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Doomsday: End of the World Scenarios
Describes ten scenarios that could lead to the end of the world, including an asteroid impact with Earth, the greenhouse effect, an ice age, insect invasions, and the plague.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
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March 30, 2023From asteroid impacts, massive volcanic eruptions and megatsunamis to cyberterrorism, climate change and weapons of mass destruction, Doomsday: End of the World Scenarios, by Richard Moran, describes existential threats to humanity with lucid prose and dramatic flair. I devoured this book in a sitting and have returned to reread portions of it many times. It never fails to rivet my attention to the page. I was surprised to discover that it had only one prior review on Goodreads, and a negative one at that.
Yes, some of Moran's claims are questionable. Some of his statistics might be dubious. I'd call his geo-political analysis naïve. I certainly wouldn’t cite him as a scientific authority. But none of that’s important—not to me, anyway. I see Doomsday not as a book of hard science, but as a collection of terrifyingly plausible thought experiments. I appreciate the frisson I receive from the author’s powerful imagination as it roves over a wide spectrum of disaster fantasies, so colorfully and in such thorough and thoughtful detail. I appreciate how he makes me reflect on the evanescence of everything that we can't help but take for granted.
The thrust of Moran's thesis is indisputable. Disasters of unimaginable magnitude smite our planet over the course of geological time. We owe our very existence to them, as when a six-mile-wide rock fell from the sky, ending the 200-million-year reign of the dinosaurs and enabling the rise of the mammals. The dinosaurs themselves only got their chance to evolve after an even more destructive event, a million-year volcanic eruption that came within a whisker of obliterating every living thing on Earth.
One day it will be our turn. There’s no question about whether, only of when. One day humanity will follow the glyptodon, the parasaurolophus and the trilobite into oblivion. Our species exists at the whim of forces that, for all of our technological ingenuity, we will never fully predict or control.
Indeed, our very ingenuity might prove to be our undoing. The threat of nuclear annihilation is only the most familiar example. Advances in gene-splicing technology will inevitably empower tyrants and terrorists with horrifying new bioweapons, such as genetically engineered plagues. The increasing infiltration of computer technology into every aspect of life leaves us ever more vulnerable to cyber-attacks that can disrupt economies, poison civic relations, and plunge civilization into violence, privation and chaos. Reckless exploitation of fossil fuels and other finite resources continues to threaten the health of the biosphere. Moran bluntly confronts us with uncomfortable fact that humanity is its own worst enemy.
Doomsday concludes, if not quite on a hopeful note, then on one that seems to me full of wisdom: “Perhaps, in the final analysis, we should not worry about tomorrow—for tomorrow will be what tomorrow will be—but rather seize each day we are given. Love our families, cherish our friends, and forgive our enemies, open our eyes to the beauty of nature around us. Before it’s too late, we need to stop and smell the roses, for roses—like the human species—cannot bloom forever.”
I recommend Doomsday without hesitation to every connoisseur of catastrophe.
Yes, some of Moran's claims are questionable. Some of his statistics might be dubious. I'd call his geo-political analysis naïve. I certainly wouldn’t cite him as a scientific authority. But none of that’s important—not to me, anyway. I see Doomsday not as a book of hard science, but as a collection of terrifyingly plausible thought experiments. I appreciate the frisson I receive from the author’s powerful imagination as it roves over a wide spectrum of disaster fantasies, so colorfully and in such thorough and thoughtful detail. I appreciate how he makes me reflect on the evanescence of everything that we can't help but take for granted.
The thrust of Moran's thesis is indisputable. Disasters of unimaginable magnitude smite our planet over the course of geological time. We owe our very existence to them, as when a six-mile-wide rock fell from the sky, ending the 200-million-year reign of the dinosaurs and enabling the rise of the mammals. The dinosaurs themselves only got their chance to evolve after an even more destructive event, a million-year volcanic eruption that came within a whisker of obliterating every living thing on Earth.
One day it will be our turn. There’s no question about whether, only of when. One day humanity will follow the glyptodon, the parasaurolophus and the trilobite into oblivion. Our species exists at the whim of forces that, for all of our technological ingenuity, we will never fully predict or control.
Indeed, our very ingenuity might prove to be our undoing. The threat of nuclear annihilation is only the most familiar example. Advances in gene-splicing technology will inevitably empower tyrants and terrorists with horrifying new bioweapons, such as genetically engineered plagues. The increasing infiltration of computer technology into every aspect of life leaves us ever more vulnerable to cyber-attacks that can disrupt economies, poison civic relations, and plunge civilization into violence, privation and chaos. Reckless exploitation of fossil fuels and other finite resources continues to threaten the health of the biosphere. Moran bluntly confronts us with uncomfortable fact that humanity is its own worst enemy.
Doomsday concludes, if not quite on a hopeful note, then on one that seems to me full of wisdom: “Perhaps, in the final analysis, we should not worry about tomorrow—for tomorrow will be what tomorrow will be—but rather seize each day we are given. Love our families, cherish our friends, and forgive our enemies, open our eyes to the beauty of nature around us. Before it’s too late, we need to stop and smell the roses, for roses—like the human species—cannot bloom forever.”
I recommend Doomsday without hesitation to every connoisseur of catastrophe.
January 14, 2016
I doubt the "thoroughly researched science" behind this book - particularly as it refers to the WMDs of Iraq as fact. I suspect it was thoroughly researched in the politically biased newspapers and possibly Wikipedia. For example, his theory of a nuclear waste shipment being derailed and leading to radioactive poisoning is ridiculous. Those containers are designed to withstand much more than the knockabout he's suggesting.
Though titled as "End of the World scenarios", this is very much from a single American point of view, referring to 'our homeland' which is not applicable for us in the UK, or indeed anyone else in the world. In fact this book is so unbalanced as to be laughable. A whole chapter is spent discussing the threat of WMDs, how they've been used before etc, yet no mention is made of the bombing of Hiroshima. Why? because it makes the US look bad.
The most worrying thing about this book is that people will be taken in by the pseudoscience. He states the dinosuars "were annihilated by an asteroid", when in fact it's proven they died out over millions of years. Quick ecologically but not sudden. The author continually over-estimates the speed at which geological events happen. He also blatantly misleads his audience. In the course of putting the destruction of the Minoans into a modern perspective he ends up using it as proof that all life would be wiped out. Yes, only becuase he exaggerated all the destruction to highlight the importance of the Minoans.
Throughout, Richard Moran always fails to take one thing into consideration. Human ingenuity. To him it would be catastrophic for all ports to be flooded. To me it would be an opportunity for aircraft. People wouldn't just sit by and starve or freeze.
The final straw however, is when he asks us to consider what would happen if scientists extracted blood from an extinct species, such as the dinosaur, (yes, just like they did in Jurassic Park) and discovered the animal had a hitherto unknown deadly disease.
Though titled as "End of the World scenarios", this is very much from a single American point of view, referring to 'our homeland' which is not applicable for us in the UK, or indeed anyone else in the world. In fact this book is so unbalanced as to be laughable. A whole chapter is spent discussing the threat of WMDs, how they've been used before etc, yet no mention is made of the bombing of Hiroshima. Why? because it makes the US look bad.
The most worrying thing about this book is that people will be taken in by the pseudoscience. He states the dinosuars "were annihilated by an asteroid", when in fact it's proven they died out over millions of years. Quick ecologically but not sudden. The author continually over-estimates the speed at which geological events happen. He also blatantly misleads his audience. In the course of putting the destruction of the Minoans into a modern perspective he ends up using it as proof that all life would be wiped out. Yes, only becuase he exaggerated all the destruction to highlight the importance of the Minoans.
Throughout, Richard Moran always fails to take one thing into consideration. Human ingenuity. To him it would be catastrophic for all ports to be flooded. To me it would be an opportunity for aircraft. People wouldn't just sit by and starve or freeze.
The final straw however, is when he asks us to consider what would happen if scientists extracted blood from an extinct species, such as the dinosaur, (yes, just like they did in Jurassic Park) and discovered the animal had a hitherto unknown deadly disease.
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