Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody

its antimicrobial properties to both eliminate odor and reduce the chance of infection. As such, they’re being mass produced for use in socks, underwear, bandages, cookware—a billion little particles with a billion potential uses, and they don’t even need to be modified, just shrunk down. This is because some elements, when reduced to nanoscale, can suddenly have effects previously unseen in their large-scale counterparts. One gram of any nanoparticle less than ten nanometers in diameter is roughly one hundred times more reactive than a gram of the same material comprised of larger, micrometer particles. In short, the more you shrink it, the more crazy shit it does. Just like the Japanese.

Unnecessary Joke Explanation

Because the Japanese are typically a shorter people, and are, as a nation, batshit insane God love them for their awesome robots, but you cannot dispute the epicness of their crazy.

It’s also astoundingly hard to measure the exact effects of any random nanoparticles you may absorb, because the more you accumulate of any given particle, the more you change the way it affects you. In the case of regular-scale silver, the side effects on human beings are relatively harmless. At most, if you consume too much normal silver you’ll develop argyria—a condition that turns your skin blue. It is permanent, but otherwise relatively harmless. The upside of normal-scale medicinal silver? It’s an effective antimicrobial ingredient whose flexibility and relative safety have proven incredibly useful to human beings. The downside? You might have to spend the rest of your life as a Smurf. And that’s pretty OK, right? They seem happy enough folk, even if it is a bit of a sausage party.

Nanoscale silver is still beneficial, of course: It still has all the antimicrobial properties of its larger counterpart… it’s just that it might have too much. Professor Zhiqiang Hu, from the University of Missouri, has conducted studies that showed that even relatively small doses of nanosilver can kill the bacteria used to process sewage and waste. So the more nanosilver you flush, the more invincible you make your own poop—a disturbing thought if ever there was one. And these aren’t the only necessary bacteria that silver puts at risk: If too much gets into ordinary soil, it can eliminate nitrogen-fixing bacteria in there as well. All plants on Earth need that stuff to live, so if you kill that off, no more food for you. And as a human being, you probably need that stuff to live. Well, unless you’ve drunk too much normal-scale silver, in which case you’d be just fine; Smurfberries will be largely unaffected.

Downsides of Being a Smurf

Physically frail Whole life limited by adjective before name Always getting captured by asshat Gargamel Only one woman Sloppy 242nds.

Yet another problem lies in the very nature of nanotech’s construction. See, nanobots have to be made of only the hardiest materials in order to withstand the vast atmospheric pressures that would otherwise crush their delicate machinery. Materials like diamond, carbon, and even gold are used in pretty much all nanotech. Durable materials. Strong materials. Materials that do not break down. Materials that sit inside your veins, and just build up, and up. It takes only a millimeter of arterial plaque in your veins to provoke coronary artery disease (the leading cause of fatal heart attacks), and though nanobots are much smaller than that, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of them. Basically, you could now be looking at a massively contagious worldwide heart attack. It’s a supreme twist of irony: By developing microscopic, disposable machines in order to do away with the arcane, polluting, industrial practices of yesteryear, we may literally pollute ourselves to death from the inside out with the litter of the future. On the plus side, though, that litter is mostly made of diamonds and gold—so at least your insides will be blinged out like Snoop Dogg’s car on the submolecular level. It’s like they say: “Live fast, die young, leave behind a beautiful, jewel-encrusted cardiovascular system.”

SPACE DISASTERS

Asteroids, radiation, frigid vacuums, and hostile aliens—let’s face it: space sucks, sometimes literally. Space doesn’t bring you flowers, or nurture abandoned puppies back to health. Space doesn’t provide delicious sandwiches at the company picnic or help old ladies across the street. It doesn’t do one damn nice thing for you; it basically just plots your death from the abyssal void of nothingness. Sinister threats from outer space may seem like science fiction to you, but it’s only science fiction until it’s landing on your damn head. Also, if you really stop and think about it, there’s a lot more of space than there are of us.

My God… don’t… don’t look now, but I think it’s everywhere. Space has got us surrounded!

12. ASTEROIDS AND EXTINCTION-LEVEL EVENTS

AN EXTINCTION-LEVEL Event (ELE) is a massive die-off of the majority of life on our planet, and they often seem to be caused by a particularly devastating asteroid impact. It’s not exactly a subtle or mysterious phenomenon. In a nutshell: big rock, big explosion. There’s not much to do but die as hard as you possibly can. When most people think of major meteor strikes, they typically think of distant prehistoric events, like the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago when an asteroid roughly six miles in diameter struck the Earth at a place called Chicxulub, which we now call Mexico, and began the most dramatic extinction in history. (It was not the largest extinction period: That dubious honor falls to the Permian-Triassic extinction event. But while the P-Tr event killed off most of the world’s insects, the Chicxulub event managed to slay every single real live dragon at once, and that’s the kind of dramatic flair that squashing a trillion bugs just does not possess.) Because we associate ELEs with such disasters in the long-distant past, the tendency is to think that catastrophic asteroid strikes are strictly relegated to ancient history when, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Meteors hit the Earth like your dad hits the bottle every time you disappoint him, which is to say very often, and very, very hard.

For example, see March 22, 2008, when a one-thousand-foot diameter asteroid passed within four hundred thousand miles of Earth—missing us by only six hours. To us, numbers like four hundred thousand seem vast, but in terms of space travel that’s basically like being in Earth’s pocket, and while missing something by six hours may seem like a lot to you, in astronomical terms that’s practically already inside of you: easing just the tip of its disaster member in to see how you like it before the full-fledged catastrophic shafting begins.

But even if it hadn’t missed us, Earth’s atmosphere typically protects us from a good deal of the debris that space is constantly trying to murder everybody with, and when a meteor enters the atmosphere it usually results in little more than a pleasant shooting star. Wishes are made, boys become real, and everybody learns a little lesson about love, right? Well, those dramatic shooting stars typically come from objects no bigger than a grain of sand, and if a grain of sand can light up the night sky—while simultaneously giving life to the hopes and dreams of optimistic children throughout the world—you can probably imagine what might happen when something a thousand feet across comes barreling through the atmosphere. (Hint: It ain’t granting wishes. Unless you’re wishing for a painful and fiery death.)

The Best Wish to Make upon a Falling Star

“I wish that was not a meteor about to kill everybody I love.”

If that asteroid does enter Earth’s atmosphere, a variety of things can go down, depending on its specific