I always thought a stray meteorite would just smack into the world in, oh, 2020, and that would be that.
Or, perhaps, around 2015, everyone would become a celebrity and have a simultaneous nervous breakdown, brought on by excessive drug abuse, causing a Koresh-like disappearance of humanity.
But no, the year to prepare all your insurance policies for is 2030.
By that year, according to Professor John Beddington, the U.K. government's chief scientist, food and energy demand will have risen by 50 percent and fresh water by 30 percent. And the global population will have risen to around 8.3 billion.
(Credit:
CC L*u*z*a Lack of Inspiration)
Professor Beddington said at the Sustainable Development UK conference today that it will be a "perfect storm." Because today's storm is, of course, so frightfully flawed.
Here's the good news. For the United Kingdom, at least: "We're relatively fortunate in the U.K. There may not be shortages here, but we can expect prices of food and energy to rise."
Yes, Britain may, again, rule the world. Now that would, indeed, be perfect.
It's not that I'm pessimistic, but does Professor Beddington really believe that, given the way things have been going lately, there will even be a world by 2030? I worry that he doesn't watch enough TV.
Live for today, people. Tomorrow may not be another day after all.
I am not an intelligent designer. Nor am I a resident of France or Switzerland.
But this Large Hadron Collider experiment, in which particles are breaking the speed limit somewhere beneath the French/Swiss border and then crashing into each other like teenage drunks in fairground bumper cars scares the semi-comatose bejaysus out of me.
These scientists claim to know what they are doing. But scientists always claim to know what they are doing. Then they discover, while doing the thing that they claim to know they are doing, that they are doing something entirely different.
Is any government monitoring these people? What if the Alps are suddenly sent into orbit by two particularly control-free particles and land square on top of, I don't know, Cleveland?
Alright, sometimes experiments do have excellent unintended consequences. But not often enough. Yugoslavia was an experiment. Look what happened to that.
The subatomic particles in their long tubes will be going at just this side of the speed of light and no one, but no one, knows what will happen when they enjoy their protonic fender-bender. It's all very well for Stephen Hawking to bet $100 that the supposed "God Particle' will not be found by this experiment. It's all very well for scientists to mock Professor Otto Rossler, who says that black holes will be created that will suck the earth away.
But let me tell you this. I have proof these scientists may be several wires short of a working plug. Before they began their descent into scientific instability, these people actually made a rap video.
In this rap they declare that this madness of theirs will "rock you in the head." They rumble on about anti-matter being "matter's evil twin." And in some twisted way, they seem to want to recreate the Big Bang that made everything other than the Partridge Family and the Palin Family.
These people are clearly on an insane quest for anti-matter, the so-called evil twin. They are like the antagonists in ConAir or A Beautiful Mind, the sort of folks who want to blow up the whole world and deny Russell Crowe an award.
Is no one prepared to put a leash on this crazyfest? The first collision is due in around thirty days. Please, look at that video. Don't they look like mad people to you? They're not a day over 25 and if you're telling me they're compos mentis, I'm telling you that Amy Winehouse is taking tea with Richard Dawkins next week.
Will someone not put a stop to this? I don't care if I'm made up of tiny little bits of string. I just want to be in one piece to watch the next Superbowl, the next series of Entourage and, although this is very ambitious, the Olympics live on the West Coast.
Techies, please help me here. Well, the sane ones amongst you, anyway.
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