Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody

cars!”

• “What do you call a Zebra Fish with two black eyes? Nothin’! You already told it twice.”

• “Have you heard about this? Male fish turning female? They call ’em TransvesTilapia.”

That’s just a staggering oversimplification based on a very limited set of data. So maybe you shouldn’t worry yourselves about it. Even if it is happening right now, as you read this! But for there to be some real danger of a humanity-erasing plague of sterility, it would probably have to strike both men and women drastically.

Which it is. Come on! Would it be in this book if it wasn’t terrifying?

The UCLA School of Public Health has found some early evidence that perfluorinated compounds, or PFCs, could be associated with increasing infertility in women. And, though they sound exotic and rare, PFCs are used in pretty much everything: Plastics, pesticides, clothing, makeup—odds are you’re wearing or touching something chock-full of perfluorinated chemicals as we speak. The study says that women with higher levels of PFCs in their blood take longer to become pregnant than women with lower levels, if they can become pregnant at all. Because more manufactured materials are used and discarded in those pesky industrialized Western nations again, of course they’re the ones getting hit the hardest. And right in the babymaker.

There’s research to suggest that the fertility of both sexes is in decline due to somewhat mysterious circumstances, but not all sterility-inducing factors are unidentifiable. For example, right now a new crop of genetically modified corn is being harvested. This mutated corn isn’t any larger than normal, doesn’t have a longer shelf life, and isn’t more resistant to disease: It has only one purpose, and that is to serve as a contraceptive.

Seriously.

It’s condom corn. It’s birth-control maize. The crop is harvested and distilled into a gel that acts as a spermicide, but it could render males who eat it infertile as well. One can only assume that the corn is also quite literally the most delectable substance on Earth, because though ordinary corn bread is undeniably delicious, it’s not quite “I don’t want to have kids ever again” delicious. A company in San Diego called Epicyte is responsible for this terrible, terrible idea. They’ve accomplished this extremely unsettling feat by using a recently discovered and exceedingly rare class of human antibodies that attack sperm. When they found these antibodies—which I should remind you are described as “attacking” something inside your balls—Epicyte decided to take the road less traveled and, instead of taking the logical course and killing them with fire, they opted to splice them into corn crops.

Other Epicyte Inventions

• Black Death by Chocolate Cake

• Coke Ebola

• AIDS burgers

But I digress. Epicyte isn’t pure evil; they actually want to help. The general idea Epicyte is working on is to create a hormone-free contraceptive that places reproductive responsibility on both men and women equally, rather than sticking with the status quo, which is asking women to take daily insanity pills so sex can be fun again. Epicyte has also isolated an antiherpes antibody and spliced that gene into the corn as well. So their product will not only serve as a sexual lubricant, but also as a contraceptive and an STD inhibitor. Epicyte president Mitch Hein explains how it works in bizarrely dance-centric terms:

Essentially, the antibodies are attracted to surface receptors on the sperm. They latch on and make each sperm so heavy it cannot move forward. It just shakes about as if it was doing the lambada.

Aside from his strange obsession with the Forbidden Dance, that’s an accurate description. The antibodies don’t kill sperm, they just render it inactive. It’s not like you accidentally eat the wrong corn dog once and so can never have babies again—the antibodies actually have to be continually present to function. If you stop eating the corn, the effect will gradually fade.

And before you start thinking that’s comforting, let’s revisit what we learned from the genetically modified foods section: Scientists have proven, over and over again, that it is practically impossible to fully contain GM crops. They will escape and, what’s worse, could actually become the dominant strain of a crop through purely natural reproduction, not to mention the possibility of crosspollinating into other related plants. When you consider that corn is the single largest crop on the planet—sustaining not only our own food, but that of our livestock and, thanks to ethanol, even our vehicles—that’s a pretty big field to contaminate. Since it’s not an “if” but a “when” the contraceptive corn escapes, that means there is a distinct possibility that the largest crop on the planet will eventually render you infertile if you eat it, forcing you to choose between food or babies.

Food is delicious and babies are loud. And if the question is “Would you rather have a Coke or a kid? A sandwich or a lifelong commitment?” we all know the answer most men would choose. (Hint: It’s the dooming- humanity one.)

Not enough examples to worry you yet? OK, one more: There’s a popular theory right now that obesity, conventionally blamed on too much pie and couches, could actually be caused by a virus. A fat virus.

It started twenty years ago, when an Indian scientist named Nikhil Dhurandhar found something odd: An epidemic had struck the local chicken population, killing thousands of birds and leaving behind giant, fatty corpses. Eventually a bizarre type of adenovirus was found to be causing the deaths and now, twenty years after the chickenpocalypse, it’s happening again.

In humans.

Another strain of the same disease, called AD-36, is being found in increasing numbers in human fat tissue. And, as Professor Richard Atkinson of the University of Wisconsin found in a related study, it does have the same obesity effect in humans as it did in chickens. He tested five hundred people for the AD-36 strain and found that those infected by the virus weighed noticeably more than the uninfected. Even after isolating and destroying it in patients with antiviral drugs, the virus’ fat-making effects were not reversed. So, like a can of viral Pringles: Once you pop, you can’t stop (being fat).

It’s not just limited to this one bizarre strain, either. There are several other pathogens linked to obesity in the animal world, and any one could make the jump just like AD-36. Of course, this is all in a chapter about sterility, so let’s get to the matter at hand: Let’s assume there’s a fat plague ravaging the world and that eventually everybody will end up big boned and burger laden. Humanity still has urges, and what is deemed attractive in the oppisite sex can be quite flexible. So we’re having fat, sloppy, roll-slapping sex, so what? So it’s not getting us anywhere, that’s what. A study at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam tested three thousand women struggling with fertility problems and found that chances of successful pregnancy reduced by a staggering 4 percent with every additional Body Mass Unit: The more obese the woman, the less her chance of pregnancy.

This is known as the No-Fat-Chicks Theory of Evolution, and is currently being espoused by both Dutch fertility scientists and the bumpers of pickup trucks with gun racks everywhere.

That means that there’s a virus that inflicts irreversible obesity that in turn renders us infertile, not to mention the fact that our water is “feminizing” all the males, overall ball size has shrunken within a generation, and cornflakes turn your sperm into all-night dance machines that shake, shake, shake it until they die. It’s not hard to see that this is actually one of the most likely doomsday scenarios threatening our species today. So if I were you, I’d start fucking right now.

We’re going to need the head start.

5. NEW ENERGY