TEOLAWKI still imminent

Let's go to the wayback machine and return to this warning from 2001: "Killer plasma ready to devour the Earth."

SCIENTISTS yesterday issued warnings of two new menaces to mankind that could either swallow up the Earth or turn the universe to jelly.

Particle scientists, who spend much of their time immersed in a theoretical world so arcane that anyone else struggles to understand it, warned yesterday of a wall of death expanding across the universe at the speed of light, obliterating everything in its path until no matter - anywhere - is left.

Dr Benjamin Allanach, a research associate at Cern, the European particle laboratory, said that a chance fluctuation of the "vacuum universe" would disintegrate all atoms.

he said: "The universe is perched on a terrible precipice. It could catastrophically tunnel to a new state, disintegrating every atom."

And if that does not wipe out all known life anywhere in the universe, Dr Allanach said so-called killer strangelets could "eat up the Earth from the inside out".

First there was the supernova and galaxy-attack scenarios. Then the predicted return of the comet Genondahwayanung, which pretty much annihilated most life in North America when it came here the first time. And then the massive gas cloud speeding toward a collision with the Milky Way! Then we learn that the earth's atmosphere may detonate. And then the asteroids. Then the black hole death stars! Then we'll be swallowed whole by the sun. Then the intense beam of gamma rays coming our way. Then there was the fear that "human society is very quickly headed to a violent and disturbing end." Then the earth began to kill people for changing its climate. Then there is the voracious, galactic Hoover in Switzerland that will suck the whole planet into a black hole. And the massive destruction along the coasts of countries like the USA, UK and many on the African continent, within a matter of hours.

I tell ya, I'm starting to think that sooner or later, every one of us is going to wind up dead.