>
> Seems to be some renewed interest in this recently :
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> The first twenty as published :
> http://www.discover.com/issues/oct-00/features/featworld/
>
> 20 Ways the World Could End
>
> Swept away.
> By Corey S. Powell
> DISCOVER Vol. 21 No. 10 | October 2000
>
>
> We've had a good run of it. In the 500,000 years Homo sapiens has roamed
> the land we've built cities, created complex languages, and
> sent robotic scouts to other planets. It's difficult to imagine it all
> coming to an end. Yet 99 percent of all species that ever
> lived have gone extinct, including every one of our hominid ancestors. In
> 1983, British cosmologist Brandon Carter framed the
> "Doomsday argument," a statistical way to judge when we might join them.
> If humans were to survive a long time and spread through
> the galaxy, then the total number of people who will ever live might
> number in the trillions. By pure odds, it's unlikely that we
> would be among the very first hundredth of a percent of all those people.
> Or turn the argument around: How likely is it that this
> generation will be the one unlucky one? Something like one fifth of all
> the people who have ever lived are alive today. The odds of
> being one of the people to witness doomsday are highest when there is the
> largest number of witnesses around- so now is not such an
> improbable time.
>
> Human activity is severely disrupting almost all life on the planet, which
> surely doesn't help matters. The current rate of
> extinctions is, by some estimates, 10,000 times the average in the fossil
> record. At present, we may worry about snail darters and
> red squirrels in abstract terms. But the next statistic on the list could
> be us.
>
>
> Natural Disasters
>
> 1 Asteroid impact Once a disaster scenario gets the cheesy Hollywood
> treatment, it's hard to take it seriously. But there is no
> question that a cosmic interloper will hit Earth, and we won't have to
> wait millions of years for it to happen. In 1908 a
> 200-foot-wide comet fragment slammed into the atmosphere and exploded over
> the Tunguska region in Siberia, Russia, with nearly 1,000
> times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Astronomers
> estimate similar-sized events occur every one to three
> centuries. Benny Peiser, an anthropologist-cum-pessimist at Liverpool John
> Moores University in England, claims that impacts have
> repeatedly disrupted human civilization. As an example, he says one killed
> 10,000 people in the Chinese city of Chi'ing-yang in
> 1490. Many scientists question his interpretations: Impacts are most
> likely to occur over the ocean, and small ones that happen over
> land are most likely to affect unpopulated areas. But with big asteroids,
> it doesn't matter much where they land. Objects more than
> a half-mile wide- which strike Earth every 250,000 years or so- would
> touch off firestorms followed by global cooling from dust
> kicked up by the impact. Humans would likely survive, but civilization
> might not. An asteroid five miles wide would cause major
> extinctions, like the one that may have marked the end of the age of
> dinosaurs. For a real chill, look to the Kuiper belt, a zone
> just beyond Neptune that contains roughly 100,000 ice-balls more than 50
> miles in diameter. The Kuiper belt sends a steady rain of
> small comets earthward. If one of the big ones headed right for us, that
> would be it for pretty much all higher forms of life, even
> cockroaches.
>
> 2 Gamma-ray burst If you could watch the sky with gamma-ray vision, you
> might think you were being stalked by cosmic paparazzi. Once
> a day or so, you would see a bright flash appear, briefly outshine
> everything else, then vanish. These gamma-ray bursts,
> astrophysicists recently learned, originate in distant galaxies and are
> unfathomably powerful- as much as 10 quadrillion (a one
> followed by 16 zeros) times as energetic as the sun. The bursts probably
> result from the merging of two collapsed stars. Before the
> cataclysmal event, such a double star might be almost completely
> undetectable, so we'd likely have no advance notice if one is
> lurking nearby. Once the burst begins, however, there would be no missing
> its fury. At a distance of 1,000 light-years- farther than
> most of the stars you can see on a clear night- it would appear about as
> bright as the sun. Earth's atmosphere would initially
> protect us from most of the burst's deadly X rays and gamma rays, but at a
> cost. The potent radiation would cook the atmosphere,
> creating nitrogen oxides that would destroy the ozone layer. Without the
> ozone layer, ultraviolet rays from the sun would reach the
> surface at nearly full force, causing skin cancer and, more seriously,
> killing off the tiny photosynthetic plankton in the ocean
> that provide oxygen to the atmosphere and bolster the bottom of the food
> chain. All the gamma-ray bursts observed so far have been
> extremely distant, which implies the events are rare. Scientists
> understand so little about these explosions, however, that it's
> difficult to estimate the likelihood of one detonating in our galactic
> neighborhood.
>
> 3 Collapse of the vacuum In the book Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
> popularized the idea of "ice-nine," a form of water that is far
> more stable than the ordinary kind, so it is solid at room temperature.
> Unleash a bit of it, and suddenly all water on Earth
> transforms to ice-nine and freezes solid. Ice-nine was a satirical
> invention, but an abrupt, disastrous phase transition is a
> possibility. Very early in the history of the universe, according to a
> leading cosmological model, empty space was full of energy.
> This state of affairs, called a false vacuum, was highly precarious. A
> new, more stable kind of vacuum appeared and, like ice-nine,
> it quickly took over. This transition unleashed a tremendous amount of
> energy and caused a brief runaway expansion of the cosmos. It
> is possible that another, even more stable kind of vacuum exists, however.
> As the universe expands and cools, tiny bubbles of this
> new kind of vacuum might appear and spread at nearly the speed of light.
> The laws of physics would change in their wake, and a blast
> of energy would dash everything to bits. "It makes for a beautiful story,
> but it's not very likely," says Piet Hut of the Institute
> for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. He says he worries more
> about threats that scientists are more certain of- such as
> rogue black holes.
>
> 4 Rogue black holes Our galaxy is full of black holes, collapsed stellar
> corpses just a dozen miles wide. How full? Tough question.
> After all, they're called black holes for a reason. Their gravity is so
> strong they swallow everything, even the light that might
> betray their presence. David Bennett of Notre Dame University in Indiana
> managed to spot two black holes recently by the way they
> distorted and amplified the light of ordinary, more distant stars. Based
> on such observations, and even more on theoretical
> arguments, researchers guesstimate there are about 10 million black holes
> in the Milky Way. These objects orbit just like other
> stars, meaning that it is not terribly likely that one is headed our way.
> But if a normal star were moving toward us, we'd know it.
> With a black hole there is little warning. A few decades before a close
> encounter, at most, astronomers would observe a strange
> perturbation in the orbits of the outer planets. As the effect grew
> larger, it would be possible to make increasingly precise
> estimates of the location and mass of the interloper. The black hole
> wouldn't have to come all that close to Earth to bring ruin;
> just passing through the solar system would distort all of the planets'
> orbits. Earth might get drawn into an elliptical path that
> would cause extreme climate swings, or it might be ejected from the solar
> system and go hurtling to a frigid fate in deep space.
>
> 5 Giant solar flares Solar flares- more properly known as coronal mass
> ejections- are enormous magnetic outbursts on the sun that
> bombard Earth with a torrent of high-speed subatomic particles. Earth's
> atmosphere and magnetic field negate the potentially lethal
> effects of ordinary flares. But while looking through old astronomical
> records, Bradley Schaefer of Yale University found evidence
> that some perfectly normal-looking, sunlike stars can brighten briefly by
> up to a factor of 20. Schaefer believes these stellar
> flickers are caused by superflares, millions of times more powerful than
> their common cousins. Within a few hours, a superflare on
> the sun could fry Earth and begin disintegrating the ozone layer (see #2).
> Although there is persuasive evidence that our sun
> doesn't engage in such excess, scientists don't know why superflares
> happen at all, or whether our sun could exhibit milder but
> still disruptive behavior. And while too much solar activity could be
> deadly, too little of it is problematic as well. Sallie
> Baliunas at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics says many
> solar-type stars pass through extended quiescent periods,
> during which they become nearly 1 percent dimmer. That might not sound
> like much, but a similar downturn in the sun could send us
> into another ice age. Baliunas cites evidence that decreased solar
> activity contributed to 17 of the 19 major cold episodes on Earth
> in the last 10,000 years.
>
> 6 Reversal of Earth's magnetic field Every few hundred thousand years
> Earth's magnetic field dwindles almost to nothing for perhaps
> a century, then gradually reappears with the north and south poles
> flipped. The last such reversal was 780,000 years ago, so we may
> be overdue. Worse, the strength of our magnetic field has decreased about
> 5 percent in the past century. Why worry in an age when
> GPS has made compasses obsolete? Well, the magnetic field deflects
> particle storms and cosmic rays from the sun, as well as even
> more energetic subatomic particles from deep space. Without magnetic
> protection, these particles would strike Earth's atmosphere,
> eroding the already beleaguered ozone layer (see #5). Also, many creatures
> navigate by magnetic reckoning. A magnetic reversal might
> cause serious ecological mischief. One big caveat: "There are no
> identifiable fossil effects from previous flips," says Sten
> Odenwald of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. "This is most curious."
> Still, a disaster that kills a quarter of the population,
> like the Black Plague in Europe, would hardly register as a blip in fossil
> records.
>
> 7 Flood-basalt volcanism In 1783, the Laki volcano in Iceland erupted,
> spitting out three cubic miles of lava. Floods, ash, and
> fumes wiped out 9,000 people and 80 percent of the livestock. The ensuing
> starvation killed a quarter of Iceland's population.
> Atmospheric dust caused winter temperatures to plunge by 9 degrees in the
> newly independent United States. And that was just a
> baby's burp compared with what the Earth can do. Sixty-five million years
> ago, a plume of hot rock from the mantle burst through the
> crust in what is now India. Eruptions raged century after century,
> ultimately unleashing a quarter-million cubic miles of lava- the
> Laki eruption 100,000 times over. Some scientists still blame the Indian
> outburst, not an asteroid, for the death of the dinosaurs.
> An earlier, even larger event in Siberia occurred just about the time of
> the Permian-Triassic extinction, the most thorough
> extermination known to paleontology. At that time 95 percent of all
> species were wiped out.
>
> Sulfurous volcanic gases produce acid rains. Chlorine-bearing compounds
> present yet another threat to the fragile ozone layer- a
> noxious brew all around. While they are causing short-term destruction,
> volcanoes also release carbon dioxide that yields long-term
> greenhouse-effect warming.The last big pulse of flood-basalt volcanism
> built the Columbia River plateau about 17 million years ago.
> We're ripe for another.
>
> 8 Global epidemics If Earth doesn't do us in, our fellow organisms might
> be up to the task. Germs and people have always coexisted,
> but occasionally the balance gets out of whack. The Black Plague killed
> one European in four during the 14th century; influenza took
> at least 20 million lives between 1918 and 1919; the AIDS epidemic has
> produced a similar death toll and is still going strong. From
> 1980 to 1992, reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
> mortality from infectious disease in the United States rose 58
> percent. Old diseases such as cholera and measles have developed new
> resistance to antibiotics. Intensive agriculture and land
> development is bringing humans closer to animal pathogens. International
> travel means diseases can spread faster than ever. Michael
> Osterholm, an infectious disease expert who recently left the Minnesota
> Department of Health, described the situation as "like
> trying to swim against the current of a raging river." The grimmest
> possibility would be the emergence of a strain that spreads so
> fast we are caught off guard or that resists all chemical means of
> control, perhaps as a result of our stirring of the ecological
> pot. About 12,000 years ago, a sudden wave of mammal extinctions swept
> through the Americas. Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of
> Natural History argues the culprit was extremely virulent disease, which
> humans helped transport as they migrated into the New
> World.
>
>
> Human-Triggered Disasters
>
> 9 Global warming The Earth is getting warmer, and scientists mostly agree
> that humans bear some blame. It's easy to see how global
> warming could flood cities and ruin harvests. More recently, researchers
> like Paul Epstein of Harvard Medical School have raised the
> alarm that a balmier planet could also assist the spread of infectious
> disease by providing a more suitable climate for parasites
> and spreading the range of tropical pathogens (see #8). That could include
> crop diseases which, combined with substantial climate
> shifts, might cause famine. Effects could be even more dramatic. At
> present, atmospheric gases trap enough heat close to the surface
> to keep things comfortable. Increase the global temperature a bit,
> however, and there could be a bad feedback effect, with water
> evaporating faster, freeing water vapor (a potent greenhouse gas), which
> traps more heat, which drives carbon dioxide from the
> rocks, which drives temperatures still higher. Earth could end up much
> like Venus, where the high on a typical day is 900 degrees
> Fahrenheit. It would probably take a lot of warming to initiate such a
> runaway greenhouse effect, but scientists have no clue where
> exactly the tipping point lies.
>
> 10 Ecosystem collapse Images of slaughtered elephants and burning rain
> forests capture people's attention, but the big problem- the
> overall loss of biodiversity- is a lot less visible and a lot more
> serious. Billions of years of evolution have produced a world in
> which every organism's welfare is intertwined with that of countless other
> species. A recent study of Isle Royale National Park in
> Lake Superior offers an example. Snowy winters encourage wolves to hunt in
> larger packs, so they kill more moose. The decline in
> moose population allows more balsam fir saplings to live. The fir trees
> pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, which in turn
> influences the climate. It's all connected. To meet the demands of the
> growing population, we are clearing land for housing and
> agriculture, replacing diverse wild plants with just a few varieties of
> crops, transporting plants and animals, and introducing new
> chemicals into the environment. At least 30,000 species vanish every year
> from human activity, which means we are living in the
> midst of one of the greatest mass extinctions in Earth's history. Stephen
> Kellert, a social ecologist at Yale University, sees a
> number of ways people might upset the delicate checks and balances in the
> global ecology. New patterns of disease might emerge (see
> #8), he says, or pollinating insects might become extinct, leading to
> widespread crop failure. Or as with the wolves of Isle Royale,
> the consequences might be something we'd never think of, until it's too
> late.
>
> 11 Biotech disaster While we are extinguishing natural species, we're also
> creating new ones through genetic engineering.
> Genetically modified crops can be hardier, tastier, and more nutritious.
> Engineered microbes might ease our health problems. And
> gene therapy offers an elusive promise of fixing fundamental defects in
> our DNA. Then there are the possible downsides. Although
> there is no evidence indicating genetically modified foods are unsafe,
> there are signs that the genes from modified plants can leak
> out and find their way into other species. Engineered crops might also
> foster insecticide resistance. Longtime skeptics like Jeremy
> Rifkin worry that the resulting superweeds and superpests could further
> destabilize the stressed global ecosystem (see #9). Altered
> microbes might prove to be unexpectedly difficult to control. Scariest of
> all is the possibility of the deliberate misuse of
> biotechnology. A terrorist group or rogue nation might decide that anthrax
> isn't nasty enough and then try to put together, say, an
> airborne version of the Ebola virus. Now there's a showstopper.
>
> 12 Particle accelerator mishap Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the
> Unabomber, raved that a particle accelerator experiment could
> set off a chain reaction that would destroy the world. Surprisingly, many
> sober-minded physicists have had the same thought.
> Normally their anxieties come up during private meetings, amidst much
> scribbling on the backs of used envelopes. Recently the
> question went public when London's Sunday Times reported that the
> Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) on Long Island, New York,
> might create a subatomic black hole that would slowly nibble away our
> planet. Alternately, it might create exotic bits of altered
> matter, called strangelets, that would obliterate whatever ordinary matter
> they met. To assuage RHIC's jittery neighbors, the lab's
> director convened a panel that rejected both scenarios as pretty much
> impossible. Just for good measure, the panel also dismissed
> the possibility that RHIC would trigger a phase transition in the cosmic
> vacuum energy (see #3). These kinds of reassurances follow
> the tradition of the 1942 "LA-602" report, a once-classified document that
> explained why the detonation of the first atomic bomb
> almost surely would not set the atmosphere on fire. The RHIC physicists
> did not, however, reject the fundamental possibility of the
> disasters. They argued that their machine isn't nearly powerful enough to
> make a black hole or destabilize the vacuum. Oh, well. We
> can always build a bigger accelerator.
>
> 13 Nanotechnology disaster Before you've even gotten the keyboard dirty,
> your home computer is obsolete, largely because of
> incredibly rapid progress in miniaturizing circuits on silicon chips.
> Engineers are using the same technology to build crude,
> atomic-scale machines, inventing a new field as they go called
> nanotechnology. Within a few decades, maybe sooner, it should be
> possible to build microscopic robots that can assemble and replicate
> themselves. They might perform surgery from inside a patient,
> build any desired product from simple raw materials, or explore other
> worlds. All well and good if the technology works as intended.
> Then again, consider what K. Eric Drexler of the Foresight Institute calls
> the "grey goo problem" in his book Engines of Creation, a
> cult favorite among the nanotech set. After an industrial accident, he
> writes, bacteria-sized machines, "could spread like blowing
> pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of
> days." And Drexler is actually a strong proponent of the
> technology. More pessimistic souls, such as Bill Joy, a cofounder of Sun
> Microsystems, envision nano-machines as the perfect
> precision military or terrorist tools.
>
> 14 Environmental toxins From Donora, Pennsylvania, to Bhopal, India,
> modern history abounds with frightening examples of the dangers
> of industrial pollutants. But the poisoning continues. In major cities
> around the world, the air is thick with diesel particulates,
> which the National Institutes of Health now considers a carcinogen. Heavy
> metals from industrial smokestacks circle the globe, even
> settling in the pristine snows of Antarctica. Intensive use of pesticides
> in farming guarantees runoff into rivers and lakes. In
> high doses, dioxins can disrupt fetal development and impair reproductive
> function- and dioxins are everywhere. Your house may
> contain polyvinyl chloride pipes, wallpaper, and siding, which belch
> dioxins if they catch fire or are incinerated. There are also
> the unknown risks to think about. Every year NIH adds to its list of
> cancer-causing substances- the number is up to 218. Theo
> Colburn of the World Wildlife Fund argues that dioxins and other, similar
> chlorine-bearing compounds mimic the effects of human
> hormones well enough that they could seriously reduce fertility. Many
> other scientists dispute her evidence, but if she's right, our
> chemical garbage could ultimately threaten our survival.
>
>
> Willful Self-Destruction
>
> 15 Global war Together, the United States and Russia still have almost
> 19,000 active nuclear warheads. Nuclear war seems unlikely
> today, but a dozen years ago the demise of the Soviet Union also seemed
> rather unlikely. Political situations evolve; the bombs
> remain deadly. There is also the possibility of an accidental nuclear
> exchange. And a ballistic missile defense system, given
> current technology, will catch only a handful of stray missiles- assuming
> it works at all. Other types of weaponry could have global
> effects as well. Japan began experimenting with biological weapons after
> World War I, and both the United States and the Soviet
> Union experimented with killer germs during the cold war. Compared with
> atomic bombs, bioweapons are cheap, simple to produce, and
> easy to conceal. They are also hard to control, although that
> unpredictability could appeal to a terrorist organization. John
> Leslie, a philosopher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, points out
> that genetic engineering might permit the creation of
> "ethnic" biological weapons that are tailored to attack primarily one
> ethnic group (see #11).
>
> 16 Robots take over People create smart robots, which turn against us and
> take over the world. Yawn. We've seen this in movies, TV,
> and comic books for decades. After all these years, look around and still-
> no smart robots. Yet Hans Moravec, one of the founders of
> the robotics department of Carnegie Mellon University, remains a believer.
> By 2040, he predicts, machines will match human
> intelligence, and perhaps human consciousness. Then they'll get even
> better. He envisions an eventual symbiotic relationship between
> human and machine, with the two merging into "postbiologicals" capable of
> vastly expanding their intellectual power. Marvin Minsky,
> an artificial-intelligence expert at MIT, foresees a similar future:
> People will download their brains into computer-enhanced
> mechanical surrogates and log into nearly boundless files of information
> and experience. Whether this counts as the end of humanity
> or the next stage in evolution depends on your point of view. Minsky's
> vision might sound vaguely familiar. After the first
> virtual-reality machines hit the marketplace around 1989, feverish
> journalists hailed them as electronic LSD, trippy illusion
> machines that might entice the user in and then never let him out.
> Sociologists fretted that our culture, maybe even our species,
> would whither away. When the actual experience of virtual reality turned
> out to be more like trying to play Pac-Man with a bowling
> ball taped to your head, the talk died down. To his credit, Minsky
> recognizes that the merger of human and machine lies quite a few
> years away.
>
> 17 Mass insanity While physical health has improved in most parts of the
> world over the past century, mental health is getting
> worse. The World Health Organization estimates that 500 million people
> around the world suffer from a psychological disorder. By
> 2020, depression will likely be the second leading cause of death and lost
> productivity, right behind cardiovascular disease.
> Increasing human life spans may actually intensify the problem, because
> people have more years to experience the loneliness and
> infirmity of old age. Americans over 65 already are disproportionately
> likely to commit suicide. Gregory Stock, a biophysicist at
> the University of California at Los Angeles, believes medical science will
> soon allow people to live to be 200 or older. If such an
> extended life span becomes common, it will pose unfathomable social and
> psychological challenges. Perhaps 200 years of accumulated
> sensations will overload the human brain, leading to a new kind of
> insanity or fostering the spread of doomsday cults, determined to
> reclaim life's endpoint. Perhaps the current trends of depression and
> suicide among the elderly will continue. One possible
> solution- promoting a certain kind of mental well-being with psychoactive
> drugs such as Prozac- heads into uncharted waters.
> Researchers have no good data on the long-term effects of taking these
> medicines.
>
>
> A Greater Force Is Directed Against Us
>
> 18 Alien invasion At the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, a
> cadre of dedicated scientists sifts through radio static in
> search of a telltale signal from an alien civilization. So far, nothing.
> Now suppose the long-sought message arrives. Not only do
> the aliens exist, they are about to stop by for a visit. And then . . .
> any science-fiction devotee can tell you what could go
> wrong. But the history of human exploration and exploitation suggests the
> most likely danger is not direct conflict. Aliens might
> want resources from our solar system (Earth's oceans, perhaps, full of
> hydrogen for refilling a fusion-powered spacecraft) and swat
> us aside if we get in the way, as we might dismiss mosquitoes or beetles
> stirred up by the logging of a rain forest. Aliens might
> unwittingly import pests with a taste for human flesh, much as Dutch
> colonists reaching Mauritius brought cats, rats, and pigs that
> quickly did away with the dodo. Or aliens might accidentally upset our
> planet or solar system while carrying out some grandiose
> interstellar construction project. The late physicist Gerard O'Neill
> speculated that contact with extraterrestrial visitors could
> also be socially disastrous. "Advanced western civilization has had a
> destructive effect on all primitive civilizations it has come
> in contact with, even in those cases where every attempt was made to
> protect and guard the primitive civilization," he said in a
> 1979 interview. "I don't see any reason why the same thing would not
> happen to us."
>
> 19 Divine intervention Judaism has the Book of Daniel; Christianity has
> the Book of Revelation; Islam has the coming of the Mahdi;
> Zoroastrianism has the countdown to the arrival of the third son of
> Zoroaster. The stories and their interpretations vary widely,
> but the underlying concept is similar: God intervenes in the world,
> bringing history to an end and ushering in a new moral order.
> Apocalyptic thinking runs at least back to Egyptian mythology and right up
> to Heaven's Gate and Y2K mania. More worrisome, to the
> nonbelievers at least, are the doomsday cults that prefer to take holy
> retribution into their own hands. In 1995, members of the Aum
> Shinri Kyo sect unleashed sarin nerve gas in a Tokyo subway station,
> killing 12 people and injuring more than 5,000. Had things gone
> as intended, the death toll would have been hundreds of times greater. A
> more determined group armed with a more lethal weapon-
> nuclear, biological, nanotechnological even- could have done far more
> damage.
>
> 20 Someone wakes up and realizes it was all a dream Are we living a shadow
> existence that only fools us into thinking it is real?
> This age-old philosophical question still reverberates through cultural
> thought, from the writings of William S. Burrows to the
> cinematic mind games of The Matrix. Hut of the Institute of Advanced
> Studies sees an analogy to the danger of the collapse of the
> vacuum. Just as our empty space might not be the true, most stable form of
> the vacuum, what we call reality might not be the true,
> most stable form of existence. In the fourth century B.C., Taoist
> philosopher Chuang Tzu framed the question in more poetic terms.
> He described a vivid dream. In it, he was a butterfly who had no awareness
> of his existence as a person. When he awoke, he asked:
> "Was I before Chuang Tzu who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a
> butterfly who dreams about being Chuang Tzu?"
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> My addendum
> Death by Paradigm Shift
>
>
> 21 Where our very cultural model
> of ourselves becomes so different from our
> inherited legacy 'human' self model that we find ourselves
> terminally disgusting.
> The primate folk would undergo a kind of "death
> by paradigm shift", if it were to be honest about its
> own brain structure and function.
> I predict this to happen soon, along with 16.
> --
> Frederick Martin McNeill