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.
Stanislav Petrov’s Shown Work
Step 1: Maintain calm in face of Armageddon.
Step 2: Call computer on its bullshit.
Step 3: Divide by GIANT BALLS.
Step 4: Stand by hunch with fate of humanity hanging over head.
Step 5: Carry the balls.
Step 6: Save world.
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 one thousand 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.
2. KLEBSIELLA PLANTICOLA
IN THE 1990s, a European biotech company prepared to commercially release a genetically engineered soil bacterium for use by farmers. They were operating under two very reasonable assumptions:
1. Nobody likes plant waste.
2. Everybody likes booze.
Whereas the common man might address these issues by simply not doing any plowing and opting to get plowed instead, scientists at the biotech company thought of a much more elegant solution: Engineer a bacterium that aggressively decomposes dead plant material—specifically wheat—into alcohol. And in 1990, they did exactly that. The bacterium was called Klebsiella planticola, and it nearly murdered everybody; you just don’t know it yet.
Klebsiella planticola is of the enterobacterium family, microbes that typically reside inside the guts of mammals, but this particular strain inhabits the root systems of most terrestrial plants. Actually, every root system that’s ever been tested for the presence of K. planticola has come up positive, so it is as near to a universal plant bacterium as there has ever been (you should remember that part, because it’s going to come in handy later). In its premodified, natural form, K. planticola is partly responsible for the decomposition of all plant matter—a vital step in the natural life cycle—and it’s notoriously aggressive in this role. That’s why it was picked out for experimentation in the first place: Like an Old Testament God, K. planticola is both omnipresent and incredibly belligerent.
Biotech researchers saw these traits and thought they seemed perfect for an agricultural problem they were working on. Burning off dead plant material, as was the standard practice, severely pollutes the air and damages the lungs of farmers. But what if, instead of the regular old largely useless sludge that decomposing plant material results in, we could alter that sludge into something more useful to humans, thus eliminating the desire to simply burn it away? What if we could ferment it, and turn it into an alcohol, a fuel, or a hyperefficient fertilizer? Or better yet, all three! Why not get blitzed off of it, piss it into your gas tank to power your car, and then puke it up into the yard to make your garden grow?
Suddenly alcoholics are useful members of society again. Hell, they’re practically heroes: brave men and women sacrificing both their livers and their dignity to bring us power, food, and alcoholic-inspired confidence! Well, that’s the noble goal biotech researchers had in mind when they spliced an alcohol-producing bacterium into K. planticola. Once their product was released, farmers would simply gather the dead plant matter into buckets and let it ferment into alcohol. Alcohol that could do everything they hoped: Be distilled into gasoline, sowed as fertilizer, burned as cooking fuel, or just drunk by the filthy, dirt-tasting bucketful. Their bioengineered K. planticola would create a beautiful, Eden-like garden paradise.
So it was all with the intent of doing good that they engineered this microbe, but you know what they say about “the best intentions,” don’t you? That’s right: They inevitably result in pestilent, humanity-destroying plagues.
Biotech Scientists
“What if we could use plant waste as fertilizer?”
“Yeah, and what if we power our cars on it?”
“Hey, yeah! And what if we could get fucked up on it too?!”
“…”
“I think you might have a problem, Ted.”
See, it was that fertilizer part where things got, shall we say, fucking horrifying: Once the fermentation process necessary to turn that dead plant material into alcohol occurred, the sludge left over would be rich in nitrogen and other such beneficial substances, making it an ideal fertilizer. The plan was to spread this sludge fertilizer back on the fields, thus eliminating all waste from the whole process.
An Exchange from Utopia
“Honey, did you mow the lawn yet?”
“Fuck yes, baby. Where you think I got this weed whiskey?”
“I love our perfect lawn, darling!”
“I love free booze!”
The big problem? The fermentation process didn’t kill the modified K. planticola—it was still there, ready to turn dead plant material into alcohol.
The bigger problem? It didn’t even wait until the plants were dead to start.
The normal K. planticola bacterium results in a benign layer of slime on the living root systems it inhabits, but the engineered version would also be producing alcohol in this slime—with levels as high as seventeen parts per million, and anything beyond one or two parts of alcohol per million is lethal to all known plant life. So the engineered K. planticola basically gives all plant life it touches severe alcohol poisoning, putting them more than ten times over the lethal limit of fucked up. Like a frat house during pledge week, K. planticola would force all new plants it encountered to drink well beyond their reasonable limits. But unlike frat-house rushes, it’s not just freshman idiots who are affected, it’s everybody. So maybe that analogy isn’t entirely accurate: It’s more like a bleak dystopian future where frat houses rule the world with a tyrannical fist, hazing and beer-bonging humanity into the grave. Because, you’ll remember, K. planticola is present in all plant life.
Every species.
Every variety.
Poisoned.
To death.
Now those wonderful traits that made it such a good candidate for modification in the first place—its notorious aggressiveness and near omnipresence—are no longer such good things, are they? Because if there’s one thing you really don’t want your poison to be, it’s “notoriously aggressive.” And if there’s one place you absolutely do not want your “notoriously aggressive poison” to be, it’s everywhere.
Keep in mind that this was not a theoretical scenario, far-flung, fictional, and unlikely to ever actually occur. This bacterium was going to be released; it had all of the necessary approval. It was only a matter of proper marketing and shipping at this point. It was only by virtue of a random review by an independent scientist (Dr. Elaine Ingham, a professor at Oregon State University and possibly the savior of all mankind) that it was caught in time.
How the fuck could this possibly happen? How did the leading biotech researchers of the day not realize that they had engineered a bacterium that would kill all plant life it touched? Did they not test it on any, y’know, plants?!
Well, for all intents and purposes: No, they didn’t.
See, the Environmental Protection Agency was the only overseer for all biotech releases, and their policy was to test new bacteria in sterile soil. The problem here being that the real world is not sterile; it is the antithesis of sterile. The whole point of sterility is to zap all normal, unexpected elements out of a sample environment so that the scientists can see its effects in a pure, untainted environment. They deemed the modified K. planticola to be safe in sterile soil, but apparently just totally forgot that its intended use was in the fucking dirt, which is a notoriously dirty place, isn’t it?! Luckily, Ingham and her group took it upon themselves to study the bacteria in a more realistic scenario, using normalized samples of unsterile soil and three different sample groups. There was a group absent of K. planticola entirely, a group with the normal K. planticola present, and a group with the genetically modified K. planticola in it. They planted wheat seeds in all three groups, and then let it sit for a week. When they came back they found the first two groups doing fine, while all the crops from the GM sample were dead.
Excerpt from EPA Protocol Manual
If your dirt is dirty, make sure to take all of the dirt out of the dirt before you test the dirt.
Dead in less than a week.
If released from the lab—which, I cannot stress enough, it very nearly was—the modified K. planticola would have spread worldwide in a matter of months, killing all plants it touched within a week, and turning all soil-based plant life into sweet, sweet liquor. Like a twisted hillbilly fantasy, the world really very nearly drowned in moonshine.
CURRENT THREATS
A lot of speculation about the apocalypse is based in the worries of an uncertain future: Will that meteor hit us? What new threats will technology bring? What crazy diseases will we fight in the future?
But there’s no need to wait to get that sick fear-fix you so desperately desire!
There’s plenty of shit going down right now that may already be wiping the human race off the face of the Earth as we speak! Don’t dwell in the future or the past, friends! After all, the reason they call it “the present” is because every day is a gift! A terrible gift that you most certainly should not unwrap. (If you shake it, it sounds a lot like genocide.)
3. FRANKENCROPS
GENETICALLY modified foods are all the rage, and recent advances in technology have us doing some pretty crazy stuff, like splicing antifreeze fish genes into tomatoes, hamster genes into tobacco, or even chicken genes into potatoes! And while fish tomatoes and hamster cigarettes sound a little disturbing, who can’t see the appeal of a chicken potato? They put peanut butter and jelly into the same jar; why not apply the same thinking to KFC? If you ask me this is just a case of science doing stoners a solid, but some killjoys decided to start looking into potential side effects of these pimped-out foodstuffs, and to the surprise of nobody, they’ve found that we’re already completely fucked to the gills… much like a fish tomato.
In general, genetically modified crops tend to be thought of as a slowly developing problem at worst. Considering that if you’re willing to pay a bit more, you can currently find organic pretty much anything, natural food is still readily available for any and all takers—provided you hate disposable income like it killed your father. But just because organics are available to elite folks in industrialized nations doesn’t mean that’s true for the developing world. When you also consider that the entire worldwide agrochemical market is owned by just ten companies—the entire thirty-billion-dollar-a-year market—you start to see signs of a future monopoly. Two companies in particular seem ripe (zing!) to govern a dystopian future straight out of science fiction: Novartis and Monsanto. Novartis is the less worrisome of the two, and—considering that they’re a single massive corporation that controls the creation of plants, the distribution of food crops across the world, and the medicines that keep you alive—being “less worrisome” is really saying something for the terror factor of their rival global-domination food company, Monsanto. See, Monsanto doesn’t seem content with meager ambitions like ruling the world’s food and medicinal supplies—they’re aiming to control the very nature of food itself, with something they have not-so-comfortably dubbed “Terminator Technology.”
Really.
That’s not a nickname made up by their opposition; Monsanto themselves named their product “Terminator.” It’s like they’re flaunting their potential supervillainy! In the realm of terror-inspiring corporate decisions, that’s right up there with naming your headquarters Death Mountain, and awarding Employee of the Week to Hitler’s-Brain-in-a-Robot. Terminator Technology isn’t just an unfortunate name, however: It really is every bit as worrying as the moniker implies. It refers to genetically modified plants that produce only sterile, dead seeds, and so cannot ever reproduce naturally. Monsanto hopes to eventually replace all of its agricultural seed sales with this technology, thus forcing all farmers to purchase new seeds from Monsanto yearly, since they’ll be unable to simply plant the seeds gathered from the previous year’s crop. The benefits to farmers using Monsanto’s new seeds must be enormous, right? Not so much! Lower prices and a slightly more stable crop. That’s pretty much it.
Better Names for Sterility-Based Plant Products
• Red Barren
• Infertile Foliage
• Impotent Potables
Oh, but the perceived benefits to Monsanto? Nothing less than the complete ownership of plant life. That sounds like the plot point to a fucking Captain Planet episode; surely it could never come to pass! The government surely must be watching and making sure that no one single private corporation could own an entire fundamental necessity of life, right? That’s like Microsoft buying “air,” or Walmart owning the patent for “shelter.” It’s so absurd that there’s no way it can slip by the authorities. And it hasn’t.
The government knows all about it.
They’ve heard about it from Michael Taylor, for one, an attorney and proponent for Monsanto as well as a current employee. He told the government all about Monsanto’s sinister plans… when President Obama appointed him to the Food Safety Working Group in 2009. Or maybe they first heard about Monsanto’s bid for domination when Michael Taylor was Deputy Commissioner for Policy at the Food and Drug Administration in the early 1990s, or maybe when he was Administrator of the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service in the mid-’90s. This guy is currently one of the central points of control for the government’s oversight of genetically modified foods, and he is working for the company that wants to own the very concept of food.
So yes, the feds are well aware of Monsanto’s aspirations, and they think that’s just awesome. They probably wish they’d thought of it first, if anything.
Terminator Technology is particularly worrisome because it forces farmers to pay for next year’s seed every year. So
if there’s any fluctuation in a farmer’s income—due to drought, infestation, or other unforeseen circumstances—and he can’t pay, Terminator Technology basically functions as a guarantee that there will be no crops to make up for it the following year. It’s like a ticket to go fuck yourself next season!
Act Now and Get 30% Off the Return Trip!
*Return trip does not reverse any pestilence, famine, or plague resulting from original ticket.
Valid every single year! Forever!
But hey, if you don’t buy this shit because you, like a sane person, are not exactly enthusiastic about a corporation renting your own belly out to you, then surely it doesn’t affect you….
Wrong again! Man, it seems like every rhetorical question you ask this book turns out to be wrong. It affects everybody, according to experts like Camila Montecinos, a Chilean agronomist, who says:
We’ve talked to a number of crop geneticists who have studied the [Terminator] patent. They’re telling us that it’s likely that pollen from crops carrying the Terminator trait will infect the fields of farmers who either reject or can’t afford the technology. Their crop won’t be affected that season but when farmers reach into their bins to sow seed the following season they could discover—too late—that some of their seed is sterile.
So if you, as a farmer, live near anyone who buys Terminator Technology, well, Terminator Technology then comes for you. And like Kyle Reese (who is no biologist but does have a doctorate in starring in the movie Terminator) says: “Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”
Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody Page 2