Nuclear Holocaust: Currently, there are 9 countries in the world that possess nuclear weapons. These countries include, in order from greatest nuclear capability to least: USA, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. There are believed to be 16,300 nuclear weapons spread across these 9 countries, but only 5 of these countries are "legally" authorized to possess them (USA, Russia, UK, France, and China). With international tensions flaring up, a burgeoning world population, and a scarcity of rare metals and non-renewable resources entering the global stage, it is not difficult to imagine a "leader" of one of these nuclear nations flipping a switch and giving the green light for the nuclear option. For example, if the USA were to deploy a nuclear warhead, its political rivals, Russia and China, would be quick to retaliate. Taken a step further, nations allied to either side would step into the fight and use the nuclear option as well. The result would be nothing short of Armageddon/Ragnarok.
To give you perspective, the most powerful nuclear weapon that the USA possesses, the B83 bomb, can produce a blast of 1.2 megatons. 1 megaton is equivalent to 1 million tons of TNT. The B83 could produce a blast 80 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The resulting mushroom cloud would be twice as tall as Mt. Everest. A series of these mushroom clouds could plunge Earth into a nuclear winter, a period of abnormal cold and darkness predeicted to follow a nuclear war, causedby a layer of smoke and dust in the atmosphere blocking the sun's rays.
If this doesn't give you anxiety thinking about it, just look to Russia for a fear overdose. The Russians possess a nuclear weapon dubbed, "Tsar Bomba"; a bomb with an explosive force of 50 megatons, or 3,333 Hiroshima bombs. Furthermore, it is known that at the time when Tsar Bomba was being developed, the Russians had a pipeline to develop a bomb that was twice as powerful as Tsar Bomba.
Global Pandemic: Forget the Ebola scare of 2016-2017, at any moment a pandemic of global proportions could break out and wipe out a very significant portion of the human population. It sounds like something out of a science fiction thriller or zombie flick, but the possibility of a large-scale life threatening disease is very real. Through the abuse of antibiotics by the Medical, Pharmaceutical, and Agricultural industries, bacterial resistance to these drugs has flourished at unprecedented rates. No longer are "last resort" antibiotics having an effect on these pathogens. The implications are unimaginable. Uncurable, lethal, superbugs infecting the host, reproducing and spreading before rendering the host lifeless. This is nothing to be facetious about... The rise of the superbug has already begun.
As reported by the magazine Scientific American in the article titled "Superbug Resistant to Last-Resort Antibiotic Arises in China", "A wide variety of E. coli bacteria in China have developed resistance to a key antibiotic of last resort, a new study revealed, a worrying development in the rise of so-called superbugs." ... "The gene known as mcr-1—which has the capacity to move from one bacterium to another—was found in about 1 percent of E. coli bacteria and 1 percent of a bacteria, known as Klebsiella pneumoniae, that can cause pneumonia, bloodstream infections, and wound infections.
Although that incidence was described as rare, it wasn’t especially reassuring to Lance Price, director of the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University.
“One percent doesn’t sound huge, but for something that we didn’t know about a little more than a year ago and that is clearly a recently evolved [drug resistance] element, it’s pretty substantial,” said Price, who was not involved in the study.
The mcr-1 gene gives bacteria the ability to withstand treatment with a drug called colistin. It’s an old antibiotic that wasn’t used much for years because it has unpleasant side effects; other newer drugs were simply better. But with resistance to better drugs on the rise, colistin has taken on increasing importance in medicine.
In many places is it reserved for human use—and even then, only when absolutely needed. But China has been using it in agriculture, to speed growth of animals raised for meat.
In November 2015 scientists reported finding this gene in China, raising alarms around the world. Within a short span of time researchers elsewhere revealed they had looked for and found the gene in their stored bacteria collections.
An alarming feature of mcr-1 is that the gene moves easily from bug to bug and also from a family like E. coli to others, like Klebsiella pneumoniae."
In plain English, Zoonotic pathogens (diseases originating in animals that can spread to humans) are becoming impossible to kill off with last resort antibiotics secondary to the pathogens having developed a resistance and now have the ability to spread this resistance to other pathogens (ex. from E. coli to K. pneumoniae) through DNA plasmid transmission. One can easily extrapolate and come to the conclusion that if these pathogens can transfer their resistance, then if a particularly infectious and lethal pathogen were to receive this immunity, a hugely significant amount of humans could become infected and killed by said pathogen.
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