Angry Planet - This Is (Probably) How the World Ends

Episode Date: November 1, 2019

It’s the end of the world as we know it and I’m fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. Stop asking.Between the climate Apocalypse, tensions in the Middle East, the dissolution of decades old nuclear treaties, artificial intelligence, 3D printed weapons of mass destruction, immortal humans, CRISPR, and drone swarms, it feels like we’re closer to a science fiction apocalypse everyday. These days it’s not a question of when the end of human civilization comes but how. Mike Pearl has spent years obsessing over The Day it Finally Happens. That’s the title of his new book, which studies the various methods by which humanity could achieve mass extinction.Pearl is a journalist whose work has appeared in VICE, The Outline, The Awl, and the Hollywood Reporter. You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. What do you mean evacuate the building? Like walk out into the street and get hit directly by the nuclear explosion? That's a terrible idea. It just showed that they were completely thoughtless in their attempt to adapt to a nuclear missile threat. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello and welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. It's fine. I'm fine. Stop asking. Between the climate apocalypse, tensions in the Middle East, the dissolution of decades-old nuclear treaties, artificial intelligence, 3D-printed weapons of mass destruction, immortal humans, crisper, and,

rome swarms, it feels like we're closer to a science fiction apocalypse every day. These days, it's not a question of when the end of human civilization comes, but how? Mike Pearl has spent years obsessing over the day it finally happens. That's the title of his new book, which studies the various methods by which humanity could achieve mass extinction. Pearl is a journalist whose work has appeared in Vice, the outline, the All, and the Hollywood reporter. Mike, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Matthew. It's great to be here. Mike, why are you trying to scare everybody? I'm not. I started writing about the things that scare me a few years ago. And the way that I like to describe what I do is I used to be terribly afraid of pit bulls. And I investigated how scared a person

should generally be of pit bulls in an article called How Scared Should I Be of Pit Bulls for vice. And I discovered that a pit bull is more likely than any other. First of all, I discovered that pit bulls are a consumer category, not a, not a breed. And second of all, I discovered that dogs described as pit bulls are very likely to attack something, maybe another dog, but that no dog is especially capable of killing a person reliably. You can, you can kind of fight off a dog if you're an able-bodied adult. If you're, if you're enfeebled and elderly, a dog, might kill you, but if you are able-bodied and healthy, you can probably get the dog to stop biting you, or get the dog, you know, the dog will do that sort of like latch onto your arm

thing, and then somebody will have to pry its jaws, but it won't kill you. And so discovering that dogs probably won't and can't kill you was a revelation for me. I'm, I'm, I'm, it sort of reframed my fear of dogs and made it so that if a pit bull seems friendly, I, I'm, I'll happily pet it. And that kind of encapsulates what I was trying to do with this book. Like, you know, open your eyes as wide as possible to what is scary about these topics, but not, you know, go out of my way to scare you and deal with the things about these things that maybe aren't scary or in some cases can be kind of hopeful.

So, yeah, I'm not trying to scare people. I'm just trying to get people to look at these things clearly. It's trying to banish fear, in fact. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You could say that. Well, one of the things I really love about the book is its structure. Can you explain to the audience, like what the structure of the book is? I think that's really fascinating. So it's generally structured.

The chapters go from – nobody's asked this question before, by the way. So thank you. The chapters go – there are 19 chapters, and they go generally from the – least grim possibilities at the start of the book to the most grim possibilities toward the end of the book. With a few sort of exceptions mixed through, but that's the general structural trend of how it's written. So it'll get more and more grim as you go until the epilogue, which is about the end of all existence. And the individual chapters are structured such that there's a little bit of fiction to start you off to kind of like what your appetite to get you thinking. And then the reported part kind of defends the piece of fiction that I wrote, usually defends the piece of fiction that I wrote.

I don't generally write a little piece of fiction and then refute it, say, oh, but that's not really what would happen. Sometimes what I report out is going to kind of in some ways imply that what you just read in the fiction section isn't especially likely to take place. But, you know, when I write that little piece of fiction, I'm trying to get you to think about the way I want you to frame it. So, you know, speaking of ones that aren't apocalypses, there's a chapter on the day that the last human-driven car rolls off the lot. And to get you thinking the way that I'm thinking about this topic, my little piece of fiction, I took you to India so that you would stop thinking about how that's going to work in like Manhattan and start thinking about how that's going to work in like Mumbai. All right. On that note, I want to point out that you've got, you know, you run the gamut here. We've got, you know, your last fish in the ocean, billionaires taking over the world, which I'll point out is number two.

The last entry in the book before the epilogue is the day the last cemetery runs out of space. Why is that the most grim? Because it's about cemeteries. Spooky skeletons and corpses and coffins. That's why. Okay, fair enough. Because it's about your, it is literally about your death, dear reader. It is about like the fact that if you, if, for instance, if you're a veteran right now, if you served in Afghanistan last year, you're not going to, you're probably not going to be able to be buried in Arlington.

No matter how, no matter what kind of bravery you served with, it's going to be full. That's not, that's not going to be available to you. There's a pretty good chance you're not going to be able to be buried anywhere. They're not going to have that available, although I don't think the last cemetery is going to run out of space inside of your lifetime. But it's going to, it's changing. It is dramatically changing. This also speaks to another thing that I think is very interesting about the book is like obviously nukes and the internet shutting down. The really like frightening world ending events are in here.

But there's also a lot of apocalypse and Armageddon's in the sense of great civilizational change, right? not just the end of the world, but the beginning of something else new. Can you talk about that? Most interviewers, most interviews do not pick up on this theme of the book. Yeah, exactly. Yes, that is really what I was going for. Yeah, the best example of that is the first chapter, which is on the monarchy being abolished in the UK, which is something that the people that I spoke to at Oxford said was eventually going to happen, that the UK will abolish its monarchy. And if you look through the existing scholarship on this, nobody wants to think about it.

Nobody wants to contemplate it. So, you know, I went through, I went to constitutional scholars, and I said, like, what happens to your country if you do away with the monarchy? And they were like, glad somebody's finally asking this. So, you know, like, these things may not be,

it may not be the end of the world. Losing the monarchy is the end of the world. if you, like, work in British tourism, then it's kind of the apocalypse for you. But for most people, it's not. It's just a kind of paradigm shift that people don't think about in any kind of detail. Or if they do think about it, then there's somebody, they're like a, they're like a, somebody from the Tory party, and they're like, oh, if we do that, it could lead to the end of monarchy, or, oh, that kind of thinking could lead us toward a republic.

and what they mean is they could lead us toward something unthinkable. They're not thinking all the way to a republic. They're just using the republic as an example of something unthinkable that they really, really don't want to happen. So what I like to ask is, well, okay, but what then? You know, what happens then? Okay, so this book is kind of born out of this series of articles, a column you had advice for a long time about the future and kind of like,

how worried should I be? or how scared should I be, I believe, was the name of it, right? Yeah, it's born out of that one, and it's born out of one called Hours and Minutes, which is usually about war scenarios. Okay. So, did you, it strikes me as we're talking about this, that, I think probably when I was a teenager, that they're, in, like, into my early 20s, there's kind of what I'll call non-prejoratively a juvenile obsession with, like, the end of the world and end of the world scenarios.

But then as you study it, do you feel like you kind of, as you learned more, you kind of grew out of it and became more interested in the greater question of what comes after? Because this stuff, we don't end, right? Like, even with a climate, even with climate devastation, there's still going to be something afterwards. What the shape of that is is up to us to shape, but there's still a future, correct? Yeah, I mean, I think, So when we talk about the apocalypse, we don't really define our terms. If you're, if you're Catholic, then the apocalypse means the final judgment. It means, it means the end.

And, you know, and there's a process built into that. There's, you know, certain, their souls go to heaven. People are sorted out. It's not like, it's not like there's just a period at the end of the sentence of existence, and then there's no more. But it, but it means a sort of theological end. I think to a lot of people, the apocalypse means human extinction, which I don't think a lot of people think about it. I think, you know, there are a lot of people who they think about the climate apocalypse in a sense of like, oh, you know, can I swear on this, by the way?

Is this a swearing podcast? Yeah, absolutely. Go to town. Okay. So, I mean, so a lot of people, you know, look at climate change. You know, you have Jonathan Franzen writing in the New Yorker, you know, but we're fucked. Let's stop pretending that we can do anything about climate change. And then there are people who take that a step further and say, we're all going to die.

Let's go to the woods and learn to be in tune with the dirt and soil and animals that live there as we contemplate finitude. And I don't think they're really thinking about collapsed civilizations that currently exist. There's this idea that the temperature will increase to a point where I guess they think we'll all kill each other for food. They have such a dim view of humanity that they think that once food supplies are cut off or once water is scarce, that will all slit each other's throats. And, you know, you can look at parts of Madagascar where that's very true right now. And things aren't great, but they're not all dead.

And to say that humanity is going to go extinct in the near term is sort of weirdly naive. So today I just heard a, I was listening to the, I was listening to the current affairs podcast and they had a, they had, they had, I forget his name, the guy who works for Matt Brunig's think tank, who does Native American stuff. And he described the Native Americans as people who are familiar with what it's like to live after the end times. you know, this was all theirs. Pretty much the worst thing imaginable happened. And now they're kind of living with that. You know, that is that happened. They look through everything through that sort of scope of, of everything's viewed in retrospect.

Everything's viewed sort of like through the lens of it all, this is all the, this is all the cost of what they did to us, you know. And I think that our descendants will kind of view us the exact same way that settler colonialists are seen by the Native Americans as these bastards who screwed you. And you just sort of like you live with what they did forever. But it doesn't mean you're dead. It just means things are a lot worse than they were. It kind of feels like how zoomers and millennials view the baby boomer generation, right? Right, but amplified. Amplified, exactly.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. On that note, I want to transition to what I thought was one of the way, one of the very interesting questions that you asked in the book. And I want to dive deep into this one. So what's the likelihood that the U.S. is going to ban all firearms? And what would happen? Great.

So the likelihood that the U.S. is going to ban firearms is pretty much nil. I use the Australian firearms ban as my model for banning all firearms, which essentially means not banning. So that's first of all. I couldn't get to the point where you ban all of something. You know, cocaine is not, all cocaine is not banned. And all methamphetamine is not banned. You can get both of those with a prescription.

So if you go to Australia right now where guns are, I'm using finger quotes banned, you can, there are still gun shops there. I went to one in Brisbane. It's just that they are a lot harder to get. And there's a large buyback program. And now there are a lot of regulations in the way of getting yourself a gun.

So I use that as my model. And even that is extremely, extremely, extremely unlikely. I sort of took it as my premise of my chapter that some, Black Swan event has happened and made and made banning guns politically popular because first of all, it's not going to happen unless it's politically popular.

And that makes it really hard to write about because, you know, I'm getting on the phone with people from the ATF. I'm getting on the phone with people who are NRA members who are, you know, part of the part of what we call gun culture. And they're saying like, you know, what you're talking about, That's crazy. Taking away our guns, you know, nobody, if you do this, it's, you don't realize, you don't realize just what this culture is and what we stand for and this is our freedom and stuff like that. And, you know, and they're completely right. They're absolutely right that, like,

I think most people don't appreciate just how, um, just how fervent they are about, about the justification of gun ownership. Um, so I sort of had to, I sort of had to premise it on something having happened that has made the idea of banning guns popular, because otherwise it just doesn't compute. You kind of have to be living in a different America for a gun ban to even be in the air because it's, I mean, you know, Marvel movies, you know, name a hobby, name a fandom, name something that people love. It just doesn't compare to how much people in this country love guns.

It's like the number one hobby is like collecting them, buying ammo, going in the backyard and shooting them. It's what Americans love to do. And I think people on the coasts kind of don't appreciate just how much people love them. So that's first of all, not at all likely. And you kind of got into gun culture a little bit for this particular piece, right? I bought a gun, yeah. What'd you buy? I just bought a Ruger 1022, just a 22 rifle, a squirrel shooter gun.

Because I just wanted to go to an apple seed shooting thingy. Do you know those apple seed shooting seminars? I do, yeah. Have you ever been to one? No, I've never been to an apple seed. They are, it's fun. You sure do shoot a lot of rounds. You bring a little, you bring a little mini stockpile of ammunition and you shoot all day and you lie prone and shoot and you learn to like reload real fast and aim and shoot.

It's really great for beginners. but they also teach it to you on the premise that the targets are redcoats and you're defending liberty. You're never, they're not like now you're, now you're going to shoot this deer or there's like a bear in the woods or something like that. It's not hunting. They are teaching you how to defend your homeland or whatever. It is about shooting people, preferably in the head.

And it's like the most popular, it's like the most popular beginner Marksman. course in the country, and it is all about, you know, killing people. That surprised me. And not only that, but it's all about sort of teaching you the value of the revolutionary, the sacrifices of the Minutemen and stuff like that. You know, they really sort of like drill that into your head as the value of what you're, what you have in your hands is the gun that was, you know, assured to you by the Constitution. So, you know, all I mean to say is that this is kind of like step one for gun owners, for rank beginners.

People take their kids to, or their teens to apple seed to, like, introduce them to what it's like to have a gun. It is not some kind of hardcore militia indoctrination. And yet there is that tinge to it, you know? And the one that I went to was in Southern California. It wasn't in Tennessee. So, you know, this is, it is absolutely in, it is part and parcel of gun ownership that you are not going to let somebody, as the saying goes, come and take it, you know. On that note, we're going to pause here for a break.

You're listening to War College. We are on with Mike Pearl talking about his book, The Day It Finally Happens. All right. Thank you for suffering through that War College listeners. We are on with Mike Pearl. we were talking about the day, it finally happens. And he was just talking to us, or just telling us about American gun culture and how we're probably not going to lose the guns in America. It's probably not going to happen because it would take much too drastic a cultural shift.

And we just like our guns too much. Yep. Yep, that's right. And, you know, I, nonetheless, I write about the culture. But I do go through, you know, how to sort of change the constitution. how a ban would work, how the legislation would give way to buybacks. And, you know, one point that's very interesting is that most state constitutions have, you know, extra added, you know, extra little Second Amendment things written into the state

constitution just in case they repeal the federal constitutional promise that you can own a gun. So, you know, you'd have to, you'd have to not only repeal the Second Amendment, you'd have to repeal the Second Amendment and also invalidate all of those state constitutional amendments federally. So like I say, it would have to be very – doing this would have to suddenly be very politically popular. There'd have to be gun buyback programs. You'd then have to – you'd have to really then staff up the ATF and you'd have to be ready to basically make – basically wage war.

and it would probably lead to an armed insurgency of some kind. You know, and I hate to, I hate to, I mean, I think there are a lot of, I think there are a lot of gun activists who would criticize me for saying, for repeating that, because I think that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a sort of like right wing talking point that, that, oh, you can't ban the guns because they'll, they'll wage war. That's their, that's their, that's the kind of, some would say that's the kind of blackmail that keeps the, status quo as it is. But to that I would say, well, I mean, I take them at their word and they got the guns and they like to use them. So if they are in fact blackmailing us or if they are in fact threatening us with war if we try to take their guns, they can wage the war. I don't think necessarily that they would win it.

But the conclusion that I come to is that, you know, the U.S. military apparatus is, is this the biggest thing in the world. And, um, and, and a lot of, a lot of the people who owned guns were part of that military apparatus and could put up a fight. But that's not to say that they would win. If you look at, if you look at when the, when the three percenters show up to a protest to like, you know, stand guard over the proud boys or whatever it is, they like to do, um, a lot of them look very impressive. A lot of them are, you know, are, are, have just come back from wars. Their training is fresh in their minds. They're still in great shape. They can, they could probably really do some damage. A lot of them, not so much. A lot of them,

if they, if they saw action, it was a long time ago, and, and they're probably not ready for, for, you know, serious guerrilla warfare. So if, if there were a war between the United States, it's a horrifying concept, but, you know, a war, a war to take the guns, the great gun war, if it happened, I think a lot of people underestimate how much damage the gun fans could do, but the U.S. would probably prevail. The question is whether when people saw the news and when people saw the social media posts about this, about the drone strikes in the upper peninsula of Michigan, would they say, oh yeah, keep taking the guns, this is good, I want the guns gone, or would they say stop dropping bombs on American soil?

You know, that's the question. And so even if it were popular to know how people would dig in their heels and fight, would it stay popular as we tried to actually execute it? That's my question. I have not as much faith in the U.S. military to win a prolonged insurgency against an enemy that knows it really well. That's my take. And I also live and work in the South.

So I've got a different perspective on things. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I think I don't, I, we could do a whole episode just about like what that kind of war would look like. I think what your point about, um, people not being ready for things like drone strikes on high value targets on American soil. I think that would be, but now we're in like super speculation territory. So yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, you're talking about.

I mean, you say, if it were, if it came to that, if it came to like guerrilla warfare between, uh, between the actual U.S. military and, and people who, who know this area. I mean, the military is going to be a lot of people who, who know the area pretty well, too. Um, but, but you're talking about, I mean, what you're saying is, is that, is that they're, they're dug into the ground. They are, they, they have in many cases set up, set up with these battles in mind. They have set up their homes with these exact battles in mind, and they are really, really ready to wage them. And so the question becomes, because if you just go in with troops, a lot of these gun fans could probably fight them off.

They really could. They have tannerite bombs in their trees and tripwires. And, I mean, they truly are, you know, military ready. So the question becomes, because, but the gun fans don't have bunker busters. And they don't have, you know, they don't have air to surface missiles. and they aren't they aren't they don't have a tens you know there's there's a certain amount of stuff that the U.S. military has that is you know unquestionably superior to what uh to what the gun fans would would have um and so the question just becomes whether they'd actually use that stuff you know

well it's been 18 years in Afghanistan and we're still using that stuff right right well i mean yeah yeah yeah so so so you're talking about talking about, you're talking about that same kind of like police action versus versus full scale war sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, I have a hard time imagining that there would be, that it would be as intense as what we're doing in Afghanistan and have done in Afghanistan. And I, you know, and it would depend on like what escalation looks like and how many different forces you're actually fighting because there's probably going to be many different desperate groups and not just kind of one unified thing.

There's just a lot of weird stuff up in the air for what a new American civil war over a gun buyback would look like. Right. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and that's the thing about the book, you know, is that you can look at my premises and come to different conclusions than I did very easily, just depending on the kind of, like, the story that you tell of sort of how this is going to play out, you know. I think, sure, sorry.

Let's move on to a happier topic and talk about nuclear war. Great. Your family was in Hawaii when the false alarm went off. Can you tell us their story? Like, what happened? So this is the false alarm. This is the Hawaiian missile false alarm where everybody got a text message that said that a missile was inbound and that it wasn't a drill and that you needed to seek cover.

So my parents were at a at a very large and well-known Hawaiian hotel that shall remain nameless, which had absolutely no plan of any kind for an inbound nuclear missile, which a lot of, you know, safety types, generally speaking, do not do not make plans with with nuclear strikes in mind. And that was definitely the case here. They just sort of, it was, it was this bizarre sort of flailing moment where people were running around the hotel, kind of guessing as to what the, as to what the best places to be were. They decided on a stairwell toward the middle of the building, and they were exactly right.

They went to the bottom floor of the hotel. They found a stairwell that was toward the center. If it had been on the exterior side of the building, the stairwell, then that wouldn't have been such a great idea. But since it was toward the middle of the building, it was a really good place to be. But there was nobody there to tell them that. And there was nobody there who had thought this through. They went to the lobby. The lobby said, oh, if you, you know, if the government tells us to evacuate, then we'll evacuate the building.

And it's like, what do you mean evacuate the building? Like walk out into the street and get hit directly by the nuclear explosion? That's a terrible idea. It just showed that they were completely thoughtless in their attempt to adapt to a nuclear missile threat. And the thing about nuclear missiles is that they are, or the thing about, the thing about nukes in general, is that they are not the abrupt opening of a portal to hell. They are just very, very big bombs. And I think that's something that people don't appreciate kind of about what they are. I think when we talk about them, we talk about them as if one goes off anywhere ever, that's the end of the world.

Which, you know, it's a, it's a good step in that direction, but it's not the, but one, one nuclear missile going off is not the apocalypse. Yeah, that's interesting. This is one of my wheelhouses, actually. And I think you're exactly right. And the more I've learned about nuclear weapons, nuclear preparedness, nuclear safety, I've actually been much. less afraid of nukes in the past. Me too, yeah. Because it really, you talk to, like in your book, you talk to Brooke Boudamayir from the Liverpool Lab, right? Who's this guy that does these amazing lectures on like what to do to prepare yourself and like you watch those and you kind of get an idea of what you're dealing with. It's really like almost any other disaster with just a few key specifics. Right? In terms of preparation.

Yeah. And and in some ways it's more localized than a lot of disasters, you know, which I hate to say because the destruction is pretty widespread for a bomb, but it tends to be pretty local. Yeah. Yeah, I was in New York recently talking about or talking to the Office of Emergency Management there about nukes. and the gentleman I was talking to is like, what is the material difference between the advice we give for nukes versus any other disaster? It's generally the same, right? And it's just like what you just said, like get into the middle of a building. Or if you can get below ground, get below ground into the basement, take shelter, wait a while for the dust to settle quite literally, and then figure out what's going on.

at that point. Yeah, and not only that, but I, my, my folks were convinced that if it were, that, that, that it was a sort of like, that it was a strategic strike. They thought this through. They were like, well, the Pacific fleet of the, of the U.S. Navy is pretty much based, you know, in, in Pearl Harbor, just right over there. They were, they were on, they were on Oahu. They were in Honolulu.

They easily could have been hit by a missile that was aimed at the Navy installation in Pearl Harbor. It could have been Pearl Harbor, too. And they figured that it probably was in that they were doomed. And so I went to, I'm sure you've used Nuke Map. Oh, yes, Mr. Alex Wallerstein has been on the show before. So, yeah, definitely. Okay, great. Yeah.

Yeah. So I went to nuke map right then. because I'm a big fan I went to nuke map while I was on the phone with my parents and I was like, well let me see and then I brought up the actual the megatonage

or the kilotunage of the biggest North Korean nuclear weapon that had been tested so far I dialed that into nuke map and I dropped it right on Hickham Field in Hawaii you know saying like

okay well if they send their biggest nuke and scored a bullseye right on Hickham Field, and then I looked at where they were. They were in, they were in, they were in, they were in, they were in, they were in Wickee. A nuke in field leaves Wichykee, pretty much untouched. And a large nuke, that, that targets Hickham field leaves Wikiki pretty untouched. And I think they were pretty surprised. But that's a nuclear bomb, you know. It's, I thought it killed, you know, the entire. city. And it's like, well, it kills a lot of people. It certainly doesn't, it certainly doesn't spare a lot of the territory in the immediate surroundings of its target. But, you know, a certain,

a certain range out from a, from a nuclear weapon, you're not going to be knocked, you're not going to be knocked down by the shock wave, you're probably not going to be hit by the immediate blast of radiation, you're, there might, there'll be fires, there will obviously be the danger that comes from, you know, being near a horrible disaster that just happened. You're not going to be in a good situation, certainly, but the immediate effects of a nuclear strike will leave you alone. You know, where I'm sitting right now in the San Fernando Valley, if they dropped even, I believe even if they dropped a Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuclear bomb ever dropped on downtown Los Angeles, where I am right now in the San Fernando Valley,

I would be fine. So I think we kind of, in our minds, I think we kind of overestimate the size of these of these explosions. As big as they are, we kind of, we kind of overestimate them. We turn them into something supernatural when they are, they are just, they're just weapons. Well, the other source of fear for these is that we don't normally conceive of them as just one, right? Yeah.

We're thinking about a massive launch. For good reason. For good reason. Yeah. And I mean, and it makes sense to think of it that way, particularly since we haven't seen a lot of a lot of retaliation plans. We haven't actually, you know, those haven't been, those haven't been declassified. I'm not sure any of them have ever been declassified. You know, the actual, the actual step-by-step plans for nuclear retaliation, for instance. If we, if, if, if North Korea drops. If North Korea uses one of their new submarine-fired missiles to bomb Los Angeles, then what do we retaliate with? Do we retaliate with 100 missiles?

Do we retaliate with nuclear weapons at all? Do we use conventional warfare as our nuclear retaliation? There's something to be said for using our huge conventional military to retaliation. to retaliate, particularly since North Korea has been preparing itself for decades for nuclear retaliation, you know, going underground and, you know, building out huge, huge tunnels, huge inhabitable tunnels that we don't even pick up on our satellite photographs. So, like, is it even a good idea to, you know, quote unquote, bomb them back to the Stone Age? We like to say that we would, we love to use this phrase, wipe North Korea off the map.

But if we used all of our nuclear weapons on North Korea, you know, we'd certainly do some damage, but could it be wiped on the map? It's not clear that it could be wiped off the map in the way that people think, and they're like genocidal nuclear fantasy. So is it necessarily, would we necessarily retaliate with nukes? Yeah, probably, but not necessarily. Well, you're also speaking to the limits of air power itself to win a conflict, but that's a whole other podcast. Sure. So of all your doomsday scenarios, which do you still find the most frightening?

Hmm. Which do I still find the most frightening? Probably the internet going down. I was shocked when I was shocked when I researched that at just how just how helplessly we would be if we lost the internet

and just how sudden of a change that that would be I'll put it to you this way The reason that the loss of the internet scares me so much is that I thought I was going to kind of debunk it and I came away from it more scared. I thought I'm on the coast. I'm a, I work in media. Of course I'm helpless without the internet.

I'll go find somebody who is going to be fine without the internet and I'll talk to them. And so I found a long haul trucker. And I was like, what would happen if you didn't have the internet? And he was like, I'd be fucked. I couldn't do anything. Nothing would work. I couldn't put gas in my truck. I couldn't get jobs. I'd be stranded at the side of the road if the internet went out. And I thought like, you know, and when you put it together, like, you can't use most point of sale systems in most retail establishments. They're all,

they're all ISP based. You can't do anything. You can't make phone calls. Most, an increasing number of, This was some original research that I did. But an increasing number of mobile phone carriers are using internet protocol-based data transfer to move mobile phone ones and zeros around. So when you make a call, that stuff is being moved from tower to tower with internet. They're not charging you for it as though it's internet. They're charging you for it as your phone minutes. but it's it's internet everything now is internet your your landline calls are internet and more and more the water that comes out of your pipes is uh is you know that's kept from that's kept that's

you know backflows are prevented via internet enabled telemetry systems and increasingly the people who work at utilities are not aware of how those systems worked before the internet-based automation went into effect. That sort of institutional knowledge is gone. So, you know, a lot of those, a lot of utilities could probably survive if the internet went down, but a lot couldn't. There'd be some accidents, definitely. So what I mean is that when it comes to global scale disasters, I think that there are

some that we expect and are in a sense prepared for because we think that they'll like creep up like climate change flooding from climate change or something like that well those are things that'll happen you know Miami will Miami will be destroyed over the course of decades it's not something that'll happen all at once but if the internet blinks off I don't think we're ready for just how dramatic of a of a change that will be how we will all lose this superpower that we've all grown accustomed to having and none of us are ready to do anything access our money communicate with any anyone find information about anything without the internet. So that's something where the level of unexpected chaos that would ensue genuinely, genuinely left me worried after I researched it.

All right, but how likely is something like that to occur? Not all that likely, fortunately. What I discovered is that barring a deliberate attack, the internet is not likely to. go down wholesale. You could, you could, you know, an international subterranean data transfer cable, one of those fiber optic cables under the ocean. One of those could get severed by, you know, some kind of accident or by a, you know, by a shark biting it or something like that, although they say they say they're shark proof now. So there are, there are pieces of the internet that can, that can get knocked out. There was this lady in Sibleezy, Georgia a few years ago,

who knocked out the internet to Armenia and most of Georgia by just chopping a cable with an axe. But the entire global internet, it would have to be a deliberate and pretty sophisticated attack, probably by a state actor for that to actually happen. And barring somebody who, barring global scale sabotage by a well-funded terrorist group or something like that, the internet is probably safe just because it's so complicated and it's made of so many different things.

So that's the good news. You know, we usually like to end the show on a downbeat, but I think somehow it's appropriate for a book of this nature for the show to be a little different and end on a slightly upbeat note. Sure, I like it.

Mike Pearl, thank you so much for coming on the show. The book is The Day It Finally Happens, Alien Contact, Dinosaur Park's, immortal humans and other plausible phenomena. Thanks. Great to be here. All right. Thank you so much for listening. War College listeners. War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Kevin Nodell, who is about to go back to the Middle East. It will be gone for about a month, and I will be flying solo, and I'm both mad that he is leaving me and worried about his safety.

Kevin knows what he's doing, though. He will be safe and just fine, and we will get to hear all about what he saw and experienced as soon as he gets back. War College was created by myself and Jason Fields, who just entered an essay contest about how we can deal with Russia. His answer was not much. If you like the show, please like and subscribe, share us on iTunes, and all the other places that find pods are casted. You can find us online at War underscore College and myself at MJ Galt and Kevin at KJK Nodell. We'll be back next week. Until then, stay safe.