Food & Drink Face Off Interview - Varsity

14
VIEWFeatures
Features Editors: Tash Lennard and Josh Sutton
features@varsity.co.uk
Friday January 25 2008
varsity.co.uk/features
The End
is Nigh
Our resident science guru and apocalyptic soothsayer Kevin Koo takes us through the ifs, whens and hows of
The Collision
The nearest spiral galaxy to
our own Milky Way is the Andromeda
Galaxy, which is quietly
spinning 2.5 million light-years
away. But Andromeda is moving
toward us at about 90 miles
per second, which means that
in three and half billion years,
the two galaxies will collide in a
Solar System-displacing display
of orbit realignment. Even as
the galaxies approach each other,
significant changes in stellar
positioning are likely to occur.
Where the Earth ends up in the
wake of this is unknown, but if
the planet isn’t torn apart by the
forces of the impact, then it could
be hurled into another solar system
or even into the dark corners
of the new merged super-galaxy.
Odds: 7,000 to 1
Ouch Factor:
The Roast
Like all stars, our sun will one
day die by heating up and turning
into a bloated red giant. The
sun provides light and heat to
Earth through nuclear fusion
reactions, in which two hydrogen
atoms merge into helium and
release energy as a by-product.
Eventually the sun will exhaust
its hydrogen core, leading to a
rapid increase in temperature
that could seriously affect life on
Earth. When the sun becomes
a red giant in about six billion
years, it will engulf the Earth
and vaporise all matter in, on,
and around the planet. We may
not need to wait that long for the
fireworks to begin, though; in just
one billion years, the sun’s energy
output is theorized to increase by
10 percent—enough to transform
the Earth into a greenhouse and
boil away all surface water.
Odds: 2,000 to 1
Ouch Factor:
The Big Rip
The universe is constantly
expanding due to a thing called
dark energy, which acts like antigravity
for the cosmos. Dark energy
fuels the steady acceleration
of the universe’s expansion. In
one end-of-world hypothesis, scientists
theorize that the rate of
acceleration is not constant, but
instead increasing. This means
it takes less time for the expansion
to get faster and faster.
Eventually the dark energy becomes
phantom energy, and even
the strongest forces in the universe
are overwhelmed, resulting
in an event appropriately termed
the Big Rip. Translation: atoms
split violently as their subatomic
particles are yanked apart. And
we, of course, are made of atoms.
Odds: 2,000,000 to 1
Ouch Factor:
The Robot Rebellion
Many people envision a future
in which intelligent technology
can be used to enhance and improve
human lives. One current
area of research seeks to engineer
robots on the molecular
scale to carry out tasks requiring
atomic-level analysis. For
example, these “nanobots” might
be used to help clean up oil
spills by identifying oil droplets
and using them to self-replicate.
But what happens when a programming
mistake directs the
robots to consume…everything
Eventually, a sea of this “grey
goo” neatly devours all matter
on Earth—a process called
ecophagy—while expanding its
own population exponentially.
Odds: 3,000 to 1
Ouch Factor: