Free Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody by Robert Brockway

likely be some form of jelly when you achieve that dream, but hey, we all make sacrifices for our goals, right? That plume is the truly worrying part: It would raise water, dirt, debris, and of course the obligatory trailer parks twenty miles straight up into the stratosphere. For those of you coming from public schools, that’s like the bottom of space! This sudden influx of matter in the upper atmosphere would punch a hole right through the ozone layer and scatter everything formerly safe on the ground into orbit. On the plus side, suborbital trailer parks sound marginally more livable than normal trailer parks, but on the downside, the debris would then act as a superpollutant, blocking out the sun, poisoning the air, and triggering even further planetary devastation. The water and dust molecules introduced to this fragile area would also block the atmosphere’s ability to absorb harmful ultraviolet light. So hey, if you do manage to survive the actual hypercane with the power of clean living and intense prayer, you still get terminal space cancer if you ever see the sun again. Jesus, it’s like it not only wants to kill you, but also plans to take away everything good about your life if it can’t. The hypercane sounds so epically awful that it would have been equally at home in either science fiction or as a Care Bears villain—just out to steal joy away from the world.
Tips to Survive a Hurricane
Stay away from glass.
Seek shelter in a basement or small room.
Have an emergency kit prepared.
Tips to Survive a Hypercane
Don’t.
    And just when you thought it was over—well, it’s quite possibly never going to be over. Because the extremely low barometric pressure inside a hypercane also gives it a nearly indefinite lifespan. For example, look skyward: See that giant spot on Jupiter, commonly called The Eye? The one that’s been there for thousands of years? Technically, that’s a hypercane. And if the conditions are exactly right, a self-sustaining infinite hypercane is also theoretically possible right here on Earth.
    But hey, it’s not so bad. After all, the hypercane takes a lot to be triggered: It needs a large expanse of water rapidly heated to well over 100 degrees to form. Anything capable of achieving something like that is pretty unlikely to occur. It would take another form of serious disaster, like a worldwide rise in temperature (a “Global Warming,” if you will) or an asteroid impact like Apophis (see chapter 12 ) or an underwater supervolcano (see chapter 6 ) like on La Palma (see chapter 7 ) … to … shit.
    Put on your screamin’ shoes, looks like we’re going hypercane shopping.

NANOTECH THREATS
    Great leaps in human technological advancement are often initiated by the rise of a single, new, unforeseen field of invention. The forging of metals brought us solidly into the age of construction; the printing press brought us into the age of literacy; and the modern factory system brought us into the industrial revolution. The next big leap in technological advancement is, according to all sources, just over the horizon: nanotechnology. If industrialization made consumer products easier, cheaper, and more readily available, nanotech is going to make consumerism practically rain from the sky. Nanoparticles, the term for inert, nonmachine molecules reduced to the nanoscale, could theoretically do anything from eliminating cancer to creating self-mending clothes, while nanobots, the more complicated microscopic machines, could rearrange the building blocks of matter itself, essentially creating something out of nothing. It’s going to be like having a million tiny robot butlers at your beck and call who live inside your body, and whose only desire in life is to fetch you as much awesome as you can hold .
    This is the world of nanotech, and it’ll be the best thing that ever happened to you … if it doesn’t kill you first .

9.
GREEN GOO
    COMPUTERS ARE reaching their saturation point in our