The end is nigh, possibly

BY STEVE BRAUNIAS

FIRST WEEK of the new year, first year of the new decade, and hope smiles down from a warm sky. The fish are jumping. The kids are running around. The politicians are absent. New Zealand, in summer, on holiday, is holding hands and at peace. The future is ours; the possibilities for happiness are infinite.

Nice. But hang on. The sky is greenhouse gassed. What's all that crap polluting the rivers? Teenagers are out of it on alcopops. The politicians are plotting their return. New Zealand is crumbling into the sea. Forget about the future. It's not going to happen. The potential for disaster is unlimited.

In short, we're doomed, as usual. Will the world survive the next 10 years? "The grim reality is that our planet has reached a point of crisis," Prince Charles said at the climate change summit in Copenhagen, "and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control." Seven years! That doesn't leave us nearly enough time to get the washing in and do the shopping, or for Charles to inherit the throne from his mum's stolid bum.

What other calamities await, what various states of emergency? Is the future half-full, or half-empty? As we dip our toe into the new decade, it may not be unduly pessimistic to squint into the distance and fret that the horizon is on fire.

Islamic terrorists, inspired by hate, history and the promise of 72 apparently amorous virgins, are not averse to lighting the match. New Zealand, that after-thought of assorted islands at the end of the world, thinks itself immune from international menace. But this is nonsense. Our enemies are within. The SIS knows this; it's why director Warren Tucker recently distributed a brochure to universities, warning staff to watch for individuals trying to gain the skills needed to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. An editorial in the Dominion-Post spoke for all New Zealand lunatics when it declared, "The SIS move is a prudent response to realities of the 21st century world."

The cost of freedom is eternal prudence. But New Zealand is equally vulnerable to attack which does not take human form. I remember a summer growing up in Mt Maunganui when the town experienced an invasion of beetles.

Black, hard-shelled, ground beetles, millions of the beasts, marching up and down every pavement, heading for the beach, climbing the Mount, in every home, the terror of pets and girls, an inky deluge that crawled out of the earth in such a multitude that the sun turned black – it's possible the story has grown in the telling. But there really was serious talk of end days.

Nothing happened. Apocalypse postponed, again. We have all lived through greater and lesser fears. Nuclear holocaust, killer pandemic, Islamic extremism, George W Bush; reality TV, junk food, Y2K, Michael Jackson.

Each spelled doom, pushed the world to the brink. Many fears persist. Reality TV continues to rot the minds of innocent millions.

No one can afford to be blase, and carry on having a really good time, seeing the world, eating delicious food, looking their best, enjoying available drugs, or putting their feet up in one of those sunflower-patterned sun loungers with foam inlay, which I'd really like, but just can't find anywhere.

Pleasure and relaxation are a slap in the face to the industry of anxiety.

Anxiety is a tool. It's best used blunt. We must use it to force a government's hand, protect the environment, influence Graham Henry's All Black selection, and fund new research which measures our exact levels of anxiety. Only by scanning the horizon for fire can we prepare to turn on the hose. It wouldn't hurt to water the garden in the meantime.

Established threats to civilisation – nuclear holocaust, killer pandemic, etc – are part of the furniture, but they need constant updating. They can change with the season. Right now, Pakistan, India and North Korea may be designing their exciting new spring line of nuclear warheads.

Human ingenuity is capable of inventing fresh annihilations. So, too, is the force of nature, and acts of God. Every age has its threat. What will be the new threats in the new decade?

Only time will tell, but do please read on within the next seven years. As follows is a useful guide to threats old and new; to things which might, like a really toxic can of fly spray, kill humans dead; to just a few of the infinite possibilities of the way in which the world could come to a blistering, choking end.

Oh, and, Happy New Year!

NEW WEAPONS. In 2007, the scarily named Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre within the UK Ministry of Defence drew up a 90-page report detailing the most likely new threats of the 21st century. Its "analysis of key risks and shocks" highlighted two new weapons.

An electromagnetic pulse, according to the MoD report, will probably become operational by 2035, and have the power to destroy all communications systems in a selected area.

The development of neutron weapons which destroy living organs but not buildings "might make a weapon of choice for extreme ethnic cleansing in an overpopulated world".

Both scenarios point to a future where the lights are on but nobody's home; both point to a chilling future where the world resembles Hamilton.

A radicalised middle-class. Another threat identified by the MoD. Its report says, "The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx". The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich. "The world's middle classes might unite, attracted by... rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as Marxism."

Interesting. Marx, for so long a discredited, whiskery antique, returning to favour, and inspiring millions to take to the streets, chanting: "Bourgeoise of the world, unite!"

But what are the signs? In New Zealand, the nearest thing to middle-class militancy was last year's spectacle in which the pro-smacking brigade got organised – stupidity loves company – to moo their displeasure at being denied the democratic right to give children the hiding they so richly deserve.

They used revolutionary rhetoric. They waved placards of detested dictator Mugabe. They raged against a government – a sovereignty, a tsarist state – that wasn't listening to their concerns. They were as mad as hell, and they weren't going to take it any more.

In short, they were mad.

Osama bin Laden. What does he do all day? We don't know. Where does he do it, whatever it is? We don't know that, either. According to a Taliban detainee in Pakistan, bin Laden was seen in Afghanistan in January or February of 2009. According to a satellite-aided geographic analysis led by geographer Thomas Gillespie of the University of California, bin Laden is most likely in one of three walled compounds in Parachinar, an Afghani town close to the Pakistani border. And according to US intelligence reports made public last month by national security adviser James Jones, bin Laden "is somewhere inside north Waziristan, sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border".

But the sharpest, most lethal needle in the world's haystack has a weakness for consumer goods.

Other sightings place the al Qaeda leader somewhere inside the walled compound of the Coastlands shopping mall in Paraparaumu, and "showing an interest" in the trestle table offering three pairs of socks for $12 at the St Lukes shopping mall in Auckland.

Keep your eyes peeled. According to a helpful physical description posted by the FBI on its Most Wanted list, "Bin Laden is left-handed and walks with a cane".

Climate change. Ian Wishart, Garth George and Rodney Hide deny it's happening, so that's all right, then. In other news, God created all living things, and New Zealand benefits from the financial acumen of Hide's major-me, Sir Roger Douglas.

The Doomsday Clock. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists last updated its famous Doomsday Clock in 2007 by setting it two minutes closer to midnight. Climate change was a significant factor.

The nearer the clock is to midnight, the closer the world is to global catastrophe. The 2007 setting put the world at five to 12 – the nearest to midnight since 1984, when Russia and the US were at each other's throats.

"The dangers posed by climate change," the Bulletin stated, "are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons... Over the next three to four decades climate change could cause irremediable harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival."

Thanks to daylight saving, though, the Doomsday Clock has been rewound to a languid five to 11.

Killer pandemic. Avian flu, or H5N1, was going to wipe out anyone who so much as looked at a bird, but it didn't. World Health Organisation (WHO) figures, last updated on December 17, put the worldwide death toll at 263, including one poor sod in Nigeria.

Figures released the same day for swine flu, or H1N1, estimated the worldwide death toll at 10,582. Bad, but not as alarming as earlier reports feared.

Philip Alcabes, author of Dread: How Fear and Fantasy have Fuelled Epidemics, is scornful of WHO's response. "There was never any evidence, not from day one, and not anytime since, that this strain of flu was going to be a particularly dangerous strain, either in terms of its capacity to make people sick or its capacity to kill people... Yet that's the story that's always been told, almost every single day since it appeared in April. Essentially WHO were saying the sky might fall."

Don't look up. Look to the sea. Sources close to WHO predict the next killer pandemic will be fish flu, or H0N000000000.

Paul Henry. The thinking man's Leighton Smith is a role model. Immediately after news broke that TVNZ upheld a complaint against Henry's description of singer Susan Boyle as "retarded", the Stuff website ran hot with comments.

Jen wrote, "Come on people – if we all took offence every time someone poked fun we'd be crying into our cereal instead of having a laugh with Paul Henry who is quite honestly the best thing about mornings." Kath wrote, "Paul Henry is fantastic...This country is so wrapped up on PC it forgets there are REAL problems in the world." Yawn wrote, "What a load of PC flannel." Clarkee wrote, "What the? Keep up good work PH. Love ya work!" Vee wrote, "Paul Henry is very entertaining! He definitely has my vote. :)"

Asteroid impact. It's bound to happen. Even right this second, space debris may well be spinning and spiralling through the atmosphere, twisting and turning, reducing its mass until it's just big enough to smash through the roof of the TVNZ building one morning and take out Paul Henry and that dim, blathering trout who sits next to him. :)

Anxiety. It'll kill us before anything else, according to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University and co-author of a cheerful volume published in 2008, Global Catastrophic Risks. What constitutes a global catastrophic risk? "A catastrophe that caused 10,000 fatalities," he writes, "would not qualify as a global catastrophic risk."

He's willing to concede, though, that the complete annihilation of life on Earth qualifies as a global catastrophic risk. There is only one absolute certainty of that occurring: "In about 3.5 billion years, the growing luminosity of the sun will essentially have sterilised the Earth's biosphere, but the end of life on Earth is scheduled to come soon sooner, maybe 0.9-1.5 billion years from now. This is the default fate for life on our planet. One may hope that if humanity survives, it will long before then have learned to colonise space."

Yeah, but we'll get to another planet and there to greet us will be Richard bloody Branson.

Beetles. I kept one of the beetles which invaded Mt Maunganui that long-ago summer. I called it Gregor. I sealed him, and stuck him in the freezer. He's travelled from one fridge to another ever since.

I took him out to thaw a few months ago.

He started moving after a few days.

Then crawling, but he stays close to home – he knows where his next meal is coming from. At first it was leaves, then ants, then fruit, then starch, then red meat.

He's now as wide as a porch.

His name isn't Gregor.

He's pregnant.

The sun is turning black.

- © Fairfax NZ News