Even Stephen Hawking Is Talking About the Millennial Kingdom

Stephen Hawking says we've got about 1,000 years to find a new place to live

(CNN)We're all doomed. Unless we can figure out how to get the heck off this planet.

Don't believe it? Then ask noted theoretical scientist and astronomer Stephen Hawking. He says humanity won't survive another 1,000 years on Earth because of, you know, the usual suspects -- climate change, nukes, robots.

Hawking, speaking earlier this week at Oxford University Union, says our best chance for survival as a species is to leave the only home we've ever known and establish colonies on other planets.

"Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years," Hawking said in the speech, according to the Christian Science Monitor. "By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race."

And the pace of space exploration seems to be ramping up. NASA is busy searching for "goldilocks" -- exoplanets that might be able sustain human life. Meanwhile, Space X CEO Elon Musk has already laid out his plans to colonize Mars within the next century.

Despite all of his gloom and doom, Hawking did end with some positive notes, according to British newspaper The Independent.

"Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, wonder about what makes the universe exist," he said. "Be curious. However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up."

America Prepares For The Nuclear Holocaust (Revelation 16:8)

HHS Boosting Nation’s Stockpile of Burn Treatments in Case of Nuclear Attack

By Susan Jones | October 1
cnsnews.com

HHS Boosting Nation’s Stockpile of Burn Treatments in Case of Nuclear Attack
By Susan Jones | October 1, 2015 | 6:49 AM EDT

(CNSNews.com) – “The detonation of an improvised nuclear device would produce intense heat, resulting in many patients with severe burns,” says a September 30 news release from the Department of Health and Human Services.

The announcement says HHS has contracted for the development of “four novel products to treat severe thermal burns.”

The products will boost the number of treatment options in case of disaster, and they’ll also be used in “routine” burn care situations.

The four treatments — one commercially available right now and three in development — “will be added to the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) or managed by vendors to help protect people from burn injuries resulting from radiological and nuclear threats,” HHS said.

The announcement notes that burns stemming from a nuclear attack may require surgial skin grafting that is “resource intensive and technically demanding.” And with only 127 burn centers nationwide, a “mass casualty” incident could “easily overwhelm the nation’s burn care infrastructure.”

“To protect health and save lives from the impacts of multiple types of disasters, we have to address critical challenges in burn care,” said Robin Robinson, Ph.D., director of HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). “These products are intended to offer greater options and help create a continuum of care in a mass casualty incident; together they have the potential to eliminate resource-intensive steps, shorten hospital stays and improve patient outcomes.”

The announcement comes at a time of heightened concern about national security in general and the threat of foreign terrorist fighters in particular.

A currently available treatment called Silverlon, manufactured by Argentum of Geneva, Ill., is described as a “long-acting, silver-impregnated nylon bandage that can be used to cover first- and second-degree thermal burns. HHS said Silverlon could help burn patients before they get surgical treatment for their injuries in the hospital. The five-year contract for delivery of Silverlon is valued at $20 million.

The other three products are being developed in federally funded clinical studies.

They include:

— NexoBrid (from MediWound of Israel), a topical gel made of pineapple-based enzymes and designed to dissolve the damaged or dead skin tissue to create a clean wound-bed for skin grafting. The five-year contract is valued at $20 million.

— StrataGraft (from Stratatech Corporation of Madison, Wis.), a cell-based skin made from living human cells that could reduce the need to remove healthy skin from the victim’s own body to graft over the burned skin; ($246.7 million contract);

— ReCell (from Avita Medical Americas, LLC of Northridge, Calif.), a topical spray derived from a small sample of the patient’s own skin. This topical spray may enhance skin growth, allowing burn surgeons to use smaller skin donor grafts, and stretch grafts over a larger burn wound. This contract has a total value up to $79.5 million.

HHS notes that since its inception in 2004, BARDA has supported the development and procurement of 16 medical countermeasures – vaccines, drugs, the new burn treatments and and other medical products needed for emergencies, including ionizing radiation and illnesses from anthrax, smallpox, and botulism.

Just this week, the Justice Department said that just in the past year, it has brought criminal cases against 70 individuals suspected of fomenting terrorism.

Sixty of them were charged with either supporting foreign terrorist fighters or attempting to join the group. The other 10 criminal cases were brought against individuals inspired by ISIL or other terrorist groups to commit attacks here in the United States.

“So between the 60 who wanted to join the foreign terrorist fighter groups and the 10 who wanted to commit attacks here in the United States, that’s how we have over 70 cases,” Assistant Attorney General John P. Carlin’s told the Foreign Press Center on Monday.

The Anthropocene Period Will Be VERY Short (Revelation 16)

Was first nuclear test the start of new human-dominated epoch, the Anthropocene?

The Trinity Bomb in Los Alamos

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | January 16, 2015

BERKELEY — An international group of scientists has recommended that the fateful Trinity nuclear test on July 16, 1945, be considered the dawn of a new geological age dubbed the Anthropocene – an era in which humans increasingly shape the planet.

Scientists divide Earth history into epochs, periods and other time units bounded by geological or biological signals, such as those left in the rock record by the mass extinctions that ended the Cretaceous and Permian eras, and the end of the last ice age that kicked off the current Holocene epoch.

“Defining the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch would imply that humans are a geological force every bit as powerful as the ‘natural’ ones that caused such things as the onset of ice ages and major extinction events in Earth’s past,” said paleontologist Anthony Barnosky, one of the co-authors on the paper and a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology.

The recommendation, published online this week in the journal Quaternary International, was made by 26 members of the 38-member Anthropocene Working Group, an international panel charged with assembling evidence on whether the Anthropocene should be formally designated as a new geological epoch and, if so, where to place its beginning.

The term “Anthropocene” was coined by Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and and the late University of Michigan biologist Eugene Stoermer in 2000 to denote the time interval in Earth’s history during which many geologically significant conditions and processes became forever altered by human activities.

The team argued that a logical and tractable start-point for the Anthropocene would be the date of the first atomic bomb detonation in New Mexico, Barnosky said, in part because it can be measured easily as a result of the worldwide spread of artificial radioactivity from nuclear bomb tests, and in part because it roughly coincides with the global proliferation of major human-caused influences that leave permanent evidence in the geological record. Since 1945, there has been a “Great Acceleration” of population, carbon emissions, species invasions and extinctions, earth moving, and production of concrete, plastics and metals, as pointed out by another new paper in the journal The Anthropocene Review.

Manhattan Project

The Trinity test, the first controlled nuclear explosion, was the result of the Manhattan Project directed by UC Berkeley physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Various UC Berkeley scientists contributed to the war effort, which resulted in two bombs being dropped on Japanese cities and numerous above- and below-ground tests that have left a distinctive radioactive signature around the globe.

The Anthropocene Working Group hopes to present a formal proposal defining the Holocene/Anthropocene boundary as early as 2016 for consideration by the International Commission on Stratigraphy.

The team proposing to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene with a nuclear blast was led by the working group chair Jan Zalasiewicz and group secretary Mark Williams, both of the University of Leicester’s Department of Geology.

“Like any geological boundary, it is not a perfect marker – levels of global radiation really rose in the early 1950s, as salvos of bomb tests took place,” Zalasiewicz said in a press statement. “But it may be the optimal way to resolve the multiple lines of evidence on human-driven planetary change.”
Barnosky emphasized that “the Anthropocene Working Group is not setting any boundary in stone yet.”

Within a few days of the Trinity blast proposal, a different proposal was published in The Anthropocene Review by six other members of the group, suggesting that human-modified soils could also feasibly be used to demarcate a boundary, albeit one that encompassed a longer span of time than a single nuclear blast.

For now, the jury remains out. “Time – and much more discussion – will tell,” Zalasiewicz said.
For another perspective, see this blog post by Andy Revkin of the New York Times.