Chapter 292: End of the first meeting

Sobek's proposal shocked those present. "Bring the dinosaurs... here?" someone asked. Sobek had expected such a reaction, but he couldn't help but feel bothered by the man's question. "Exactly" "Can we know why?" someone else asked, but in a decidedly more respectful tone. "Of course. As I have already explained, we cannot simply build a boundary line and scowl across it. If we do this, we will always find ourselves on the razor's edge, and the risk of a second conflict would be a concrete reality" Sobek explained. "If we really want to keep the peace we have to go back to living together, on the same territory, as our ancestors did. At the moment my people and I are enjoying greater public appreciation due to the fact that we have achieved peace and solved the problem of famine. When you announce the economic plan, the appreciation index towards us will rise even more. However, it won't last forever, and sadly people forget pretty quickly. This is therefore the best time to take action and take a step forward. I'll bring some dinosaurs here, so that people start getting used to their presence" The politicians thought carefully about the proposal. The idea wasn't bad: actually, that was the best time to bring humans and dinosaurs together. If they had waited too long, the climate of tension could have reappeared and a peaceful confrontation would have been impossible. But getting dinosaurs into their territory was still a risky act. "How many dinosaurs are we talking about, lord Sobek?" "About twenty thousand. A few hundred for each nation" Sobek replied. The reason he had chosen such a low figure was simple: even if they were at a substantially peaceful time, humans were unpredictable. Sobek had no doubts that some fundamentalists would try to provoke episodes of violence. But if even a single dinosaur had let itself be taken by anger, then relations between nations would have deteriorated: in fact, people would not have seen a dinosaur acting in self-defense, but a furious beast dangerous for everyone's life. Unfortunately, this was human nature. Therefore Sobek intended to bring to the continent only the dinosaurs who best related to humans and who had no bad past with them, and above all who had shown not to give in to provocations. "Can we know how this would help reduce unemployment?" politicians rightly asked. "Simple. Once they arrive on the continent, the dinosaurs will take care of restoring the environment as it originally was" Sobek explained. "However, any human who wants to help will be welcome. In this way, not only will you give work to the unemployed, but they will work side by side with the dinosaurs and in doing so they will get used to their presence, and in turn when they return home they will spread the idea of good and kind dinosaurs, and not killing machines" "But who is going to pay people to work with dinosaurs? I doubt that dinosaurs make use of money" someone argued, supported by many. But surprisingly it was Jocelyne who spoke: "They won't pay them. It will be the movement founded by John Hammond to do so" This changed everything. Everyone knew that the movement founded by John Hammond had huge funds and that several billionaires were part of it. If they had paid them, the nations would not have had to charge themselves any costs. "Why should they do it?" "Because it is in line with their ideals, of course. Like lord Sobek, they too aim for coexistence, so they'll be happy to help in person" Jocelyne explained. "Do you have evidence for what you stand for?" the politicians asked again. "You can call John Hammond or any other person in the movement. They will confirm my words"Jocelyne replied simply. Judging by their looks, the politicians seemed more than willing to do so, however they held back and asked again, "How much would unemployment decrease if we implemented this plan?" Both Jocelyne and Pauline had already done the calculation. "If we combine it all with a good advertising campaign and strong media awareness, it is possible that the 80% we aspire to turn into 90%, maybe even 93%" replied the queen of Prettania. Now the politicians were seriously tempted; resolving 80-85% of unemployment in three years was already a Herculean work, but reaching up to 93% would have been a resounding success. It literally meant making unemployment disappear from all the nations of the entire Eden Union. "I agree that this is a difficult decision to make, so I propose to suspend this meeting again" Sobek said. "Not for three hours but for the whole night. I propose to vote at noon tomorrow, so that everyone can adequately reflect on this decision" The politicians quickly approved. Once again, the meeting was dissolved. ******* Since the meeting had been suspended until the next day, Sobek had him taken to the warehouse where he would be staying. When he arrived he discovered that it was a real hangar that could have contained an aircraft carrier. "I hope the arrangement is to your liking" Harris said as he invited him in. "That'll be enough" Sobek assured him as he stepped into the warehouse. It wasn't exactly the perfect place for him, but he wouldn't want to complain. "Leave me alone now, I need to rest a bit" Harris didn't get it repeated and ordered the hatch closed. Sobek knew that surely the defense minister would have armed guards all around the perimeter to avoid any attempted bombing or assassination, but he didn't care. He lay down on the cold and smooth ground and then sent an order to the System: "Open the interface!" [Spinosaurus perfectus] Level: 52 Length: 52 m Height: 16.2 m Weight: 26 ton Diet: carnivore, piscivore Strength: 52,480 Agility: 50,880 Defense: 46,320 Maximum speed: 53 km/h Experience points: 12,000/9,310,000 Skill points: 306 Fame points: 9,992,605,000/10,000,000,000 Bonus Money: 15,890,465 Sobek grunted as he checked his fame points. Apparently my speech has already had its impact, he thought. "Only 8 million points remain... indeed, less. And then I will finally be able to evolve and reach my maximum potential!" =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= AUTHOR'S THOUGHTS Hi! I'm back after a while. However, today we won't talk about citations and paleontology as usual, but I would like to answer a rather common question: how dangerous is the ghost of the nuclear holocaust, and could an eventual atomic war really wipe out the human species? Well, let's start by saying that this is highly unlikely. Firstly because in an atomic war the two sides would hardly release all the weapons at their disposal. In fact, there are specific protocols that require a long series of steps before pressing the button that allows you to shoot even just a single nuke. Consequently, an atomic war would probably end within minutes, since after annihilating the people who can initiate such protocols (e.g. the US president) there would be no one left who could give the order, at least until when no substitutes take over, but for obvious reasons this cannot be done in a matter of minutes. Consequently, an atomic war would hardly see the explosion of more than fifty bombs and be won by the one who strikes first. But if we forget this scenario, and instead assume the explosion of all atomics on Earth, what would happen? Currently, there are about 15,000 nukes on the planet, many of them with different potential, and most of them are owned by the United States and Russia, and the rest are divided among a few other nations such as China, Iran, France, the United Kingdom United Kingdom, India, Pakistan and North Korea. If we took all these bombs and put them all together and detonated them in the same place, we would get a destructive force of about 7,500 megatons, which is roughly the equivalent of a small asteroid. However, such an action would not cause the end of civilization, but would limit itself to causing 'only' a nuclear winter of a few years and an increase in radioactivity on the whole planet. However, things change if we detonate bombs in different places on the planet. Just as a simultaneous eruption of several small volcanoes would cause far more damage than a single, gigantic supervolcano, similarly numerous nukes exploding at various points on the planet would cause far more damage than a single pile of nukes placed in one spot. How damaging such a scenario could be is disputed, but many scientists believe that as little as 100 Hiroshima-like bombs placed in the right spots in the subtropics would be enough to cause a small nuclear winter that would make many parts of the Earth uninhabitable. However, the number of bombs we will detonate in this scenario is 150 times as many and these bombs have a much stronger power than Hiroshima. So, what would happen in this apocalyptic scenario? For simplicity, we'll split the events into several places; keep in mind that many of these points do not follow a real chronological order, but occur simultaneously or over the course of several years or even decades. So, let's do it: 1) We begin our story with a war. For some reason, both the US and Russian presidents give the order to drop their entire atomic deterrent at the same time; the other nations linked to them by alliance ties follow their example shortly after and the few remaining, seized by panic, also drop their weapons. This means that the detonation of bombs occurs mainly in the northern hemisphere, therefore, at least for the time being, people in the southern hemisphere are safe. If the International Space Station were to pass over the northern hemisphere right now, astronauts could watch thousands of extremely powerful lights on Earth turn on for just a few seconds and then go off again. These lights are nothing but the fireballs of nuclear bombs as they hit their targets. Every single city in North America, Europe and much of Asia is wiped out by the fury of atomic bombs, killing over a billion people in minutes and several hundred million more in the next few hours and days, and the few survivors of this disaster they will make up for cancers such as leukemia in just a few years. With no more hospitals or emergency services, millions more people die from injuries. Only the detonation, therefore, is sufficient to kill almost a fifth of the entire human species, but these are only the first moments of the catastrophe. 2) The second after the detonation, technology ceases to function all over the planet. In fact, atomic bombs release electromagnetic impulses capable of frying every electronic circuit; only older cars and more protected technologies can partially resist this. The simultaneous explosion of all atomic bombs at specific points on the planet creates an electromagnetic pulse so powerful that it engulfs the entire Earth. All over the world, the lights go out and cities are plunged into darkness; it is not impossible for the pulse to be so strong that orbiting satellites that are unfortunate enough to pass over the detonation site are hit by it, but even if they do not, without further directives from Earth in the following weeks and months they will from their orbits, colliding with each other and finally hurtling towards the planet as rapid shooting stars. Now humans all over the Earth are deprived of almost all of their technology, the main weapon that allowed them to be the dominant predators. Without cell phones, radios or means of communication, no one now has the ability to contact anyone or access information from other countries; even if a government still existed in the northern hemisphere, it would be unable to manage the catastrophe without the ability to communicate. Likewise, the nations of the southern hemisphere would be consumed by panic due to the sudden power outage, and without communications the governments there could not give orders to the police or army to deal with the terrified masses; Before long, riots would break out all over the Southern Hemisphere and everyone would be doing their own thing. And without means of communication, no one would have a chance to prepare for what's coming. 3) The shock wave of each atom travels in every direction destroying everything in its path, and even if beyond a certain limit they lose their destructive power, they still continue to move the air for thousands of kilometres, even colliding with other shock waves and generating new energy. Some of the explosions can literally be heard around the world as the blast wave circles the Earth. The most powerful bomb in man's nuclear arsenal, the Tsar Bomb, was in fact capable of causing a shock wave that circled the Earth three times when it was detonated in the year 1961. But the shock waves they are not the only problem: the force of certain atoms pushes so hard against the earth's crust that it causes seismic waves that travel in all directions. Again, the Tsar Bomb alone in 1961 was able to generate an earthquake measuring 5 on the Richter Scale that traveled across the planet three times. But in this scenario many more bombs are dropped and, despite having a lower power, they still release energy in the form of seismic waves. The violence of the explosions is therefore felt all over the planet within a few tens of minutes: the Earth is devastated by earthquakes that can even reach magnitude 6 if not even 7. Many areas of the world are not used to earthquakes of such power , and so the soil crumbles as if it were made of papier-mâché; moreover, a large part of the third world population does not have houses and structures capable of withstanding such shocks. Earthquakes therefore kill several thousand people all over the planet. The force of the seismic waves is so strong that some parts of the ocean floor, continuously subjected to such forces, see the opening of deep fissures which suck in the water, causing tsunamis in every corner of the world; it is impossible to establish how high these waves would be or where they would occur, but in any case in the days and weeks following the detonation living near the coast will be a huge risk for any human being. 4) In the following hours after the detonation, throughout the southern hemisphere the fire would flare up devastating forests, woods, villages and cities that had escaped the initial disaster; without firefighters or otherwise people capable of containing the fire caused by the fireballs, nothing would prevent the flames from spreading in all directions. The mushroom clouds would also drag air to their base and thus provide an abundance of oxygen, which combined with the huge amounts of gasoline, paper, wood, plastic, diesel, coal, petroleum and other flammable materials found in large quantities in nearly every city in the northern hemisphere, would turn wildfires into a true firestorm. Within a few hours the northern hemisphere would be the closest thing to hell that we could imagine on Earth: fire would blaze everywhere with extreme violence, burning everything combustible, and furthermore the gases generated by combustion would accumulate in the air making it unbreathable; not only the smoke from the burnt trees, but also extremely toxic fumes that emerge from the factories due to the now burning coal. Fire also unleashes another danger: in fact, nuclear power plants are overheated and without personnel or electricity, the water in their cores evaporates, releasing enormous quantities of radioactive vapor into the air, much higher than that of bombs (which, as we will see later , was mostly transported to the upper atmosphere). Each breath brings poison to the lungs of the survivors. By now, in the northern hemisphere the only hope for any form of animal life is to escape underground and wait for the worst to pass. Furthermore, it is not impossible that the firestorm heats the atmosphere to the point that, by combining with the air moved by the shock waves, it can cause an alteration of the currents and therefore generate typhoons and hurricanes that devastate the coasts. These storms would also drag other nuclear elements to the ground in the form of black rain, raising radioactivity levels to the point that even breathing in the vicinity of the storm would be lethal to survivors. For several hours, the northern hemisphere is an unlivable place and the few survivors can only take refuge in caves, caves, tunnels, subways or other places that have resisted the detonation and the earthquake. 5) But we haven't talked about the worst part yet: the fireballs generated by the detonation are in fact propelled towards the upper atmosphere in the form of mushroom clouds, and in doing so they also carry with them almost all the radiation they emit. Unlike the radiation emitted by nuclear power plants, therefore, most of the radioactive material in nukes remains trapped in the upper atmosphere and only a tiny fraction of it falls to the ground as rain. In the short term, this is a good thing; me in the long run, it's not at all. Radiation trapped in the upper atmosphere rapidly begins to form nitrogen dioxide which damages the ozone layer, Earth's shield against cosmic radiation. This is obviously not an event that happens in a single day, but in the following weeks and months, cancer cases around the planet skyrocket, until even just going outdoors during the day becomes life-threatening. Everything that has survived up to this point is now exposed to deadly radiation from the Sun, and now the southern hemisphere is also affected. Hundreds of millions of people die from the rays of our star. But even taking refuge underground during the day doesn't help: the absence of sunlight in fact causes serious health problems which in the long term weaken the body and facilitate the proliferation of diseases, reaping thousands of victims. The ozone layer will remain damaged for decades or even centuries, making the Earth an unlivable place. But while this event is still in its warm-up act, in the first days after the detonation of the bombs, it generates another extremely dangerous disaster which again reduces the planet to hell: the increase in solar radiation would in fact ionize the gases in the atmosphere, which means that they would punch through molecules and knock electrons off nuclei, leaving them charged, which gather large quantities of water vapor creating huge global clouds. Within these clouds, free electrons cause a massive release of energy, or rather, lightning. For weeks, the Earth is then ravaged by the most terrifying lightning storm the planet has ever seen, setting fires across the planet and destroying all that survived. While people in the Southern Hemisphere have managed to get by so far, they too are now being decimated by fires and lightning, wiping out cities and destroying all sources of food. When this super lightning storm finally subsides, at least 80% of humans are already dead, but now the survivors will have to face the freezing grip of nuclear winter. 6) The enormous amount of dust dragged into the atmosphere by the mushroom clouds, combined with the gigantic global clouds created as a result of the damage to the ozone layer and with the toxic fumes and vapors caused by the fires, form a thick blanket that envelops the entire planet, thus falling into darkness. it is difficult to say exactly how severe such an event would be: at best, the sunlight that would get through would be barely red and would be periodically diminished by large cloud masses; in the worst case, the cloud cover would completely block out the sunlight. In any case, whatever plants were able to survive up to this point are now starved of sunlight, and so all plant life disappears within thirty days at the latest. Inside the continents, the temperature drops by about twenty degrees in a few days; the oceans are luckier, as the water retains heat, but the absence of sunlight still kills most cyanobacteria and phytoplankton, and without them, the entire marine food chain collapses. Only deep-sea fish are able to survive, accustomed to frost and few food resources, but all the marine species that inhabit the surface are instead facing extinction. On land, things are not much different: without plants and with the constant cold, animal life disappears quickly, and only the strongest and most specialized predators manage to get by for the longest. Needless to say, by this point, all surviving humans on the surface are dead. The only place where humanity can still survive is underground, but even these areas do not guarantee an eternal refuge. In fact, six months after the detonation, almost every bunker on the planet is low on supplies and clean air; the survivors are forced to go out and look for food outside, but the place where they find themselves seems like an alien landscape: ash and debris cover the ground and descend from the sky in the form of a horrendous gray snow, the sky is dark, it is cold, and nowhere can you see any trace of greenery. The only forms of life still able to thrive are fungi, which grow on the bodies of dead animals; all the animals that have survived up to this moment are now in an extremely emaciated state, and driven by hunger they do not hesitate to eat even their own kind or the human beings they feared so much before; moreover, many of them display decaying skin and hideous mutations. The air is in fact now saturated with the radiations that rain down from the sky together with the ash, and even if the cloud cover partially protects from the sun's rays which are no longer blocked by the ozone layer, they are still at harmful levels. Venturing into such an environment is no different than drinking poison. Eventually, 99.99% of all humanity dies in this apocalyptic scenario. Only the 0.01% of it, made up of the wealthiest and richest people, hidden in extremely specialized bunkers and capable of producing food and resources autonomously, manages to resist this horrible nuclear winter. 7) How long this nuclear winter will last is a matter of debate, but it is likely that in a few decades the dust cloud will settle and the sun will shine again on the planet; within a few more decades or centuries, the ozone layer will also have completely reformed. At the end of the catastrophe, at least 50% of all life forms will simply have vanished from existence, and if we imagine the worst case scenario, that number could rise to 70-80%, thus placing itself at the same level as the KT event. But even in this apocalyptic scenario, plant seeds will have survived protected by the soil, and as soon as sunlight returns, the planet will quickly flourish again. Numerous animals will also have survived and will go on to occupy the new ecological niches left free by their predecessors. In less than a thousand years, no sign of the disaster will remain, except for numerous craters scattered throughout the northern hemisphere, each no larger than a kilometer. Radiation levels will also have fallen back to normal. Some scientists have often wondered if such an extinction event could lead to the end of humanity, but most likely the answer is no: as I already said, a tiny part of humanity survived in bunkers capable of supporting thousands of people over the course of of several generations. Even if the total human population is now made up of just a few tens of thousands of individuals, practically nothing compared to the billions that were, they are still enough to restart the species without risking genetic diseases due to mating between blood relatives; moreover, many of these bunkers are equipped with all the necessary tools to rebuild civilization, so even if our progress has suffered a setback, it is very likely that it will pick up where we left off. Consequently we can safely say that a nuclear war, however destructive, would not be sufficient to bring about the extinction of the human species, but even if this gives a sense of relief, we must not forget that it would lead to the death of billions of people, therefore maybe we should just... don't do it.