed in getting evolution pushed out of textbooks. Scientific illiteracy dooms America to second-class status.
28. Laziness: "Endlessly gaming, chatting, and chilling with their iPods, the next generation already has a more tenuous connection to 'Western civilization' than most parents appreciate," historian Niall Ferguson writes. While everyone in France continues to take vacation in July and August, the next generation of Americans refuses to work except in July and August.
29. Oldocracy: As the population ages, there is growing discord between old fogeys with lots of voting power and younger people, increasingly foreign-born. The older generation seizes power and wastes all of America's money on increased Social Security benefits.
30. Suburban Slums: Today's McMansions will become tomorrow's tenements, turning America's exurban sprawl into a hellacious backwater. "About 25 years ago, Escape From New York perfectly captured the zeitgeist," Christopher B. Leinberger writes in the Atlantic. "Two or three decades from now, the next Kurt Russell may find his breakout role in Escape From the Suburban Fringe."
31. Christianity: Just as, per Edward Gibbon, the rise of religion killed Rome's fighting spirit, increasing spirituality turns America into a nation of pacifists. We get attacked and don't fight back.
32. Militant Islam: Muslims feel increasingly alienated by American society. Al-Qaida gets a much bigger toehold, giving it a staging ground for devastating domestic terror attacks that rip the nation asunder.
33. Drug Boom: Americans turn to advanced, hyper-addictive recreational drugs that are tailored to each individual user's body chemistry. Civilization dies in a drug-induced haze.
34. Decline of Civic Spirit: As happened in Rome, excessive taxation leads citizens to lose respect for the state. The all-volunteer Army shrinks as no one cares to assume the risks of fighting for the country.
35. Gay Marriage: As the institution spreads across the country, splinter groups bemoan the practice and agitate to form their own, heterosexual-only state.
36. Wealth Gap: The divide between rich and poor grows. The nation's lower classes, increasingly resentful of their impoverished condition, launch guerrilla attacks against the depraved, prosperous elites.
37. Complexity: Anthropologist Joseph Tainter and political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon argue that societies benefit from complexity (irrigation networks to prevent droughts, for example) up to a certain point but that too much intricacy can be a bad thing. Homer-Dixon explains: "As an expanding portion of a society's wealth is sucked into further boosting complexity, its reserves to deal with unexpected contingencies fall."
38. Multiculturalism: In a 2004 speech, former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm declared that America is doomed because it has gone from a melting pot to a "bilingual-bicultural country." Diversity "stresses differences rather than commonalities," he said. "Diverse people worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other-that is, when they are not killing each other."
39. Smallpox: A rogue scientist looses the virus from a Russian vault, and terrorists use the disease to attack and destabilize America.
40. Swine Flu: The pandemic worsens, devastating American society to a much greater extent than the 1918 flu pandemic. Mortality from the virus itself is high, but pandemic expert Dr. Michael T. Osterholm argues that the disruption of supply chains will be far worse. When countries shut their borders to quarantine themselves, we'll be unable to import the food, energy, and acute-care drugs we need.
41. Super-AIDS: The disease evolves, and airborne transmission spreads it faster than ever. Even the world's richest nations are unable to get it under control.
42. Synthesized Super Virus: In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman suggests one scenario for the end of humanity: "a psychotically obsessed, biochemically trained terrorist creatively splice something together that evolves faster than we develop resistance-maybe by clipping genetic material into the versatile SARS virus, which could spread both sexually and via the air."
43. Anthrax: Terrorists in crop dusters drop aerosolized anthrax across a dozen metropolitan areas, sending the nation into a panic.
44. Tropical Diseases: Global warming enables insects to spread their diseases northward. A weakened America lacks the wealth and resources to stave off malaria outbreaks.
45. Antibiotic Resistance: As a result of factory farming and spiking sales of antibacterial hand soap, superstrains of bacteria develop that are resistant to medicine. Public health officials can do nothing but throw up their hands.
46. The Rapture: Christians are instantly transported to heaven. The nonbelievers left behind in America struggle to survive as Muslim countries gain in power relative to the United States.
47. Obama as God: The president, by far the most popular in history domestically and abroad, becomes the leader of a global religious cult. If that sounds unrealistic, sub Tiger Woods for Obama.
48. Dec. 21, 2012: According to an ancient Mayan prophecy-at least as interpreted by the kind of people who believe this sort of thing-this is a likely date of the apocalypse. In the event of the apocalypse, the United States will struggle to carry on.
49. Alien Invasion: Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev once discussed banding together to fight off a UFO attack. For all the happy talk about cooperation, when the tractor beams come down, it's every country for itself.
50. Voluntary Human Extinction: A movement to end breeding rises in popularity as climate change and resource wars intensify.
http://images.yuku.com/image/pjpeg/ba436e0c1941a36327b01b6d3ee39c62d0056f6c.pjpg
The top 144 scenarios.
1. Electromagnetic Pulse: A nuclear weapon detonated at high elevation could knock out the country's electrical infrastructure, sending us back to the Stone Age. The congressional EMP Commission says an electromagnetic pulse "is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences."
2. Foreign Invasion: The Red Dawn scenario: A hostile alliance of foreign powers dispatches a team of elite combat troops to America. They launch a coordinated assault with thousands of paratroopers on key military and communications installations, dealing the U.S. government a fatal blow.
3. Russia Hits the Button: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg says the United States should fear "a mistaken attack on our country by the huge Russian arsenal of nuclear weapons." As recently as 1995, a "retaliatory" nuclear strike was barely averted when Russian officials figured out at the last second that what they thought was an enemy strike was really a craft launched to monitor the Northern lights.
4. Loose Nukes: Taliban fighters wrest nuclear weapons from a destabilized Pakistan. Or al-Qaida acquires a small arsenal of nukes from a disintegrating Russia. The nonstate actors launch against the United States in an attack exponentially worse than 9/11.
5. Dirty Bombs: Terror groups armed with "radiological dispersal devices"-a cocktail of radioactive material and garden-variety explosives-launch coordinated attacks in a dozen major cities. The attacks destabilize the government and break our spirit. The terrorists win.
6. Abandonment: After a series of devastating attacks, Washington admits it can no longer protect large swaths of the nation. The United States contracts to a smaller core that's easier to defend.
7. Suicidal Tyrant: An Ahmadinejad-like figure strikes at the heart of the Great Satan, launching nuclear weapons at major American cities and pushing the country to anarchy.
8. Internal Guerrilla Warfare: Smugglers and street gangs join forces to contest the authority of the U.S. government-first along the Mexican border and later in pockets of major cities-in order to maintain control of lucrative illicit markets.
9. Mercenary Armies: As in the seventh season of 24, a military contractor goes rogue and attacks the United States. Not even Jack Bauer can save us.
10. Space Attacks: A coalition of malevolent nations with hyper-advanced space programs strikes at the United States from the outer limits, disrupting all of our communications and rendering our conventional Army powerless.
11. Information War: A rogue state, terror organization, or group of malevolent hackers takes down America's infrastructure by infiltrating every system that's controlled by computers: television stations, traffic signals, telecommunications, the stock market, the power grid. As seen in Live Free or Die Hard.
12. Push-Button Warfare: Nanoscale production allows anyone to make tanks and flying drones with the press of a button. With sophisticated weaponry available to all, the nation-state ceases to be an important entity.
13. Peak Oil: Petroleum production reaches terminal decline. Oil becomes too expensive to extract, and alternative energies can't maintain our fossil-fuel-dependent lifestyle. The developed world goes kaput, with gas-happy America leading the way to the gutter.
14. Peak Water: The overpopulated, overheated Southwest runs out of H20, instigating mass migration to Canada.
15. Overpopulation: A spike in birth rates-or massive levels of immigration-increases the population of the United States to 1 billion. America doesn't have the carrying capacity to support its new crush of citizens, and a die-off ensues.
16. Space Harvesting: China, Russia, and South Korea corral asteroids and harvest them for valuable minerals. As the rest of the developed world gets rich, the United States-whose space program is hopelessly behind-falls from its perch.
17. Oil 2.0: China, which produces more than 95 percent of the world's rare earth metals (materials like europium and erbium), develops a major, rare-earth-fueled breakthrough in energy production. The United States, lacking the natural resources needed for this amazing new power source, becomes impoverished and insignificant.
18. Obesity: One of the fattest nations in human history keeps getting fatter. An increasingly sedentary society beset by health problems can no longer compete with the world's fitter nations.
19. Geothermal Energy: In the post-petroleum age, we generate electricity by drilling into the Earth's interior to extract stored heat; we drill too deeply, causing massive earthquakes.
20. Nuclear Waste: Yucca Mountain and other nuclear storage facilities begin to leak radioactive waste. Everyone gets cancer.
21. End of English: Chinese economic power combined with an influx of non-English-speaking immigrants to the United States leads to the decline of anglophone American culture worldwide.
22. Media Piracy: The American film and music industries go bankrupt as piracy becomes universal. The United States ceases to be the world's leading exporter of culture, and the country declines in influence as images of America no longer proliferate worldwide.
23. Decadence: Rome had bread and circuses. America's descent into a mindless stupor, historian Niall Ferguson argues, can be seen in the popularity of pornography and NASCAR. If you think ragging on porn and stock-car racing is a bit of a cliché, please substitute mixed martial arts and reality television.
24. Mass Incarceration: Rising rates of imprisonment lead the entire country to develop the social ills of America's inner cities: Ex-offenders can't find good jobs or marriage partners, and society slowly collapses.
25. End of Homeownership: The mortgage crisis kills off the American dream. Civic pride goes down the toilet, and the GDP shrinks as the ownership society shrivels up.
26. Math and Science: American math and science aptitude deteriorates, killing innovation in the tech sector and pushing America to the back of the line of post-industrial economies.
27. Intelligent Design: Creationists succeed in getting evolution pushed out of textbooks. Scientific illiteracy dooms America to second-class status.
28. Laziness: "Endlessly gaming, chatting, and chilling with their iPods, the next generation already has a more tenuous connection to 'Western civilization' than most parents appreciate," historian Niall Ferguson writes. While everyone in France continues to take vacation in July and August, the next generation of Americans refuses to work except in July and August.
29. Oldocracy: As the population ages, there is growing discord between old fogeys with lots of voting power and younger people, increasingly foreign-born. The older generation seizes power and wastes all of America's money on increased Social Security benefits.
30. Suburban Slums: Today's McMansions will become tomorrow's tenements, turning America's exurban sprawl into a hellacious backwater. "About 25 years ago, Escape From New York perfectly captured the zeitgeist," Christopher B. Leinberger writes in the Atlantic. "Two or three decades from now, the next Kurt Russell may find his breakout role in Escape From the Suburban Fringe."
31. Christianity: Just as, per Edward Gibbon, the rise of religion killed Rome's fighting spirit, increasing spirituality turns America into a nation of pacifists. We get attacked and don't fight back.
32. Militant Islam: Muslims feel increasingly alienated by American society. Al-Qaida gets a much bigger toehold, giving it a staging ground for devastating domestic terror attacks that rip the nation asunder.
33. Drug Boom: Americans turn to advanced, hyper-addictive recreational drugs that are tailored to each individual user's body chemistry. Civilization dies in a drug-induced haze.
34. Decline of Civic Spirit: As happened in Rome, excessive taxation leads citizens to lose respect for the state. The all-volunteer Army shrinks as no one cares to assume the risks of fighting for the country.
35. Gay Marriage: As the institution spreads across the country, splinter groups bemoan the practice and agitate to form their own, heterosexual-only state.
36. Wealth Gap: The divide between rich and poor grows. The nation's lower classes, increasingly resentful of their impoverished condition, launch guerrilla attacks against the depraved, prosperous elites.
37. Complexity: Anthropologist Joseph Tainter and political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon argue that societies benefit from complexity (irrigation networks to prevent droughts, for example) up to a certain point but that too much intricacy can be a bad thing. Homer-Dixon explains: "As an expanding portion of a society's wealth is sucked into further boosting complexity, its reserves to deal with unexpected contingencies fall."
38. Multiculturalism: In a 2004 speech, former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm declared that America is doomed because it has gone from a melting pot to a "bilingual-bicultural country." Diversity "stresses differences rather than commonalities," he said. "Diverse people worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other-that is, when they are not killing each other."
39. Smallpox: A rogue scientist looses the virus from a Russian vault, and terrorists use the disease to attack and destabilize America.
40. Swine Flu: The pandemic worsens, devastating American society to a much greater extent than the 1918 flu pandemic. Mortality from the virus itself is high, but pandemic expert Dr. Michael T. Osterholm argues that the disruption of supply chains will be far worse. When countries shut their borders to quarantine themselves, we'll be unable to import the food, energy, and acute-care drugs we need.
41. Super-AIDS: The disease evolves, and airborne transmission spreads it faster than ever. Even the world's richest nations are unable to get it under control.
42. Synthesized Super Virus: In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman suggests one scenario for the end of humanity: "a psychotically obsessed, biochemically trained terrorist creatively splice something together that evolves faster than we develop resistance-maybe by clipping genetic material into the versatile SARS virus, which could spread both sexually and via the air."
43. Anthrax: Terrorists in crop dusters drop aerosolized anthrax across a dozen metropolitan areas, sending the nation into a panic.
44. Tropical Diseases: Global warming enables insects to spread their diseases northward. A weakened America lacks the wealth and resources to stave off malaria outbreaks.
45. Antibiotic Resistance: As a result of factory farming and spiking sales of antibacterial hand soap, superstrains of bacteria develop that are resistant to medicine. Public health officials can do nothing but throw up their hands.
46. The Rapture: Christians are instantly transported to heaven. The nonbelievers left behind in America struggle to survive as Muslim countries gain in power relative to the United States.
47. Obama as God: The president, by far the most popular in history domestically and abroad, becomes the leader of a global religious cult. If that sounds unrealistic, sub Tiger Woods for Obama.
48. Dec. 21, 2012: According to an ancient Mayan prophecy-at least as interpreted by the kind of people who believe this sort of thing-this is a likely date of the apocalypse. In the event of the apocalypse, the United States will struggle to carry on.
49. Alien Invasion: Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev once discussed banding together to fight off a UFO attack. For all the happy talk about cooperation, when the tractor beams come down, it's every country for itself.
50. Voluntary Human Extinction: A movement to end breeding rises in popularity as climate change and resource wars intensify.