5 Apocalyptic Chain Reactions (That Have Already Started)

5 A Single Red Fungus Could Starve A Third Of The World

Wheat accounts for a full third of our global caloric intake. It comes in second only to rice on the Most Important Crops list (which we as a site are like two bad ideas away from writing). So you can imagine the panic that ensued when a little red fungus known as stem rust showed up back in the 1950s and devastated 40 percent of the North American crop. Luckily, science stepped in and developed rust-resistant varieties of wheat, thereby ensuring that the primary vehicle for peanut butter delivery kept on chugging.

The problem? The same way that bacteria are learning new ways to overcome antibiotics, thereby threatening to send medicine back to the leech 'n chop days, wheat rust too is learning to overcome.

Back in 1999, Uganda experienced the first outbreak of a new strain of stem rust. Designated Ug99 for the year it was discovered, this harmless-looking red fuzz can decimate a crop in short order. And researchers have determined that nearly all wheat strains in the world are susceptible to it.

If you're thinking that this is happening way over in Uganda and therefore you needn't be the least concerned about it, then first of all: Hello, fellow American! And second of all, since its discovery, Ug99 has spread to almost a dozen countries and shows no signs of slowing. A single hectare of Ug99-infected wheat can release more than 10 billion spores, and it would take only a single spore hitching a ride on a single human to spread this to the United States and transform our amber waves of grain into red wastelands. And that's when you'll discover that when a loaf of bread is worth its weight in gold, everybody is gluten-free.

4 Cascading Space Debris Could Destroy Our Entire Way Of Life

Remember Gravity, wherein Sandra Bullock had to survive the aftermath of an orbital debris chain reaction armed with nothing but her wits and panties? While it doesn't actually occur at the lethal speed with which it's depicted in the movie, such a scenario is already happening as we speak. It's called Kessler Syndrome, and if you like the fact that you're able to read this article on your smartphone, you should know that it has the potential to wipe out everything you hold dear (that is, said smartphone).

Since the days when a spacewalk was just an excuse for an astronaut to go out for a smoke, humans have launched more than 5,000 objects into space. This has resulted in more than 100 million pieces of space debris orbiting the planet, which looks something like this:

Way back in 1978, NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler proposed that all this space junk would eventually result in a horrific chain reaction, in which one bit would collide with another bit, creating more bits to collide with, and so on until the entirety of low Earth orbit was covered in an impassable 14,000-mile-per-hour swarm of shit. At that speed, a single five-centimeter hunk of junk has the explosive power of 1.8 kilograms of TNT -- more than enough to completely obliterate your GPS's ability to get you to the nearest Burger King, stat.

And the most terrifying part? This chain reaction is already happening. It started with the accidental 2009 collision of the satellites Kosmos-2251 and Iridium 33. The impact resulted in a spectacular shotgun blast of debris, and that's only the beginning. Also in 2009, the upper stage from a Chinese rocket narrowly missed the massive eight-metric-ton sleeping behemoth known as Envisat. There's up to a 30 percent chance of the now-useless Envisat colliding with something else during its remaining time in orbit, and the number only stays that low if we never launch another thing into space.

So what are we doing to prevent this scenario from playing out? Not a whole hell of a lot. A number of exotic proposals have been put on the table -- from giant space-nets to the robotic equivalent of that elderly trash picker who cleans up after your ungrateful ass at the park -- but they're all knee-deep in a quagmire of inadequate funding and political disunity. Has nobody tried explaining how this will affect our pornography access? You'd think that would be the great unifier ...

3 Climate Change Is Causing More Wildfires; Wildfires Are Causing More Climate Change

The hottest new side effect of climate change? Unprecedented drought and higher temperatures have resulted in mega-wildfires that burn worse than that time your dad called you a busted condom. The annual surface area of the planet consumed by wildfire has doubled in the past 30 years, and is set to double yet again by 2050. Even worse: These massive fires, which are caused in part by climate change, then pump out even more fuel for climate change.

The US, with all of our fracking and our industrial processes and vicious, lifelong hatred of walking anywhere, is the world's second-place carbon emitter. (To be clear, this is one of the few contests in which we do not want to chant, "USA! USA!") Now, let's spin the globe around to Indonesia, where for a good chunk of 2015, nearly 100,000 forest fires raged through the nation's tropical peatlands. These vast swathes of smoldering carbon-rich soil produced enough CO2 and methane to overshadow the USA's average daily carbon emissions.

In 2007, after five entire millennia of happily existing as a frozen goddamned wasteland, Alaska's North Slope burst into inexplicable flame, torching centuries' worth of organic matter in the soil. It released "as much carbon dioxide into the air as the Arctic's entire tundra ecosystem, including the northern reaches of Canada and Russia, had absorbed in the previous quarter century." And Alaska is set to see a doubling of wildfires by 2050, and a tripling by 2100 ... even if world governments take aggressive actions to curb carbon emissions right fucking now. Which, taking a quick glance in the direction of our governments, looks slightly less likely than a reanimated-cyborg-powered Beatles reunion tour.

2 Huge Tracts Of Our Oceans Are Becoming Uninhabitable To Sea Life

Given the fact that more than a billion people depend on fish from our oceans as their main source of protein, the fact that said oceans are growing increasingly unlivable to said fish is a huge problem. It might sound illogical at first, but it's entirely possible for a fish to drown in water. And the oceans have always hosted vast low-oxygen zones where precisely that can happen. These areas are typically deep down, where only the Abyss water aliens and Cthulhus thrive. But in the last half-century, they've expanded by nearly two million square miles, pushing great predators such as marlin and sharks closer to the surface (and, unfortunately for your unmauled genitals, closer to shore) to avoid being suffocated by the burgeoning cloud of liquid death. The phenomenon has also wiped out entire marine ecosystems, as well as decimated the population of food fish by driving them to the surface to be picked off by over-fishing.

That's the bad news. The good news is that this is one impending disaster for which climate change might not be to blame. In fact, some research has shown that global warming may have actually served to shrink the size of some of these vast undersea dead zones. The general consensus seems to be that what we're experiencing is less due to warmer temperatures and more a plain old "part of the natural rhythm of the ocean." So it may not be our fault!

Though that's admittedly scant comfort to your average subsistence fisherman, who was less concerned with climate change and far more concerned with dinner in the first place.

1 We May Be Living In A Period Of Lost History

With the Internet, we've placed the entirety of human knowledge at our fingertips (and the entirety of human porn at other tips). But when compared to historical means, our modern storage methods are alarmingly temporary. We may have instantaneous access to them now, but we haven't given a whole lot of thought to preserving our fancy podcasts for generations to come. Case in point: the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.

As one of the largest warships in the world, it takes a whole lot of information to keep the Nimitz up and running. Every time a beast like that goes to sea, it carries with it more than half a million files and diagrams that, back in the paper age, would have required a floating library. Luckily, in the digital age, all those files can be stored as bits and bytes ... luckily, that is, until the Navy upgraded their CAD software. It turns out that opening the old files in this new software caused subtle changes that compromised the engineers' ability to properly maintain the ship. Did we mention that it's powered by two nuclear reactors?

That's merely one example of how our rapidly changing standards of information storage can cause potential disaster for those down the line. While a historic event such as the sacking of the Library of Alexandria can deal a major blow to humanity's collective knowledge, at least that's better than a hard drive that is unquestionably going to fail, even without outside assistance from torch-happy Romans. And while present-day archaeologists find it tricky to decipher information about the past, imagine future archaeologists trying to learn about today. First they'd have to find a flash drive, then figure out what the hell it is, then hope it miraculously still works (it won't), then go about figuring out the code it uses, only to find that we were paranoid about thieves finding our precious Steven Universe fanfiction, so we password-locked the whole thing.

Hey, guess what? We're always super close to being obliterated at all times! See how in 5 Cosmic Events That Could Kill You Before Lunch and 7 Horrible Ways The Universe Can Destroy Us Without Warning.

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