ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

Imagine being told “you’re going to die!”.

Not a pleasant thought, is it? And yet, that’s the reality of life. You are going to die. Possibly those of us who don’t suffer from thanatophobia don’t think about it very often, but it’s something which is acknowledged whether or not you like it. Which is why it’s not so much a question of are you going to die, but precisely how you are going to go.

So just pick your preferred option from the list and sit back and wait for the inevitable.

1. Not being thin

   Apparently, unless you’re as thin as it’s possible to be without being underweight, you’re increasing your chances of getting cancer and dying. (“Be thin to cut cancer, study says”)

   And of course, if you’re overweight, you’ll get heart disease and die from that, too.

2. Eating bread

   And let’s not forget that eating bread ‘raises cancer risk’.

3. Drinking fizzy drinks

   As per seemingly everything else, drinking fizzy drinks increases the cancer risk.

4. Ebola

   There seem to be quite regular outbreaks of various forms of haemorrhagic fever in Africa, one of the latest having accounted for 170 people since April. Obviously, if the highly infectious disease were to break out and for people to start being infected in airports, it’s be across the world before you knew it.

5. Aids

   Let’s not forget AIDS; in the 80s we were regularly exhorted not to “…die of ignorance” (which didn’t in itself make it to the list), but the battle against AIDS has taken several steps back since then — lack of availability of condoms, desire to use them and education being important factors — and more than 40 million people worldwide are now HIV positive.

   Just remember kids: if you sleep with someone, it’s going to kill you. At least, that’s how the campaign seemed to me in the 80s…

6. Houses may drop in price

   To many of us, this wouldn’t automatically be fatal, but seemingly from the coverage given to the possibility at times in the Daily Mail and the Express, it is of such concern to their readers I can only presume it must be fatal in at least some cases.

7. H5N1

   Or Bird Flu as it’s better known. Obviously it’s only a matter of time until this becomes a global pandemic and kills everyone too.

   But if you’re feeling a little concerned about it, why not read the BBC’s Q&A. That’s bound to put your mind at rest … isn’t it?

   Researchers are now concerned because scientists … found the virus can affect all parts of the body, not just the lungs. This could mean that many illnesses, and even deaths, thought to have been caused by something else, may have been due to the bird flu virus.

   There is no failsafe way of preventing its spread. Despite mass culls, exclusion zones and other measures put in place to prevent its spread, the H5N1 virus has continued to travel.

   If the virus gained the ability to pass easily between humans the results could be catastrophic. Worldwide, experts predict anything between two million and 50 million deaths

   BBC Bird Flu Q&A

8. Meteor Impact

   And let’s not forget the possibility that we could be wiped out (or at the very least that other mainstay “the end of civilisation as we know it”) by the earth being hit by a sufficiently large meteor. After all, this accounted for the dinosaurs, and there is plenty of evidence that the earth has been regularly hit by large meteors capable of doing this sort of damage.

   Although what is ‘regular’ to a cosmologist is somewhat different from what is seen as ‘regular’ to someone going about their normal day to day business who doesn’t normally think on a millenial timescale. But we can still worry: it was forecast in 2004 that the 320m asteroid 99942 Apophis had a 1 in 17 chance of hitting us in 2029 (although it’s now believed it’s going to miss).

   That’s not really planet-killer size, but approximately once in every 10 million years of its history, the earth has been struck by an object with a diameter of 5km or more. That sort of impact would be the equivalent of 10 million megatons (with the largest ever nuclear device exploded having a yield of just fifty megatons.

   So that’s another thing for you to worry about.

9. Nuclear War

   Possibly not looking as likely as it once did, but that old mainstay of the Cold War is still a possibility: an itchy finger in the wrong place and pop goes the weasel, as it were. But of course the leaders of our governments are too sensible to lead us into pointless wars that will go nowhere and just cause pain, death, and destruction. Aren’t they?

10. Worrying

    Worrying too much is bad for you — increases stress, blood pressure, can lead to heart disease, strokes and so on. Of course, it’s a bit difficult not to worry sometimes when it seems that you can’t get through a single day without discovering another fifteen things that are likely to kill you…

11. Terrorism

    Terrorists don’t actually kill that many people (not when compared to heart disease, cancer, malaria, TB and the like) but my goodness me they certainly make the headlines, don’t they? And with scare stories about terrorists planning to use dirty bombs (including those which involve fictional substances, such as the alleged ‘red mercury plot‘), this is going to be one you can worry about for some time to come…

12. The Earth Flipping Over On Its Axis

    In just 30 years time, according to the writer Sir Ian Rankin in his book “Doomsday Just Ahead”, the earth will flip over on it’s axis when the magnetic pole shifts around. Now it’s certainly possible that the magnetic pole will shift around — there is plenty of evidence for what is termed “geomagnetic reversal” — but it’s entirely possible that some people in the scientific community will scoff at the suggestion that the earth will suddenly spin randomly on its axis for a bit, have the oceans slooshing about willy-nilly across the land, and then establishing new north and south poles.

    Particularly since it seems that his book says that:

    …more radically still, he claims that human civilisation has reached its current sophisticated levels many times before - and on each occasion was obliterated by a pole shift.

    …gravity doesn’t exist…

    …the Sun isn’t the centre of the solar system…

    Telegraph review of Doomsday Just Ahead

    …Hmm. Maybe I’ll not worry about that theory just yet, then…

13. What about that scientific one, then — Geomagnetic Reversal?

    No, this isn’t going to kill you. Current estimates are that the earth’s magnetic field is currently weakening to the extent that the field may collapse at some point between 3000 and 4000 AD. There are theories that this will be unpleasant: it may lead to a damaging increase in cosmic radiation (although our earlier ancestors seem to have survived prior shifts), and almost certainly it’ll play merry hell with your in-car sat-nav. But it’s quite a way off, so you can probably ignore this one.

14. Global Warming

    Ah yes, you remember those millions of tons of CO₂ we’re pumping out into the atmosphere, all that energy we’re wasting and so on? Well apparently, that’s a bad thing too.

    The planet is warming up, and some models predict that as it warms up, the sea will be unable to store as much carbon, making it warm up more, and that there are deposits of methane under the ocean beds which will bubble to the surface if the seas get warmer, and as that’s a greenhouse gas, they’ll warm it up even more. Basically, we’re seriously arsing up the planet simply because it’s deemed more important to keep businesses running smoothly and not to upset the economy more than it is to ensure we’ve still got an inhabitable planet in another hundred years.

    And it’s not just the warming that’s the problem: it’s the idea that whole swathes of continents will effectively become dry climates and become uninhabitable…

    You can’t call it a drought anymore, because it’s going over to a drier climate. No one says the Sahara is in drought.Richard Seager, quoted in New York Times (Online)

    …then there’s the freak weather conditions: the hurricanes, the tornados and the like which are increasing in frequency. There’s the fact that with a warmer global climate, the malarial mosquito will have a far greater effective range and diseases previously generally only associated with sub-saharan africa can spread into temperate climates.

15. Superbugs

    Then of course we have MRSA and Clostridium Difficile: the new superbugs that are antibiotic resistant, that you’ll obviously contract if you do so much as go near a hospital, and then will kill you.

16. The Rest

    Then there’s traffic accidents, suicide, various other infections, accidents at home, accidents in the workplace, necrotising fasciitis, murder (what with you being likely to be shot or stabbed seemingly if you visit the wrong city — “ooh, isn’t society violent these days?”), there’s drugs overdoses, there’s liver failure from everyone who’s now binge-drinking 24 hours a day — in between fighting of course — there’s salmonella in pretty much everything. And if isn’t that something kills you, you’ll end up going senile or you’ll get CJD and your brain going all spongy and only then you die.

So there you have it: you’re fucked, basically. It’s just a question of what kills you.

Alternatively, you could just go through life enjoying it; accepting that the inevitable will arrive at some point but not living your life so choked up with fear that you’re actually afraid to live…

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Life, Oddities, Science, Thanatophobia. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.