Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead by Robert Brockway (Epub)

Description

Just when you thought you’d accepted your own mortality . . . Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody is bringing panic back. Twenty illustrated, hilariously fear-inducing essays reveal the chilling and very real experiments, dangerous emerging technologies, and terrifying natural disasters that soon could—or very nearly already did—bring about the end of humanity. In short, everything in here will kill you and everyone you love. At any moment. And nobody’s told you about it—until now: • Experiments in green energy like the HiPER, which uses massive lasers to create a tiny “contained” sun; it’s an idea that could save the world if it doesn’t consume us all in a fiery fusion reaction first. • Global disasters like the hypercane—a hurricane so large it could cover all of North America and shoot trailer parks into space!• Terrifying new developments in robotics like the EATR, which powers itself on meat—an invention in the running for “Worst Decision Made by Anybody.”

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “A bold, terrifying read that goes down smooth thanks to a crisp infusion of humor. Thanks to this book, I can now aspire to dying in cooler ways than I ever thought possible. F**k you, old age. I’m holding out for a megatsunami.” —Daniel H. Wilson, author of How To Survive a Robot Uprising “The book is proof that the ridiculous and the horrible are joined at the hip and will never be separated; in a universe that seems to continually be thinking up new ways to kill us, Brockway knows there is but one rational response: to point at it and laugh.” —David Wong, author of John Dies at the End“There has never been a hipper Prophet of Doom. Irreverently entertaining and terrifyingly accurate, the probability of our future death has never been more fun.” —Michael Largo, author of Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die“This book is hilarious. As if I wasn’t already afraid the leave the house. What’s that? Brockway suggests the apocalypse doesn’t knock? What if I cower under a desk? Well, damn. I might as well have another nacho.” —Garth Sundem, author of The Geeks’ Guide to World Domination About the Author ROBERT BROCKWAY is an editor and columnist for Cracked.com and runs the successful humor site IFightRobots.com. He lives in Portland, Oregon. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1. Stanislav Petrov It was just past midnight in Russia on September 26, 1983, and the Cold War was at its coldest . . . and warriest. A recent transgression by Soviet military forces had left U.S.-Soviet relations more tense than a Sammy Hagar/David Lee Roth threesome—that is to say, somebody was getting a dick in the eye; it was just a matter of time. The “transgression,” in this case, consisted of Soviet fighter jets blowing a Korean Air Lines passenger plane straight out of the sky. Two hundred-sixty-nine people died in this incident, including one Larry McDonald, United States Congressman. Considering that we’re talking about the height of the Cold War here—where a windblown fart would have been reason enough to nuke a continent—that’s a pretty big “incident.” The fighter pilot’s justification for exploding a small town’s worth of people flying in the danger equivalent of a giant retarded duck? The plane maintained radio silence when hailed. Some might call that a “holy fuck-ton of overreaction” just for getting the cold shoulder from a commercial airliner, but you must keep in mind that Russia at the time was a highly volatile place. These kinds of overreactions were probably common in the USSR, leaving hot-blooded young Russian males so high-strung that, upon receiving the cold shoulder from anything—even girlfriends—a reasonable knee-jerk response was to immediately fire high-yield explosives at the offending woman until she plummeted from the sky in flames . . . probably. On top of all this preexisting tension, a NATO exercise was underway in Europe. Operation Able Archer had temporarily raised NATO nuclear alert levels in preparation of a simulated nuclear war. To help put the sheer, palpable levels of death in the air in more relatable terms, let’s use us a down-home analogy: Let’s say you and your neighbor don’t get along. Never have, never will. Such is life. But one fine day, your wife wanders onto the neighbor’s sidewalk, where upon she is immediately hit with a hand grenade by said neighbor, who then runs screaming up and down the border of your two lawns screaming obscenities and insisting that you “don’t have the balls” to do anything about it. Also, you happen to have been outside this entire time, conveniently polishing your collection of machetes and dynamite. Pretty much everybody is going to die here—it’s practically destiny. And so was the mood when Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov took charge of Serpukhov-15, a Soviet satellite station monitoring the skies for signs of nuclear attack. Petrov had agreed to cover the night shift for a coworker, so he was there when a blip suddenly appeared and the klaxons sounded. The long-distance radar was picking up a nuclear missile launch from America, targeting Moscow. While his fellow officers most likely shit themselves with fear and began slapping at nuclear launch buttons like a bunch of epileptic seamstresses, Petrov calmly deduced that the missile was likely a computer glitch. And luckily the right man was in charge. Petrov literally wrote the book on pants-wettingly terrifying near apocalypses; he was actually the author of the manual dictating Russian military response in the event of a perceived nuclear attack. So, being a key member in the development of the early-warning system, he happened to know firsthand that it was a relatively new, untested, and inherently flawed system, little better than a bunch of bells duct-taped together and shot into space to ring if something hit them. Still, it was the only system they had, and it was Petrov’s duty to warn the government of whatever missile attacks it registered, so that they could retaliate before they inevitably died. Because that was all one could do in the event of a full-blown nuclear attack: Not protect yourself, not surrender, not evacuate—just make sure that whoever fucks you gets a good solid boning in return. That’s called Mutually Assured Destruction, and it was the only thing left to do except cry in Petrov’s situation. But he held fast. “Why would the Americans launch only one missile,” Petrov reasoned, “doing comparatively little damage, but provoking a full-scale counterattack from the Russians?” If the perceived attack was a glitch and they launched missiles in response, the Americans would launch their response for real, and the resulting nuclear holocaust would kill millions on both sides. Petrov called a halt to the Mutually Assured Destruction and waited. Seated next to his enormous, steel-clad balls, he stuck by his instincts and waited—waited to see if everyone and everything he loved was about to be turned to ash by virtue of his hunch. And then it got worse! Short of getting sudden, massive, incurable rectal cancer, how the hell could this situation get any worse, you ask? The man is already waiting for a nuclear missile to strike, gambling his human instincts against the cold unerring judgment of a computer with the life of his entire country on the line—how much worse could it possibly get?! Five times, actually. That’s an oddly precise number, isn’t it? Five times worse; one for each missile that seemed to be launched. One after another, five blips followed suit and appeared on his screen. One missile blip’s a fluke, OK, but surely five Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles showing up on screen, one after another, is a pretty solid omen of the apocalypse. Why not hit the “well, fuck you too, buddy” button and at least go down swinging? Because Petrov is a stone-cold motherfucker, that’s why. In his own (absurdly calm, all things considered) words, “Suddenly the screen in front of me turned bright red. An alarm went off. It was piercing, loud enough to raise a dead man from his grave. For fifteen seconds, we were in a state of shock. We needed to understand, what’s next?”That’s right. Read that again: fifteen seconds. I spend ten times longer than that deciding what socks to put on in the morning, and that’s how long it took Petrov to a) process the very real potential of an apocalypse, b) psychoanalyze just how hard-core the Americans’ death wish was, and c) reason out a never-before-seen computer glitch in the Soviet Nuclear Defense system, whereupon he decided to place his entire career on the line in order to save the Earth. In fifteen seconds, Petrov made his assessment, and in three minutes, he would find out if he was right. You just spent as much time reading the recap of his actions as Petrov did saving the world. But though the decision was made quickly, the wait was impossibly long. As the word start ominously flashed bright red on his terminal, practically begging him to reconsider, Petrov stuck by his decision not to retaliate for three eternal minutes. Three minutes of waiting to find out whether the nuclear missile heading for his face was real. Even if they were waiting in complete and total silence, three minutes is a tense and terrifying length of time to consider your own death. But they weren’t waiting in tomb-like quiet: If the system registered more than a single rocket, it was programmed to send immediate word to headquarters. Which kind of makes you wonder what the purpose of Petrov’s whole Atlas-like “only you can decide if the apocalypse is real” duty was, if the computer just goes straight over his head the minute shit gets real anyway, like a little brother in a headlock calling for Mommy. So instead of respectful silence, Petrov spent those three minutes arguing with a panicked man over the phone, screaming commands into the intercom, and, knowing Petrov, probably winning a quick game of Heads-up Basketball while banging eight supermodels in a Ferrari. System checks kept being run on the computers, and everything kept coming back not only positive, but also registering the highest level of accuracy in its assessments. “Everything’s cool,” the computer whispered, “just kill everybody and we’re totally cool.” Because you’re not a dramatic silhouette burned into a sidewalk right now, you already know what happened: nothing. The “launches” were false alarms, glitches in the system caused by stray sunbeams registering as missiles (although the fact that the Russians’ elite military systems confused a sunny day for a nuclear holocaust and nearly wiped out the Earth in retaliation probably does little to set your mind at ease). The system was actually designed specifically to rule out this exact effect, but due to a near-cosmic alignment of the sun, U.S. missile fields, cloud coverage, and atmospheric phenomena, it was tricked into doing the one thing it was built to avoid, making any possibility of this particular error occurring practically nil. And still Petrov called it out. If this were poker, Petrov would’ve just bluffed God out of his winning hand without even holding cards. When asked about his personal opinion regarding such an impossibly fucked situation, Petrov laconically replied that it was all just “God’s own little joke of outer space.” I hope he put on sunglasses while electric guitar solos raged behind him after a line like that. So regardless of the situation, he saved the world! He’s a hero, right? Nope. Not exactly. As stated before, if those satellites registered an attack, Petrov’s only duty was to hit that retaliation button and murder a continent. The entire human race, Russians included, is alive today only because this particular Soviet soldier made an impossible judgment call. What happened to the man who saved the world? His superiors were so embarrassed that there was even a problem in the first place that they began a “formal investigation” into Petrov’s “failure of duty.” Among other things, they were quite perturbed that Petrov had not taken notes during this ordeal. They insisted that, between talking down Russian Nuclear Tactics headquarters from their kill frenzy, personally assessing the viability of the most advanced technology on Earth, and playing chicken with the angry hand of God, Petrov should have also shown his work, like a grade-school algebra student. Why didn’t he, they asked? His exact, word-for-word response: Because I had a phone in one hand and the intercom in the other, and I don’t have a third hand. When confronted with such infallible logic by the man solely responsible for the continuing lives of your children, what did the higher-ups do? They reassigned him to a “less sensitive” position, from which he soon retired. He received a pension of about two hundred dollars a month, and the record of this incident was kept top secret until 1998. That’s fifteen years of complete obscurity. Fifteen years of knowing you saved the world, and getting the career equivalent of being reamed in a broom closet for your troubles, and somehow Petrov still soldiered on. During this period of obscurity, he suffered a series of debilitating tragedies: His wife died, his legs became so badly infected that he couldn’t walk for months at a time, and the village he lives in wouldn’t even give him a job sweeping the streets. So, to recap: He was basically fired, for not completely fucking over his own government. Because in Soviet Russia, government fucks you. Since 1998, however, when word of his astounding deeds was finally made public, he has received a World Citizen Award! Amazing! It may have taken forever and a day, but a good deed is rewarded! With $1,000 dollars and a trophy! That’s not a typo. One thousand dollars. And a trophy. The same reward for winning a regional amateur bowling tournament, for the man who saved the world. Thanks for not ending humanity; buy yourself an ’83 Honda Civic. But what does Petrov himself have to say about his pivotal role in the continuing existence of human life as we know it? What does he think about his own actions, the fate of the Earth, and the subsequent disbarment and tragically inadequate rewards? “I was simply doing my job and I did it well. Foreigners tend to exaggerate my heroism.” Well, shit. Let’s hope he never reads this. He’d probably kick my ass. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐One of the funniest things I’ve ever read in my life. Brockway is a comedy writing master. This book is also very informative; it’s obvious he really did his research. The only “fact” I don’t agree with was how long ago he said a supervolcano erupted (26,000 years). I’m not sure where he got that number from. The last real eruption was at Toba over 70,000 years ago.EDIT 10/29/19 — My apologies to Mr. Brockway. Apparently, New Zealand did, in fact, experience a supervolcano eruption 26,000 years ago, if you go by the definition of a super-eruption (based on how many cubic kilometers of tephra erupted).

⭐The chapter on genetic modification of Klebsiella planticola is substantially false – there is a good discussion of it on the planticola Wikipedia page.I stopped reading at “We start overusing antibiotics and as a consequence we start to see the evolution of superviruses that cannot be stopped” since I don’t want to absorb information from someone who confuses bacteria and viruses.

⭐The first chapters are the most engaging because they cover the things that have ACTUALLY occurred in the past that brought the planet close to annihilation. These are very interesting and terrifying, and well worth reading about. The rest cover possible situations which, while fascinating and exciting, do broach the extremes of possible likelihood. If you imagine the world will likely go on as it is barring some extremely unlikely calamity, then you may want to pass on this one – however as a thought exercise it is compelling.

⭐The book is divided into a series of short essays. Each essay outlines a different subject or person or event, and the author has obviously done his homework. The first section of the book is by far the funniest. Although the remaining essays are amusing and entertaining, the book seems to run out of steam as it progresses. Warning: it is filled with profanities, so anyone who is easily offended should definitely stay away.

⭐This book made me both laugh out loud and think at the same time. I recommend it highly. Very entertaining!

⭐I like fact based comedy and am a huge cracked.com fan this book didn’t disappoint in fact I couldn’t put it down

⭐I don’t really need to say much about this book other than I kept me laughing from beginning to end. It basically describes how so many things could and will wipe out the human race. Some terrifying examples are super tsunamis, super volcanoes, plate shifts, super viruses, genetically engineered food and a lot of other man made stupidity. The reality is terrifying, the delivery is hilarious. If you have a dark and twisted sense of humor, this is definitely for you.

⭐Scary and funny too.

⭐It’s hard to know how to take this book – on one hand, it’s obviously a comedy book, and it succeeds in that reasonably well. Rather more misses than hits, but when it does hit it hits hard. There is some genuinely magical comedy in here. Just not as much as you might want from a book that is explicitly about the funny. But it’s also a book about how dangerous the universe is, from our own little patch of it to the greater expanse of space above. So it’s also kind of a science book, maybe? But the science is egg-shell thin and the conclusions preposterous and fanciful, based on a fundamental lack of understanding of the scale of the technical challenges of human made disasters. To be fair, it’s an exercise in explicit, unashamed fear-mongering so that’s to be expected. I think that could have been accomplished more effectively with a book that didn’t rely on newspapers (with all their attendant inaccuracies in understanding and reporting on anything vaguely complex), television news (with their unending need to make the world seem exciting at all times), and popular periodicals like the New Scientist (which is often guilty of vastly over-inflating fringe views to headline status).There are some good references in it, and some solid research, but the solid research is sidelined in favour of the popular and inaccurate flights of fantasy that define mainstream coverage of cutting edge science.So, it doesn’t really succeed hugely as a comedy book, and doesn’t really succeed hugely as a book of (even admittedly) fearmongering science. It’s not awful, by any means, it’s just… unnecessary.

⭐Simply hilarious. Robert really has an incredible knack for comedy writing. His style is very original and I found myself laughing at almost every second sentence. I haven’t got a real obsession with the apocolypse and only really bought it through reading the author’s articles on Cracked.com, but nevertheless found his research and comments on it very interesting. I want to him to write more books, I’ll buy them regardless of the subject.If I could give it 6 stars, I would.

⭐Great read, I’d recommend this to anyone with an interest in science and isn’t too paranoid.

⭐If you like Cracked articles, you will love this book. Quick delivery, good packaging.

⭐Kinda scary, but very entertaining! Definitely a book you can put down easily after a few stories of how we were almost killed by an idiots experiments!

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