In a movie, we might see a glimpse of a background news story on TV or in a newspaper. Characters will ignore it, not realizing that it foreshadows the disaster about to strike. We don’t experience that exact thing in real life. Mostly, that’s because the biggest headlines nowadays explicitly tell us about the world’s imminent destruction, and we all know exactly what that means.
But there are also other stories out there, whose sinister implications we miss. We’re not talking about announcements of the rise of A.I. or the ravages of war. We mean things like…
The Monkeys Have Started Kidnapping
Scientists on Jicarón island in Panama have been watching capuchin monkeys, due to these animals’ skilled use of stone tools when preparing food. A few generations ago, people thought humans were the only animals who use tools, but that’s not true, and it’s not even the weirdest thing the scientists observed.
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They noticed many of the monkeys had baby howler monkeys on their backs. These are monkeys of a different species, and closer investigations revealed the capuchins abducting the howlers from their own areas.
Often, we try to explain all animal behavior in terms of natural selection and genes trying to propagate. That doesn’t work here because raising the young of another species limits the capuchin’s own genes from spreading. So, you might theorize that the capuchin has an instinct for raising young but has no young of its own. That theory also has its limits, because the capuchins on the island appear to have no shortage of their own young. No, the truth is the capuchins are “chaos agents,” say the scientists, agents who appear to be doing this “simply to reduce their boredom.”
Sometimes, howlers come to the area to rescue their young, and the capuchins chase them off, evidently knowing the babies are missed back home. We have to assume that the capuchins are consciously choosing evil, and the next baby they nab will be the one in the cradle next to you right now.
The Mysterious Space Message
Faraway in space is an object that scientists have assigned the catchy name of ASKAP J1832−0911. It’s a long-period radio transient, which means it sends out radio waves, but we don’t know exactly what it is. Maybe such objects are binary systems. Maybe they’re magnetic white dwarfs. This one’s 15,000 light-years away, so we haven’t exactly been able to get a close look.
But we have detected those radio waves coming from it. We’ve also detected X-rays coming off it, and an object like this isn’t supposed to give off both. It’s been shooting out this dual message once every 44.2 minutes.
Is an alien civilization directly reaching out to Earth, and do they mean us harm? No scientists personally contacted us to answer these questions, presumably because the truth is too frightening to admit. We therefore must assume the answer is “yes,” and the visitors will be here any day.
Don’t try to dismiss that by saying even light would take millennia to reach here. The aliens probably already heard about that and responded by raising the speed of light.
Millions of Bees
A truck last month was hauling some special cargo near the Canadian border in Washington. It carried 35 tons of beehives. For reasons that remain worrying absent in official reports, the truck overturned and broke open. Out of the truck came 14 million bees.
Authorities now announced what they called a “rescue” effort to retrieve the bees. That sounds like questionable framing of the issue. A rescue is generally when you free someone from confinement, not when you try to pull them back in. If these bees wanted to stay in the provided hives — and many bees do, as any beekeeper will tell you — they’d have done so.
Initial reports overstated how many bees this crash released, saying they numbered 250 million. That’s nearly 20 times the real figure, but most people would say that 14 million still adds up to a large number of bees.
In the weeks following the crash, we have received no updates, which implies that everyone responsible for providing such updates is already dead. Despite all the fears of colony collapse in recent years, there are currently a record number of honeybees, and once these and the rest get organized, we stand no chance.
Birds on a Plane
Usually, on Delta Airlines, when a flight experiences a disruptive incident, it comes in the form of a passenger letting loose diarrhea next to the beverage cart. But late last month, the screams on one flight instead resulted from the sight of a pigeon flying in the cabin.
Passengers spied the bird before the plane took off, and package handlers boarded the plane to trap it. The crew didn’t handle this job, either because they weren’t as trained in the general art of wrangling as baggage handlers are or because they preferred not to interfere with anything with wings, out of professional courtesy.
Then, when the plane taxied and prepared to take off, a second pigeon appeared and also needed to be captured. No one was willing to explain how the birds got on the plane or where they had been hiding before making themselves visible. Most worrying of all, NBC’s report on the incident cited an Instagram post from someone named Tom Caw, which is clearly the name of a bird that’s merely pretending to be human.
Some people laughed off this incident as strange and random, but wiser observers understood this was foreshadowing in action. Sure enough, two weeks later, the airline industry experienced one of the most deadly crashes in history in the form of Air India Flight 171. The birds tried to warn us. And for all we know, the danger hasn’t yet passed.
A Plan to Nuke the Ocean
We said before we weren’t going to be talking about the explicitly apocalyptic stuff that fills the news, stuff like scientists warning that we’ve crossed a threshold regarding carbon in the atmosphere and are all doomed. But sometimes, the scariest parts of these stories may be the underreported “solutions” to these famous problems.
When it comes to carbon dioxide, every plant that grows on the land sucks up just a little out of the atmosphere. The bulk of carbon dioxide that gets absorbed by anything gets instead absorbed by the ocean. We’d like some way of getting the ocean to suck even more, and suggestions for this include dumping tasty mixtures into the water to get more carbon-capturing algae to grow.
But recently, scientists from the Rochester Institute of Technology have offered a new solution. We could set off nuclear bombs on the ocean floor.
The goal here isn’t to rely on this wimpy living organism to sequester carbon but instead to turn to something called enhanced rock weathering. If we smash up, say, four trillion tons of basalt on the ocean floor, this rock will absorb carbon dioxide as it breaks down chemically. It will remove as much carbon dioxide as we emit in 30 years, which is more than we could ever hope to remove through any of the other solutions we’re debating.
Are there any possible downsides to freeing that much pulverized rock into the ocean, using a nuclear explosion many times larger than anything we’ve ever tried before? “Detonating a 81 Gt nuclear device could cause a global catastrophe if done improperly,” concede the scientists pushing this plan. But climate change could cost $100 trillion by the end of the century, while this plan would cost just $10 billion, so they argue that we can’t afford not to try it.
And if the explosion does wake a certain reptilian dweller from below, who will now take revenge on us all with his radioactive breath, that may unite us all as a people and will ultimately be for the best.
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Content shared from www.cracked.com.