Saturday Morning Science 012

The future’s uncertain and the end is always near. Roadhouse Blues- The Doors

The silly season is well under way. Today the world is going to end. Joe Stalin engineered the Roswell saucer crash. The Centre for Disease Control went viral with a zombie attack piece. And don’t get me started about Lars Von Trier, his silly “worlds in collision” movie or his public airing of his private Fuhrerbunker. I’m glad this is a science column. I could just walk away and say none of this is on my beat. I could. Really!

This End First: If this sort of thing remotely interests you and here I confess to a my soft spot for crank theories then you have to look at the primary documents. Courtesy of the Family Radio website here is the central text of this current doomsday prediction: Judgement Day. For those of you who don’t want wade through this exegesis here’s the gist. What Pastor Harold Camping has done is counted the days since the end of the Flood and arrived at May 21, 2011 as the date for the Rapture ( a.k.a. the Singularity for mundanes). Yes, that’s all there is to it. So, he’s done his math and made his prediction. Now here comes the proof. On May 22 what will Family Radio say to anyone who is still listening? For the hard sciences there isn’t really much interest here. For the sociologists and psychologists, Family Radio is a veritable Galapagos Island for the study of groups, authority and mass hysteria. The real story starts tomorrow. I don’t think rgbFilter and Family Radio have much of a cross over but still: to Rev. Camping’s followers, “Welcome to the real world it is as much of heaven as a living person can ever know. If you’ve got any brains you’re probably feeling rather foolish right now. Don’t let it get you. You’ve just been handed an opportunity to move past ignorance and gullibility and come to some understanding of how you’ve been used. This can be a fresh start. Don’t waste it.”

The Architect of Fear/The Man of Steel: This one is trying too hard. Journalist Annie Jacobson has pieced together a theory about the Roswell saucer crash of 1947 that has Joe Stalin, inspired by Orson Welles radio prank, War of the Worlds, attempting to drum up mass hysteria in post war America by having Joseph Mengle (you remember him from “The Boys from Brazil”- sorry that was tasteless but nothing compared to what Ms. Jacobson is laying out) surgically alter the appearance of deformed thirteen year olds stuffed into the cockpit of a radio controlled, Nazi experimental “boomerang” plane and aiming it towards Area 51. This would have made a great X-Files episode it it hadn’t already been an episode of the original Outer Limits back in 1963. In this story a group of scientists engineer a fake alien by surgically altering a human volunteer, played by a pre-I Spy Robert Culp, in hopes of convincing Earth’s leaders that the threat of an immanent invasion might avert World War III. As I remember it, this episode was far more plausible than Jacobson’s thesis. Here’s a link to the original story about this latest Roswell tale courtesy of the Albequerque Express and a politely critical, 46 minute interview/podcast with Jacobson courtesy of NPR.

Life Imitates Art Imitating the Undead: Ali S. Khan had a problem. As a blogger for the Centre for Disease Control he didn’t think that the information was getting out there, out to the people who really need it. Information about how the Centre deals with epidemics and how it works to contain outbreaks and what the average person can do in the event of one. So he put together: Preparedness 101 Zombie Apocalypse . He admits to being a fan of the Resident Evil school of zombiology but he also deals with the more traditional Haitian and George Romero models of undead etiology to produce a balanced basic treatise that no informed person should do without. He took some flack for it but he also jacked the Centre for Disease Control’s web traffic exponentially and crashed their servers. Well done sir however for the more critical among you I offer this counter piece. I didn’t think that Cracked.com could ever top their infamous: 5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen but they have with the very well informed and precisely reasoned 7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly) which I venture will become a classic in the literature.

Next Week: Real science, rogue planets, quantum computing and at least one more possible habitable world.