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SAVE PEOPLE!
Stopping Human Extinction
by Stacy McAnulty
Illustrated by Nicole Miles
Some say the world will end in fire. Some say on ice. Others bet on nuclear war or a supervolcano. There are even those who entertain the idea of an alien invasion. Or Stacy McAnulty’s “Save the People!” I took a carefree look at the global catastrophe from his book. (Imagine “Inhabitable World” meets “Captain Underpants”.)
McAnulty, a mechanical engineer and children’s book author, begins with a grappling with Earth’s great mass extinctions, starting with the End-Ordovician, the first of the Big Five that took place some 445 million years ago. At this point, life was almost entirely limited to water. The sun was dimmer, the Earth was spinning faster (it took about 20 hours a day), and “there was no Wi-Fi,” McAnulty notes.
After mass extinctions – “like any spooky story, they’re fun to hear, but a bad thing to join them” – encounters with asteroids come. McAnulty writes that the impact of a mile-wide asteroid “can create shock waves powerful enough to rupture your organs.” Ick!Additional threats from space include coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The first are bursts of plasma from the sun that create strong magnetic fields. A CME could shut down power in North America, closing banks, supermarkets and water treatment plants, creating general chaos. GRBs are believed to form during the formation of black holes. One particularly well targeted could destroy the Earth’s ozone layer and lead to crop famine, not to mention widespread blindness. Although, as McAnulty cheerfully observed, “we do not currently have a 100 percent fatal contagious disease,” viruses can also destroy us.
McAnulty devotes the last third of the book to climate change. Our gas emissions are destroying the planet, he says. “We need to stop farting and get them under control.” This chapter is brimming with “fun and scary facts,” such as: “The US fire season is 78 days longer than 50 years ago” and “The Earth is warming faster now than it has in millions of years.” In 2015, leaders from almost every nation in the world met in Paris and pledged to reduce their country’s emissions. However, their agreement does not include any penalties for not complying with their terms. As McAnulty puts it, it’s like “a giant group project where everyone is expected to do their part, but no one gets in trouble with the teacher if they don’t.” Meanwhile, time is running out to avoid the worst effects of warming: “It’s like asking for a big pumpkin for Halloween. You can’t plant seeds a week in advance and expect an award-winning zucchini.”
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