So about 11 years ago,
I gave a talk in California at the TED Conference.
And it went really well.
It was called "10 ways the world could end tomorrow."
But it also went viral
at a time before things started going viral,
and it wasn't in a good way.
It ended up on thousands of nutty websites.
These are the kind of websites for people who think "Men in Black" is a documentary.
(Laughter)
It's the kind of websites for people who actually believe
the Mayan calendar does predict doomsday.
So if you'd googled me before this talk,
you would have seen maybe nine or ten references to me
as a science magazine editor.
Three weeks after the talk,
there were 418 references
linking "moi" to little green men from Mars.
Now, coincidentally,
I was teaching my mother how to use a computer at the time,
(Laughter)
long distance,
and I was teaching her about Google.
So guess who she googled first.
(Laughter)
So ...
(Laughter)
['Steve, are you in trouble?']
I started worrying about my reputation a little.
And I decided to call Chris Anderson, the TED curator.
I knew Chris would not want TED speakers
to be co-opted by every nut job on the web,
and maybe he could get his friends Larry and Serge at Google
to erase all this.
I was a little disappointed.
['Hmmm, sorry about that']
Didn't exactly get the sympathy I was looking for.
Chris thought it was funny.
But he did ask me to do another TED Talk,
and I jumped at the chance because I saw it as redemption.
I could do "10 reasons to be optimistic about the future."
And I did. It was a great talk.
Honestly, my best talk ever.
Full of surprises. Lots of interesting science.
But it didn't go over so well.
Everybody wanted another 10 ways the world could end suddenly.
['Why didn't you do 10 more ways the world could end?
And what about global warming?']
And no one posted the optimistic talk.
So when Mike and Linda asked me to give a talk at TEDx
these many years later,
I had lots of good ideas.
But guess what they wanted.
[8 Ways the World Could End Tomorrow]
And that's why we're here. Dr. Doom and Gloom.
So let's begin the 2013 countdown.
[#8 - A pandemic is coming]
Okay, you're looking at N1H1.
It's the original flu virus that caused the last great pandemic,
the Spanish flu of 1918,
which infected 50% of the world's population at the time,
which was a billion people,
and probably killed one out of every 10 people.
[~100 million deaths]
But here's the interesting thing about it, it came in three waves,
three different waves pretty much about six months apart.
And the second wave killed every single person who got the flu.
And that is how bad flu can be.
Now, here we are in 2013,
and in barnyards all over China there are ducks and pigs and chickens
in close proximity.
And that's actually where influenza originates.
Now, viruses have gotten so good at mutating,
and in these barnyards mostly,
that you and I have to get a flu shot every year
to protect against this.
Although I will tell you something interesting.
Less than half of the population of the United States
does get a flu shot every year.
But that is not what keeps the Centers for Disease Control up at night.
What they worry about is something called a recombinant flu bug.
And here's how it works.
There are two kinds of viruses.
There are viruses that infect animals,
and animals pass them easily to other animals.
And then there are viruses that infect humans,
and they pass them easily to other humans.
When a human has something like the Hong Kong flu,
or in 2009 that H1N1 that came back,
and they go to the market and they buy a chicken
that happens to have one of these animal viruses,
and they take it home and they don't cook it properly,
and they eat it, they get the animal virus.
And now inside that person are two kinds of viruses:
a virus that transmits easily from human to human
and a virus that transmits easily from animal to animal.
But in almost all cases,
that animal virus is far more toxic and far more of a killer.
Now, in just the last few weeks,
a new very deadly animal flu called H7N9 has popped up.
About 100 people are infected.
A lot of them have died.
And this is one that the CDC is really worried about,
and we could be looking at another worldwide pandemic
like the Spanish flu
if a human being who has a human-type virus,
that transmits easily to people,
happens to eat one of these animals.
Now, there are solutions to this,
but we live in a very different world from 1918.
There are 80,000 commercial jets
that take off every day full of passengers.
It would take a flu virus about two weeks to circle the globe.
Private producers cannot make enough vaccine fast enough to save us.
The only thing that we can do
is what the Australian government has done,
which is to create laboratories
that are ready to go on a moment's notice
to create vast quantities of flu [vaccine].
We should do this.
Second, we need to make a simple dip stick test.
You go to the drug store, you buy a swab,
you put it in your mouth.
If it turns blue, you have the flu.
How many times have you gone to the doctor:
"Do I have the flu? Do I have a bacterial infection?"
Half the time they don't even know.
When a pandemic comes, you want to know if you have the flu,
and you will not be able to find a doctor.
Thirdly, we need to invest in a really good public health system.
We've actually been firing about 50,000 public health workers
in the last three years.
You know, 40-50 years ago,
this country built thousands of bomb shelters
because we thought nuclear war was a real threat.
If we can do that, we can build a public health system
that will take care of us in a pandemic.
Number seven.
(Applause)
Isn't that beautiful?
That's a mass coronal ejection coming off the sun.
It makes something called a solar flare look like kindergarten.
[#7 - The sun brightens]
It shoots uncountable numbers of atoms
that have been broken apart into little particles
and radiation out into space.
Almost all of these blasts miss the Earth
because the sun is like this huge yellow beach ball in space,
and we're like this little tiny BB at the end of the auditorium.
So no matter which direction the sun sends these out,
it's very unusual for us to get a direct hit.
However, happened last August, and it happened a month ago.
And you would not have been wanting to have been in an airplane at that time.
In 1859, a coronal mass ejection took the brand new US telegraph system
and basically melted it.
It started fires. It shocked the operators.
And the wires disppeared.
Most of the time our magnetic field in our atmosphere
protects us from coronal mass ejections.
But a severe direct hit
would take out the entire world's power grid at once,
and all the satellites in orbit,
plunging us essentially into a 19th-century existence.
It would take 20 years to restore half the grid
because we do not have back-up.
Try to imagine life without electricity.
Almost all cities would become uninhabitable.
We build sky scrapers 80 stories high and up
and two stories underground.
We need to create safety zones beneath our buildings.
We should be building down eight stories for every 80 stories up,
and we should make that part of our building code.
The state of New Jersey is rebuilding 20,000 bridges in the state
because they know there will be a massive earthquake on the East coast
sooner or later.
If we can do that, we can have different building codes for our buildings.
We should also view transformers and wires as vulnerable and expendable,
and we should have hardened, underground power plants
ready to go in an emergency.
[#6 - We develop a new life form]
This is a synthetic genome invented by the Craig Venter Institute
and inserted into a bacterial cell
to create what I would call a new life form.
This life form never existed before, and it can reproduce.
It was done three years ago,
and the goal is noble.
It's to produce anything we want from a cell.
Takes in certain things, puts out stuff that we want.
For example, they could make synthetic vaccines.
Or they could turn carbon dioxide into usable fuels.
Now, what could be wrong with that?
Our history is littered with examples of bad things that got out of secure labs
and things that go amok when we try to tamper with Mother Nature.
And here's a low tech example.
We brought kudzu here from Japan to control soil erosion.
Didn't work out so well.
And meanwhile, labs around the world are experimenting with biotech
in ways you cannot imagine.
You can create a perfect in vitro male baby
with blond hair and blue eyes,
and you can make modified corn do anything you want.
Now, is genetically modified corn saving us from famines?
I see it as a threat to the only purely wild corn genome left in the world
that grows in Mexico.
Look at number one here: watch closer, regulate more.
Watch closer, regulate more.
No single federal agency or a single law governs this vast new world.
Instead, there's a hodge podge of regulations
from the Food and Drug Administration,
the United States Department of Agriculture
and the EPA.
We need a new single agency of the government
to bring order to this.
Meanwhile, less watched people are entering this field all the time,
and amateurs will follow.
Kickstarter just got its first proposal for a synthetic life form:
a plant that would glow at night
so we can sprinkle its seeds along roadsides
and eliminate street lights.
Remember, genetically modified crops
are not driven by a need to produce a better world
and to save people from starvation,
they are driven by money.
And synthetic biology is about money too.
Now, for a little humor.
[#5 - Robots take over]
I'm going to tell you this. You're not going to believe it.
Computers will be smarter than us in 20 years.
You know this stuff.
You know that Deep Blue can play chess
better than anyone on the face of the planet,
and you know that the Google car
can drive itself better than you can drive it.
[Solutions]
It's hasta la vista time.
Time to wake up and smell the silicon.
If you want to get ahead of this curve, you are going to have to become a cyborg.
(Laughter)
Number four: A lot of volcanoes go off.
These things are huge trouble.
We do not live on a nice, stable solid planet.
It is mostly molten rock and iron
and it probably has a nuclear reactor in the center of it that keeps it hot.
We're, like, on these life rafts
floating over all this molten rock.
Earth's crust is so constantly folding in on itself
that we cannot find a stone on the surface of the Earth
that is as old as the planet.
Ninety-eight percent of all the species on Earth have gone extinct.
And volcanoes are the biggest reason why.
Of the 11 biggest extinctions, four were caused by volcanoes.
A new study that links the late Traissic extinction
of volcanic eruptions and outflows -
or a new study links this amazing extinction of life,
95 percent of life on Earth -
to volcanoes that essentially stretched - and it all went off at the same time -
essentially stretched from what is now New Jersey
to what is now Morocco.
In our past, Earth has opened up many times
and flowed out for centuries.
India is an outflow of volcanism.
Volcanic activity fills the sky with soot and hot ash
and buries every living thing
and blocks the sun for so many summers,
the plants on land and plankton in the sea die,
and when they die, we die.
Volcanoes can also produce so much carbon dioxide
that they will massively warm the planet and create a runaway greenhouse effect,
which is the opposite of what we often expect from them.
In Holland, they grow most of their food in greenhouses with synthetic light
24 hours a day.
We can do that.
When I was putting this talk together, I just had this weird idea.
I went to Amazon, I looked to see how much they were and how good they are.
Gas masks are the cheapest insurance you can buy.
They don't take up much space,
and they get you through a lot of hard times.
And finally, the ultimate solution to living on a planet like ours,
which really is unstable and will not last forever -
in four and a half billion years, the sun will take us in -
our species will eventually die if we do not colonize other planets
in other solar systems.
Number three: a runaway greenhouse effect, I just spoke about that a little,
or an ecosystem collapse.
Okay, no surprise, we're heating up.
In 1990, the mean atmospheric temperature of Earth was 14 1/2 degrees centigrade.
In 23 years, we've gone up 3/4 of a degree.
Never in the history of this planet - we know from ice cores -
has carbon dioxide risen so fast.
When we get to 16 1/2 degrees - that's 1 1/4 degrees from where we are -
we will lose control of our climate.
Or let me put it a different way:
It will become extremely unpredictable.
Every major extinction in Earth's history
has been characterized by rapid increases in CO2.
And we're now in an unprecedented period of increases in CO2.
Normally the atmosphere releases
about 10 percent of the heat we get from the sun.
But as we heat up, more and more water turns to vapor,
more global warming methane and other gases
are released from the northern and southern permafrost,
and at some point the Earth works like a greenhouse -
gets into a feedback loop
that eventually will turn us into Venus,
where the average daytime temperature is 900 degrees Fahrenheit.
At the same time we're witnessing a huge extinction cycle.
In the next 25 years,
we will lose 25 percent of all the species in the Hawaiian islands alone.
We're devastating our oceans by overfishing them,
and we're killing our coral reefs with heat.
Somewhere in the Amazon rainforest is what I like to call a marginal tree.
We keep cutting down oxygen-producing trees,
and someday, when we get to that marginal tree,
we will see the beginning of the collapse of our oxygen ecosystem.
We are still asleep at the wheel.
Global warming is an emergency.
It's almost incomprehensible
how much CO2 we have to stop putting in the air in the next 10 years
to stop this process.
And we need to prioritize the animals and the amount of nature
that we're trying to save.
We can't save it all.
We need to save the species that help us the most.
[#2 - Nuclear war breaks out]
Now, this is interesting
because 11 years ago, this wasn't even on my radar screen,
because I don't think nuclear war was any kind of significant threat.
There's a good reason every major nation in the world
wants to keep Iran from getting the bomb.
But there's a larger reason that's really out of our control.
Both India and Pakistan have more than 100 nuclear weapons each,
far more than enough to create a nuclear winter,
which will kill us all.
They have fought three wars since 1947.
And India is developing a nuclear submarine fleet
so it can fire its missiles from anywhere.
President Obama has spoken about this idea;
it makes tremendous sense.
And there's a huge rap against anti-missile systems
because if we use it and we knock down everybody else's missiles,
then we're left with all the good missiles.
So part of the answer to this problem
may be to develop anti-missle technology cooperatively
with many, many other nations and place them where they are needed.
You have to fire an anti-missile
30 seconds after a missile with a warhead on it is fired
so that it catches it before it's on the downward curve in space.
Number one: We cross paths with a really big asteroid.
This is my favorite.
(Laughter)
Now, there's a possibility I've been wrong about some of these things,
the possibility some of these things won't happen.
In the best sense of journalism, that's my disclaimer.
But I am not wrong about this,
and this is what keeps me up at night.
This is my passion.
Right now, somewhere in space,
maybe in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter
or farther out in the Kuiper belt,
of large objects that exist beyond Neptune,
there's a missile with our name on it.
It could break out of its orbit tomorrow, or not for 100,000 years,
but its fate is sealed.
It will hit Earth.
It has happened before many times.
Get a telescope and look at the moon.
It is covered with asteroid hits.
And you'll see that in a video in a second.
The Earth is just as pockmarked with asteroid hits.
It's just that that folding crust that we have,
that's hidden a lot of them,
and vegetation has covered a lot of it.
A large asteroid took out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago
by creating shock waves and firestorms across this planet
and created a sky so full of debris
that summer did not return for at least 100 years
and maybe 1,000 years.
Had humans been alive then, they would all have been wiped out.
Now, here's some hope.
433 Eros. This is a huge rock -
it's bigger than the one that took out the dinosaurs -
that orbits in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
At sometime in its future
it will shift from a Mars-crossing orbit
that it's in now
to an Earth-crossing orbit.
It will intersect with where our planet is.
It is bigger than the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs.
But here's where this thing gets interesing.
We took this photo from a space probe that left the Earth in the year 2000,
a NASA probe, that was designed to study asteroids.
And this spaceship settled into orbit around the asteroid.
You can put a baseball in orbit around me if you're in space;
there's enough gravity.
Now, when the mission ended, there was a little leftover fuel,
there was a little leftover electricity,
and the mission controllers - this wasn't part of the mission -
they landed the spacecraft on Eros successfully.
And since then, we have intercepted three comets in deep space
that move at 20 miles per second.
Stop and think about the implications of those missions.
For the first time in human history,
we have the ability to fly into an incoming asteroid
and change its orbit,
but only if we know it's there,
and only if we have a rocket ready to go.
Most asteroids are found by amateurs when it's too late to do anything.
NASA is looking for bad guys in the asteroid belt,
and there are about 20,000 of them out there.
But they can't look in the Kuiper belt,
it's too far away,
and it has 100,000 objects in it
10 times bigger than the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs.
In only 20 years,
we have developed the technology to change our fate.
We can intercept an asteroid, and we can take it out of play.
One day you or your children, or their children,
or their children's children
will wake up and this news will be real,
the headline on the front page of The New York TImes:
Killer Asteroid Found on Collision Course with Earth.
What happens after that if we're not prepared
is really beyond horror.
Most humans will not die from the impact,
most will die of starvation.
And the price of insurance to protect us from this
is what we spend on one B2 bomber.
The asteroid problem is stupidly obvious.
A physicist said almost 100 years ago:
"There are two kinds of civilizations:
those who can protect themselves from an asteroid impact
and those who can't."
We're the former.
What are we waiting for?
Thank you.
(Applause)