If one crisis doesn’t get us, another one surely will.

People!  Take heed!  The end of the world is fast approaching!

I’m not talking about your run-of-the-mill disaster that only kills a few million people, like an earthquake along the West Coast that drops California into the ocean, or a mega-tsunami that wipes out Britain or some other island nation.  I’m talking about man-made disasters that will wipe out all life on the planet, or at least end civilization as we presently know it.

It won’t just be women and minorities who are hardest hit.  Even the ROWGs (Rich Old White Guys) will suffer, and suffer bad!  The planet is about to take its revenge on all of us for not electing Democrats to the White House often enough, and objecting to confiscatory tax policies that force the rich to give their ill-gotten gains to the deserving constituents of our elected leaders.

There are almost too many calamities to name that are about to befall us, but five stand out more than others.  Never mind that the shelf life of some of these predictions has already passed.  You should have heeded the warnings when they were first given, and it’s certainly no reason to doubt the experts who give us new warnings today.  If one of these crises didn’t get us, another one surely will.  Trust me on this.  I know it’s true because I heard it on the news, which is always impartial about important stuff like this.

So, here’s five things that will wipe out the world, in no particular order of importance.  I mean, does it really matter if Number 3 is Number 1, or vice versa?  It’s the seriousness of the charge that needs to be addressed and acted upon immediately, not the actual evidence to support the charge.  If we wait to see whether the hysteria is really justified or not, it may be too late to do anything about it.  So prepare to make radical changes in your lifestyle now, regardless of the cost or disruption to you and your family, because like the motto of the New York State Lottery says, “you never know.”  And never knowing is not good.

Global Disaster #1:  Genetically-modified food and bacteria

In the 1970s, scientists released a genetically modified strain of bacteria into the environment hoping to protect certain fragile crops against the ravages of nature, and thus increase harvest yields to feed more people.  Previously, experiments had been conducted in a controlled laboratory setting, and showed no cause for concern.  Therefore, these scientists decided that it was time to field test the bacteria in the natural environment, and persuaded the government to grant them permission to do so.

Critics sounded the alarm that this reckless action would result in the creation of new "transgenic" life forms; that is, organisms that cross unnatural gene lines and then exhibit unpredictable behavior, or replicate themselves out of control in the wild.  This could even happen without any warning inside our bodies, transforming us as well.  Nature, and humanity as we know it, would forever be changed.

The result would be nothing less than apocalyptic.  In a worst case scenario (and what scenario isn’t worst case when the planet is at stake), plant and animal life would be altered so drastically that mankind would no longer have a food source to feed it.  Or, in an equally bad situation, human beings themselves would transform into a mutated life form that bore little resemblance to the people of today.  Either way, humanity was doomed.

That was thirty years ago, and except for the people you see contributing to the Daily Kos, there are no signs of mutant humans infesting the planet.  Moreover, unless you consider tofu to be a real food, plant and animal life appears essentially unchanged too.  So, all in all, the dire predictions of the 1970s have not come true.

But they still might one day, which means we all need to remain on guard against transgenic life forms destroying our planet.  Just wait long enough and it will happen, eventually.  Don’t doubt the experts on this.  When it happens they’ll say “I told you so”; that is, if this new breed of human mutants still has a mouth to talk with.

Global Disaster #2: AIDS

When AIDS was discovered in the 1980s, there were horror stories and dire predictions that soon every sexually active adult would be at risk, regardless of their drug habits or sexual orientation.  AIDS wasn’t just a gay men’s disease, or a dirty needle-sharing disease.  Little Bobby was as much at risk in the back seat of his father’s Chevy making out with Susie as the most sexually irresponsible homosexual male, or out-of-control heroin addict.  And if you were a minority, then you had no chance at all.  After all, it was the US government that created AIDS as a way of killing off the black population so they wouldn’t have to pay them reparations for slavery.

It was only a matter of time before the world would be decimated by this unstoppable disease — unless, of course, enough money was diverted from cancer research and other diseases to find a cure.  In the meantime, any effort to restrict the human behaviors most closely associated with the spread of AIDS was considered a violation of basic human rights.  If George Washington and Thomas Jefferson didn’t want gay men to have multiple unprotected sex and drug users to shoot up with dirty needles, they wouldn’t have created the right to privacy in the Constitution, or put it in some other provision somewhere that said this was none of anybody’s business. Besides, at the rate AIDS was growing throughout the 1980s, there was only one possible outcome.  We’d all be dead by the turn of the century if a cure wasn’t found.

What was that?  It’s 2008 and we’re still around.  The rate of increase actually began to decline in the early 1990s, and has fallen precipitously since then?  Heterosexual couples aren’t seriously threatened by this disease?  Well, what’s that got to do with anything?  AIDS is still a global killing plague that must be addressed before all other diseases.  Anyone who says differently is a racist homophobe.  Forget about the fact that it hasn’t entered the general population in any significant numbers, and doesn’t look like it ever will.  Just who are you going to believe: the experts, or your lying eyes?

Global Disaster #3: Black Holes

For the past several years scientists have been building the world's largest particle accelerator in Europe.  It will smash atoms together in an attempt to discover what happened during the first moment the universe was created by replicating the physics of the Big Bang.

To do this some scientists have predicted that a tiny little Black Hole will be created, mimicking these primordial conditions. For anyone with a rudimentary understanding of physics, or who’s seen more than a couple dozen episodes of Star Trek, we all know that Black Holes can be dangerous things.  They aren’t racial slurs like Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price charged last month that are designed to inflame passions against Barack Obama.  Rather, they are distortions in space time so powerful that light itself cannot escape from its clutches once it gets sucked into it.

Black Holes exist naturally in space.  We even have a really big one at the center of our galaxy that keeps all the stars from flying off into the universe.  But deliberately creating one here on Earth — even something as tiny as what might occur from smashing a couple of sub-atomic particles together — could start a chain reaction where the Earth itself is pulled into the Black Hole like a comic book character being sucked down a drain. Or so some experts claim.  Therefore, according to these scientists we need to take action NOW to keep from becoming a planet of Wylie Coyotes in a bad Road Runner cartoon. 

News Update:  They tested the accelerator a few days ago and nothing happened.  Well, who’s to say it won’t happen sometime later?  And when it does, everyone will die.  The alarmists aren’t wrong; they never are.  Their timing is just a bit off.  It will happen one day, just you wait and see.

Global Disaster #4: Alien Invasion

According to some experts, this planet is ripe for an alien invasion (the outer space kind, not the normal kind where Mexicans sneak across our border), and we’re not doing anything to stop it.  In fact, we’re inviting a full-blown alien attack any day now.  Even worse, there isn’t a fence big enough to keep these aliens from taking over our world and making us all think we’re in a real-life version of the movie Independence Day.

Everyone who’s ever seen an episode of Cosmos or the movie Contact knows that our radio and TV signals are heading off into space where any tin horn intergalactic dictator can fire up his warp-drive battle cruiser and follow these electronic bread crumbs right back to our planet.  What you probably didn’t know is that in 1992 the US government began a "Microwave Observing Program" that conducted a targeted search of 800 nearby stars.  The purpose was to see if we could detect any signals coming from them, and then figure out a way to signal them back to let them know we’re here.  Which means, instead of just unintentionally sending out old episodes of I Love Lucy, we’re actually trying to make anyone within listening distance aware that we’re here!

Now, I fully understand that the nearest star is a little over 4 light years from Earth, which means that it takes a signal from Earth 4 years to reach it, and those folks 4 years to respond back.  And while that sounds like a pretty short time, I also know that it will take us a couple of gazillion years to send a ship from our planet to that star system (assuming we could even build one capable of traveling that far), since we’re still pretty far away from perfecting a warp-drive engine that could substantially shorten the time of this trip.

So, even if we do make contact with these lizard people or three-headed monsters or whatever they are, there’s no way we could actually visit them.  It would be like having a deep space pen pal who writes you only twice a decade, but even that assumes the planet we discover with intelligent life isn’t a couple of hundred thousand light years away.  Two-way communication with those folks would be pretty difficult.  By the time you got a response back you’d be long dead, and your great-great-great-great-grandkids might not care about the answer.

But — and this is where the concern sets in — just because we don’t have the technology to go anywhere near the speed of light, who says that the lizard people don’t.  As anyone who's ever been abducted by aliens or attended a Louis Farrakhan lecture can tell you, the Earth is being visited by flying saucers all the time.  When these UFOs come in force, even if they don’t put us all in cages and use us as their food source, do you really want to spend the rest of your life controlled by little green men who have an unnatural affection for anal probes?

Either way it’s not a good deal.  By actively advertising our presence, all we’re doing is inviting trouble, and with it bringing about an end to civilization as we know it.

Global Disaster #5: Dead Oceans

Back in the 1980s when we were facing a new ice age instead of global warming, the eminent marine biologist and environmental scientist Ted Danson told us if we didn’t clean up the oceans in 10 years, they would die.  And when the oceans died, we would die too.  Not because we’d have to eat pork instead of fish, but because a lot of our oxygen comes from little bugs in the ocean.  And without these bugs we’d soon run out of anything to breath.

This was pretty serious stuff, and it was reported seriously by the same news media that reported each of the other crises we faced.  And, it was repeated by thoughtful and concerned environmentalists (some of whom actually had science degrees) who insisted that we change our evil ways immediately.  This meant not just keeping our garbage out of the oceans, but it meant doing the “patriotic thing” (to quote Joe Biden) of paying higher taxes and giving more power to government bureaucrats to tell us how to live our lives.

Well, none of the draconian steps advocated by Dr. Danson and his followers were put into effect, but somehow the oceans didn’t die.  Not to worry, though.  The original 10-year prediction has now been expanded to 50 years, or just “the future,” so inconvenient truths will not get in the way of doing what has to be done to save the planet.

So, even though we’re all still alive and breathing, I can guarantee you that we won’t be for much longer unless we get rid of those antiquated notions that keep us from dealing with the crises at hand.  You know, outdated ideas like evidence — not hysteria — is required before acting; that facts are not the same things as good intentions; and that more governmental control over our lives isn’t the panacea for every problem, whether that problem is real or imagined.

In short, unless you do what the experts say and the people who have our best interests at heart insist is the only course of action, we’re all going to die.  And soon.  We are.  I really mean it. 

And you’d recognize this too, if you weren’t so close-minded and selfish.