Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody (5 page)

Which it is. Come on! Would it be in this book if it wasn’t terrifying?

The UCLA School of Public Health has found some early evidence that perfluorinated compounds, or PFCs, could be associated with increasing infertility in women. And, though they sound exotic and rare, PFCs are used in pretty much everything: Plastics, pesticides, clothing, makeup—odds are you’re wearing or touching something chock-f of perfluorinated chemicals as we speak. The study says that women with higher levels of PFCs in their blood take longer to become pregnant than women with lower levels, if they can become pregnant
at all
. Because more manufactured materials are used and discarded in those pesky industrialized Western nations again, of course they’re the ones getting hit the hardest. And right in the babymaker.

There’s research to suggest that the fertility of both sexes is in decline due to somewhat mysterious circumstances, but not all sterility-inducing factors are unidentifiable. For example, right now a new crop of genetically modified corn is being harvested. This mutated corn isn’t any larger than normal, doesn’t have a longer shelf life, and isn’t more resistant to disease: It has only one purpose, and that is to serve as a contraceptive.

Seriously.

It’s condom corn. It’s birth-control maize. The crop is harvested and distilled into a gel that acts as a spermicide, but it could render males who eat it infertile as well. One can only assume that the corn is also quite literally the most delectable substance on Earth, because though ordinary corn bread is undeniably delicious, it’s not quite “I don’t want to have kids ever again” delicious. A company in San Diego called Epicyte is responsible for this terrible, terrible idea. They’ve accomplished this extremely unsettling feat by using a recently discovered and exceedingly rare class of human antibodies that attack sperm. When they found these antibodies—which I should remind you are described as “attacking” something
inside your balls
—Epicyte decided to take the road less traveled and, instead of taking the logical course and killing them with fire, they opted to splice them into corn crops.

Other Epicyte Inventions

• Black Death by Chocolate Cake
  

• Coke Ebola
  

• AIDS burgers
  

But I digress. Epicyte isn’t pure evil; they actually want to help. The general idea Epicyte is working on is to create a hormone-free contraceptive that places reproductive responsibility on both men and women equally, rather than sticking with the status quo, which is asking women to take daily insanity pills so sex can be fun again. Epicyte has also isolated an antiherpes antibody and spliced that gene into the corn as well. So their product will not only serve as a sexual lubricant, but also as a contraceptive and an STD inhibitor. Epicyte president Mitch Hein explains how it works in bizarrely dance-centric terms:

Essentially, the antibodies are attracted to surface receptors on the sperm. They latch on and make each sperm so heavy it cannot move forward. It just shakes about as if it was doing the lambada.

Aside from his strange obsession with the Forbidden Dance, that’s an accurate description. The antibodies don’t kill sperm, they just render it inactive. It’s not like you accidentally eat the wrong corn dog once and so can never have babies again—the antibodies actually have to be continually present to function. If you stop eating the corn, the effect will gradually fade.

And before you start thinking that’s comforting, let’s revisit what we learned from the genetically modified foods section: Scientists have proven, over and over again, that it is practically impossible to fully contain GM crops. They
will
escape and, what’s worse, could actually become the dominant strain of a crop through purely natural reproduction, not to mention the possibility of crosspollinating into other related plants. When you consider that corn is the single largest crop on the planet—sustaining not only our own food, but that of our livestock and, thanks to ethanol, even our vehicles—that’s a pretty big field to contaminate. Since it’s not an “if” but a “when” the contraceptive corn escapes, that means there is a distinct possibility that the largest crop on the planet will eventually render you infertile if you eat it, forcing you to choose between food or babies.

Food is delicious and babies are loud. And if the question is “Would you rather have a Coke or a kid? A sandwich or a lifelong commitment?” we all know the answer most men would choose. (Hint: It’s the dooming-humanity one.)

Not enough examples to worry you yet? OK, one more: There’s a popular theory right now that obesity, conventionally blamed on too much pie and couches, could actually be caused by a virus. A fat virus.

It started twenty years ago, when an Indian scientist named Nikhil Dhurandhar found something odd: An epidemic had struck the local chicken population, killing thousands of birds and leaving behind giant, fatty corpses. Eventually a bizarre type of adenovirus was found to be causing the deaths and now, twenty years after the chickenpocalypse, it’s happening again.

In humans.

Another strain of the same disease, called AD-36, is being found in increasing numbers in human fat tissue. And, as Professor Richard Atkinson of the University of Wisconsin found in a related study, it does have the same obesity effect in humans as it did in chickens. He tested five hundred people for the AD-36 strain and found that those infected by the virus weighed noticeably more than the uninfected. Even after isolating and destroying it in patients with antiviral drugs, the virus’ fat-making effects were not reversed. So, like a can of viral Pringles: Once you pop, you can’t stop (being fat).

It’s not just limited to this one bizarre strain, either. There are several other pathogens linked to obesity in the animal world, and any one could make the jump just like AD-36. Of course, this is all in a chapter about sterility, so let’s get to the matter at hand: Let’s assume there’s a fat plague ravaging the world and that eventually everybody will end up big boned and burger laden. Humanity still has urges, and what is deemed attractive in the oppisite sex can be quite flexible. So we’re having fat, sloppy, roll-slapping sex, so what? So it’s not getting us anywhere, that’s what. A study at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam tested three thousand women struggling with fertility problems and found that chances of successful pregnancy reduced by a staggering 4 percent with every additional Body Mass Unit: The more obese the woman, the less her chance of pregnancy.

This is known as the No-Fat-Chicks Theory of Evolution, and is currently being espoused by both Dutch fertility scientists and the bumpers of pickup trucks with gun racks everywhere.

That means that there’s a virus that inflicts irreversible obesity that in turn renders us infertile, not to mention the fact that our water is “feminizing” all the males, overall ball size has shrunken within a generation, and cornflakes turn your sperm into all-night dance machines that shake, shake, shake it until they die. It’s not hard to see that this is actually one of the most likely doomsday scenarios threatening our species today. So if I were you, I’d start fucking right now.

We’re going to need the head start.

5.
NEW ENERGY

ASIDE FROM BEING
less profitable and more difficult to implement than conventional methods, so-called green energy has another, far more important problem to overcome: It’s for pussies
.

Or at least that’s the popular consensus. Sorry, hippies, I want to save the world as much as the next Bruce Willis, but there’s simply nothing sexy about our available alternative energy sources. All of our past major fuels have had at least one important thing in common that eco-friendly power lacks: They could fucking kill you. Fossil fuels burn, nuclear power irradiates, and coal once killed a man in Kentucky just to win a bet. Even pre-Industrial Revolution power was distilled from pure badass. Whale oil was the fuel of choice, and this was at a time when whales were poorly understood leviathans. They were quite literally demons of the deep—near legendary creatures the size of your entire goddamn boat—and the only way you could read your copy of
Pride and Prejudice
after sunset was to slay that sea monster with a fucking spear and render its fat to light your lamps. But solar panels, windmills, hydrogen fuel cells—shit, you might as well power your car on kitten hugs.

Well, lucky for the planet, science is about to change all that and make green energy as sexy and dangerous as she is renewable and clean. It’s just that it may be at the expense of all of our lives.

THE FUTURE OF HYDROGEN ENERGY

At the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, England, a group of scientists is refining designs for a new energy facility they call HiPER (high power laser energy research). This facility, apart from proving that scientists cheat at acronyms (if you’re being fair about it, it should be HPLER, but “Hipler” apparently isn’t sexy enough, sounding more like Adolf’s rap alias than a high-tech research center), may also solve the world’s growing energy crisis in the most awesome way that science knows how …

With lasers!

The HiPER facility is pursuing the heretofore presumed pipe dream of nuclear fusion, which they hope to achieve by using a combination of hydrogen and superlasers. The idea is to build a superefficient, giant, rapid-fire laser—not for world domination or eliminating that bastard James Bond, but to superheat a tiny little pellet of hydrogen. The hydrogen would be dropped down a 33-foot concrete and lithium shaft, where, upon reaching the dead center of the reaction chamber, it would be struck with 192 separate lasers, the combined output of which would be 500
trillion
watts (or one thousand times the power of the entire U.S. national electricity grid) delivered all at once. This creates temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius in the hydrogen pellet, thus replicating the same fusion process that powers our sun. Tubes of water surrounding the chamber superheat from the reaction, the steam is converted into electricity, and hydrogen pellets learn never to cross mankind again.

You see that, hippies? That’s how you fucking do green energy. Maybe some people won’t trade horsepower and performance for mileage, but even if it tops out at 16 mph, comes in only bright pink, and the engine sounds like Tiny Tim singing Hello Kitty songs, there’s still not a man alive who wouldn’t drive an electric car powered by goddamn
laser fusion
. All right, so maybe that’s not strictly true: The laser fusion would be converted to electricity in a separate station rather than the actual car itself, but hell, even lasers by proxy is more lasers than you have right now. Let me throw a little bit of complicated math at you to explain why that’s a beneficial development:

Manlier Ways to Power a Vehicle

• Whiskey
  

• Punches
  

• Pulling it with your dick
  

If “lasers” = “good,” then “more lasers” = “gooder.”

Clearly, the logic is infallible.

Though this technology isn’t quite feasible yet, it is close: Technicians at the National Ignition Facility, part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, while typically busy having the most badass job titles in the history of everything, are also spending their time carrying out early versions of the experiment right now, and eventually hope to combine their efforts with the new HiPER facility to create a viable electrical grid.

A few worrisome things about this process, however, are the temperatures and pressures created: Akin to a tiny, controlled sun, remember? So, how much of an issue is containment? The process has already been proven viable by the National Ignition Facility, and they’re planning to scale up to a larger form when the HiPER facility is built, yet little is said of containing this energy in the event of a failure. Forgive me for being a tad bit worried when somebody borrows a plot point from a comic book supervillain’s best-laid revenge schemes just to power their home, but creating a miniature sun on the surface of the Earth seems like the God King of bad ideas. After all, back in the ’40s there were rumblings that the first nuclear tests would ignite the oxygen in the atmosphere, leading to a global chain reaction that would, in turn, ignite all of the air on Earth—and they still went ahead with testing the bombs.