Ha ha, the headline is just clickbait. Most of these aren't really extinction level events, they're just really bad. And the odds of any of them happening in 2024 are minuscule. But still possible!
- Miyake event. This mysterious burst of cosmic rays has occurred several times in the past 10,000 years. It wouldn't actually kill a lot of people aside from, maybe, passengers on jet airliners, but "the induced current would flood the thousands of satellites that encircle Earth, crippling them for months and possibly years. Power grids would topple immediately, leaving anything reliant on electricity, like lights, electric vehicles, and ventilators, inoperable." Bad!
- Cascadia subduction zone. This is the fault line that runs under Seattle. A magnitude 9 earthquake there would basically flood the entire area, level everything in its path, and kill upwards of 100,000 people.
- The Toba supervolcano. Forget Yellowstone. The Toba eruption was bigger and happened a mere 74,000 years ago. It's credited with almost destroying the human race, leaving only a few tens of thousands tenuously alive. If it happened again it would blacken the skies; send temperatures plummeting; destroy crops globally; and produce huge tsunamis. It would likely kill millions immediately and many, many more over the course of a few years.
- The Atlantic thermohaline current shuts down. Yeah, this is the thing from the disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow. The thermohaline is a current of warm water that keeps northern Europe cozy even though most of it is at about the latitude of Hudson Bay. An influx of fresh water from global warming could shut it down, which would produce frigid winters in Europe, sea level rise of a foot or more on the US eastern seaboard, crop wreckage worldwide, and possibly force us to burn books to keep from freezing to death.
- Giant asteroid hits earth. This really is the big one. The Chicxulub asteroid produced tsunamis worldwide, threw enormous amounts of debris into the sky, and killed off the dinosaurs. NASA says a medium size asteroid has a tiny chance of hitting Earth in 2046, but how accurate are these guys, really? Maybe they got their orbital mechanics wrong and it will hit in 2024 instead.
- COVID-24. Look, COVID-19 was bad, but it could have been a lot worse. Bats are busily incubating new coronaviruses all the time, and all it would take is a little bit higher transmissibility and a little bit higher mortality rate to kill off humans and turn things over to the apes. Wasn't there even a movie about this?
- Hilina slump. The south slope of Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii is geologically unstable. If it collapses it would send 2,000 cubic miles of rock into the ocean and produce tsunami waves a thousand feet high on the California coast. There's a similar sort of danger from the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the Canary Islands, which could produce huge tsunamis off the coast of Africa and the eastern US.
- Colony collapse. Bee colonies are mysteriously collapsing worldwide, posing a threat to pollination of crops. Not all crops, mind you, but plenty of important ones like alfalfa, canola, apples, and more. But what if other pollinators start collapsing too? Grains and nuts would be OK, but everything else would be in danger until we invent nanobot pollinators.
- Hypercane. If sea surface temperatures reach 122°F it could create a hypercane, a hurricane the size of Europe with wind speeds up to 500 mph. Hypercanes would also reach into the stratosphere, potentially damaging the ozone layer with who knows what impact on human life. Now, these kinds of temps are 22°F higher than the highest sea temperature ever recorded, but still. It could happen, right?
- Oh come on. There's only a limited number of these things and I could only come up with seven good ones. Colony collapse and hypercanes are already pushing it. What else is there? Aliens who invade and eat us? But I've never understood why super advanced aliens would want us as a food source. Or as slaves. Or for anything else other than sociological observation. Maybe a stray black hole? Giant ants? A big pink cloud that appears out of nowhere and eats the sun?
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Crippling satellites for months or years? Is that supposed to be a shorthand for "destroying the electronics of satellites in orbit, taking months or years to replace?"
From what I understand from my rocket scientist husband, space junk is already a huge issue. Tons of crap up there and billionaires proposing to send up twice as much. No plan for how to manage end of life for all this stuff. It's a real problem.
And oddly enough, for years it was the Navy that surveilled space looking for "space junk."
https://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/navspasur.htm
I was under the impression that LEO satellites "these days" at least had to include provisions for de-orbiting at end-of-life.
How about a repeat of the Great New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812?
7.4 - 8.0 in an area totally unprepared for an earthquake.
Not really an ELE, just an RELE -- Republican Extinction Level Event.
I find your belief in the political homogeneity of those states disturbing...
I don't know that COVID-24 is all that far-fetched. We know that it takes mere weeks for anything to travel around the world and there is now a sizable contingent of "bring-it-on" nonbelievers who will refuse to heed any public safety rules that might encumber their freedom. The question really is how many people will they infect before doing the rest of the population a favor and succumbing themselves?
I'd put some sort of environmental disaster in China on the list. They've been cutting corners on safety for decades in favor of fast economic growth and the universe has a way of catching up on those things in unpleasant ways.
Re: all it would take is a little bit higher transmissibility and a little bit higher mortality rate to kill off humans
Huh? We've had diseases much more transmissable and fatal (smallpox comes to mind) and they never came anywhere close to killing off humanity. Even plague didn't despite two catastrophic pandemics.
Happy New Year!!!
Adventure 352.
Jeez, Kevin, we *are* apes! you'll have to come up with a different movie!
"Whart else is there?"
Trump getting re-elected?
Happy New Year Kevin
To me, Chito Von Tweeto is the worst. At least the other scenarios kill us fairly quickly
Happy New year all and let’s think positively. No more t-Rump anymore!
natural or unnatural disaster?
6 is the most likely for next year. 2 has a reasonable chance of happening this century but low for any given year. 4 is just one of several possible catastrophes related to climate change and is moderately likely -- especially if we blow by 2°C -- but will take a decade or so to happen. The rest? Unlikely near-term (centuries), unless you expand 1 to include a large solar mass ejection, which would play somewhat lesser havoc to electrical and electronic infrastructure but could still be a global catastrophe.
Fun. Happy New Year.
Bad news: Giant Asteroid hits earth.
Good News: Direct hit on Donald Trump.
😄😄😄
The Toba supervolcano.
The population bottleneck attributed to this event is now being disputed. Apparently new evidence has been discovered suggesting most human populations were doing just fine after that eruption.
Cascade is not an ELE, but I get why you put it in there (re #10).
I think the most realistic disasters in 2024 that fall short of an ELE-level event but nonetheless prove hugely disastrous would be:
1. A homebrew CRISPR-Cas virus project gone off the rails but the person running the experiment has little idea what they're doing, turning into patient zero of a rapidly spreading virus that wasn't thought to be highly pathogenic.
2. A hacker or a group of hackers find a way through the firing systems of a rogue country's ballistic missiles and decides to shoot them at another nation, sparking a war between two already tense adversaries.
3. Similar to #2 but at a series of nuclear power facilities, hacking into matching (e.g. Westinghouse) systems around the world, shutting down cooling, venting via hacked remote controllers.
4. The collapse of the Russian Federation and the balkanization of states, with their personal arsenals of nukes, indulging in the use of tactical nukes against each other.
5.The collapse of China's economy, sending its economy into a Depression-type event culminating in hundreds of thousands of suicides by young people caught up in China's pseudo capitalism. This in turn spreads around the world with countries unable to stop the slide.
6. The merge of two superstorms to form the first documented "mega-storm of the millennia" that spreads devastation for hundreds of miles.
You missed nearby supernova explosions. There is some evidence for them in geology, and apparently every billion years or so you can expect one within a few tens of light years to impact the earth's atmosphere enough to affect plant and animal species.
Is Betelgeuse close enough?
It's too far at 540 light years to have any effect. At the most it would be as bright as the full moon.
About colony collapse: Experts now seem to say that there are too many bee colonies. This is evident from the fact that the yield of honey per colony has dropped. In response to constant (overstated) reports of colony collapse people created more colonies than the available flowers can support.