End of Days Scenario

I remember having an “End of Days” conversation with my brother.  I studied physics and he Biology.  Naturally, I reckoned that it would be due to nuclear detonation leading to catastrophic loss of life as we know it.  

He was of the opinion that some pandemic, biological in nature, was by far the more deadly and more likely culprit for wiping out huge sections of the population.  

You may be dismissive but Chernobyl had just happened and I felt pretty secure in my argument.  In addition, The New Scientist of 6^th July 2013 provided worrisome evidence that the earth itself has made its own nuclear reactors 2 billion years ago.  While mining in the Oklo area of Gabon (West Africa) for uranium the French alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission discovered evidence of 16 natural fossil reactors between 1.5 and 10 metres across. These, it is thought, ran on and off for a few hundred thousand years until they exhausted their supply of uranium. Strangely disturbing that the earth could create its own nuclear reactors isn't it?

Meanwhile, my brother could counter with the 1918 flu pandemic (January 1918 – December 1920), which was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, involving the H1N1 influenza virus.  Sounds worryingly familiar today doesn't it?  It infected 500 million people across the world and killed 50 to 100 million of them—3 to 5 percent of the world's population at the time. 

Because it involved the immune system response, this pandemic targeted not those with weak immune systems, like the very young and very old, but instead the fittest and most vital of the world’s population.  In my Grandmother’s home they lost two young men of the twelve in that family within a week of each other.  I can remember my father saying that he was told they had to carry the coffin of one son through the bedroom of the dying second son.  These horrors do lodge in the mind, they happened once already and who is to say they may not happen again? 

My third brother who is a professor of  psychology was silent during our “End of Days” debate.  It is rather perturbing then to discover that  about one million people die annually from suicide according to the World Health Organisation.  In fact rates of suicide have increased by 60% in the last 45 years.   It would be terrible indeed if the “End of Days” was neither due to biology or physics but took the form of a growing cull taking place silently in our midst each year.  Now, that is scary!