male narrator: Some say the cur of man
is the knowledge of his own demise.
- They're horrific visions of war and catastrophe.
narrator: From Dante's "Inferno"...
- Wildfires burning in California
have now reached historic proportions.
narrator: To the Mayan 2012 myth...
- Talking about the end of time.
narrator: Every culture has tried to predict
the way our world will end.
- It's obviously got to be an enormous catastrophic event.
narrator: But no apocalyptic tale
is as studied and feared...
- It would end civilization as we know it.
narrator: As the seven signs cited
in the book of Revelation.
- It can be read as a warning to the human race.
narrator: Written 60 years ter the crucifixion,
scholars have worked for millennia
to decode these symbolic verses.
- They all believe that they are destined
to change civilization.
They want to die.
narrator: Now many believers are seeing these signs emerge
in new and terrifying ways...
- You are talking about tens of millions of people
who will be directly impacted.
- I'm not sure many of them will be alive
in the next week or two.
narrator: Indicating that the end days are upon us.
- This is a window of things to come.
What's gonna happen in the future?
narrator: The are the seven new signs of the apocalypse.
21st-century planet Earth
has been besieged by disaster...
- There is clear proof of just how deadly this disease can be.
narrator: After disaster.
[dramatic music]
Some argue that the modern disasters plaguing mankind
are eerily similar to the foreboding visions
laid out in the Bible's book of Revelation.
- The book is dreams and nightmares.
They're horrific visions of war and catastrophe
and complete disaster
narrator: Those visions, divided into seven signs
signaling the end of days,
sprang from the mind of a man known only as John of Patmos,
a follower of Christ.
¶ ¶
He penned his apocalyptic book in a time of desperation.
- He was coming out of a horrible war,
the war in which the Romans destroyed Jerusalem.
And John was saying, "You just wait.
"Wheour God mes back, you're going to be destroyed,
and he's gonna throw all of you into the lake of eternal fire.
¶ ¶
- In a place called hell...
- Amen, that's right.
narrator: In the millennia since,
many believers have taken the book oRevelation's imagery
as gospel
and have prepared for the worst.
They believe John's nightmare scenarios
are more than a cautionary tale,
that they form an actual road map to impending oblivion.
¶ ¶
Could they be right?
Has the end of days already started?
Are the famed four horsemen of the Apocalypse already upon us?
- "And a crown was given to him,
and he conquering."
narrator: The first horseman is said to be the Antichrist.
According to scripture,
the Antichrist will possess great rhetorical skills
used to charm the masses and gain a loyal following.
Though evil, he will first appear as a savior,
assembling a huge army
and, together with the second horseman,
will begin a great war
and usher in the end of days.
- "As the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals"...
narrator: For centuries,
devout students of the book of Revelation
have tried to identify a single man
as the Antichrist.
The tyrannical Roman emperor Nero,
known for his hedonistic lifestyle
and merciless persecution of Christians,
lived in the same era of John of Patmos
and may have been the actual inspiration for the vision.
Napoleon Bonaparte, straddling his white war-horse,
like the first horseman himself,
led a march across Russia
that left over million dead in itwake.
And just as Revelation warns,
Adolph Hitler used his fierce rhetoric
and megalomaniacal charisma
to take control of Germany,
starting a world war that would leave 50 million dead.
¶ ¶
Many of history's most destructive despots
have been labeled Antichrist
but have not actually ushered in the end of days.
¶ ¶
But what if the Antichrist is not one person
but a group of people
dedicated to a sgle apocalyptic vision?
- ISIS has now claimed responsibility.
French president Francois Hollande
says the attacks were planned and carried out by it
as an act of war.
narrator: The declared mission of the terrorist group ISIS
is tbring on the apocalypse.
In fact, their official English language magazine
is called "Dabiq,"
named afr a town in northern Syria
where, according to Muslim writings,
the battle to end all battles will occur.
It will be Armageddon.
- They all believe that they are destined
to change civilization,
to have a clash of civilization
and defeat the West
in order to bring about the apocalypse
as it exists in their religion.
They want to die,
and they are an apocalyptic death cult.
¶ ¶
narrator: But even beyond the group's
professed apocalyptic goals,
there are other striking similarities to the Antichrist
prophesied in the book of Revelation:
the ability to use great skills in communication
to converthe masses...
- [speaking in foreign language]
narrator: The desire to hold themselves up
as a new holy authority
and the desecrating of religious artifacts...
¶ ¶
And finally, their ability to use their momentum
to create war and chaos on a global scale.
¶ ¶
[sirens blaring]
November 2015.
In a sophisticated display of coordinated brutality,
ISIS terrorists lay siege to Paris,
detonating suicide bombs
and opening up with machine guns on civilians
in six separate locations.
In the bloody aftermath, 130 people lay dead.
[ominous music]
Just weeks later and 5,000 miles away,
in San Bernardino, California,
a married couple who had pledged
their allegiance to ISIS
opens fire in an office building,
killing 14 and injuring a dozen more.
The Islamic State may be
the most ruthless terrort group in history,
but could ISIS start the kind of world war
that would fulfill prophecy?
In the book of Revelation,
the second horseman is said to signal a great war
that will wreak havoc on mankind.
narrator: Starting jussuch a worlide conflict
is a key goal for the Islamic State.
- Gangs with suspected Russian ties
have been trying to sell nuclear material
to Middle Eastern extremists.
[explosion booms]
narrator: In October of 2015,
news breaks that the FBI
had shut down a gang of Moldovian smugglers
who were trying to sell a large supply of radioactive cesium
specifically to ISIS.
- Buying, stealing, otherwise acquiring nuclear material
and building a bomb is unfortunately possible.
narrator: Enough nlear material to fill this six-pack
is all it would take to destroy a large section of the city.
- Well, this is about the amount of plutonium that it would take
to create a very powerful nuclear weapon.
[dramatic music]
narrator: Some experts say the Soviet Union conceived the idea
of designing small nuclear weapons
that could look like a normal briefcase.
- And thidea here is, is that
you would get the briefcase into the country
or pre-position it in the country.
These things had selectable yields
from 1 kiloton to 10 kilotons.
narrator: So far, ISIS has used primarily assault weapons
and suicide bombs
to carry out their terror strikes in Western cities.
[gunfire]
If they secured a 10-kiloton weapon,
it would be as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima,
capable of leveling the heart of a large city.
[explosion booming]
- Well, let's say it was a Hiroshima-size weapon
detonated in a place like Manhattan, New York City.
We would think 50,000 to 75,000
immediate fatalities
and hundreds of thousands of fatalities to follow.
narrator: Destruction of this magnitude
could trigger an equally severe response.
If any of the nine countries with nuclear weapons
were targeted,
retaliation could escalate to an all-out World War III
as predicted would be ushered in by the second horseman.
¶ ¶
In 1997,
the Russian national security advisor
General Alexander Lebed
to a U.S. congressionadelegation
about the existence of suitcase nukes.
- He warned them
there were at least 100 of these things missing
and that they could be in the hands of terrorists.
narrator: The device in this photo is a mock-up,
but if they do exist, where are these suitcase nukes?
In June 2015,
ISIS claimed it could purchase a nuclear device from Pakistan
and smuggle it into the United States.
[explosion booms]
But it's not just a nuclear weapon
that could bring a city to its knees.
- Terrorists can even build weapons
that don't use nuclear energy
that could put our civilization at risk.
narrator: There are stealth weapons that a even easier
for a terrorist group like ISIS to obtain:
bioweapons.
- In New York City tonight, fears of an anthrax attack
are fueling higher-than-normal sales of antibiotics,
and the federal government is taking new steps
to prepare for a possible bioterror attack.
- Biological weapons certainly exist.
They're being developed
in defense laboratories around the world
because we're looking for antidotes to them
in case they're used by the other side.
- So it's not hard to imagine a pathway
by which biological weapons
could come into the hands of terrorists.
They could make them themselves; they could buy them.
narrator: Anthrax,
smallpox--
terrorists could spread spores of the disease
from a small plane flying over a city
or with something as simple as an aerosol spray
or just using person-to-person contact.
They could infect agents
who would go to an airport or crowded event,
touch people, and start infecting others.
- And it would spread actually probably pretty rapidly.
[air hissing]
There hasn't been a catastrophic case
of terrorist use of a biological weapon yet,
but it's something that we need to be very concerned about
because it's a lot easier to make biological weapons
than it is to make nuclear weapons.
narrator: But while the Islamic State
works to trigger Armageddon,
far more than terrorism threatens man with extinction.
There is another possibility
that the Earth could be destroyed from within.
narrator: From the arrival of the four apocalyptic horsemen
through the breaking of each of the seven seals,
in the book of Revelation,
author John ofatmos has outlined
mankind's road map to oblivion.
If alance at the catastrophes currently plaguing our planet
leaves one feeling like the end of times is upon us,
a look at the next seal of the apocalypse
only seems to provide more disturbing evidence.
- The book of Revelation see earthquakes
as one of the great signs of the end time.
Huge catastrophic earthquakes, when they happen,
that means it's coming soon.
narrator: Earthquakes have been shaking our planet
since long before man set foot on it,
but the human population
has spread farther into remote areas,
and our cities have grown more crowded...
[person screams]
[indistinct chatter]
Making every big quake potentially devastating.
- [yelling indistinctly]
narrator: Today, some scientists are predicting
that a massive earthquake,
one that would signal the coming apocalypse
promised in Revelation,
could soon strike the United States.
[dramatic string glissando]
- Oh, my God, we're having an earthquake.
Wa a minute.Hold on, h.
There go the lights.
narrator: Those who lived through
the catastrophic San Francisco earthquakes
in 1906 and 1989
might have thought the end of days was upon them.
- 911.
- Yeah, this is an emergency in San Francisco.
- What happened?
- Uh, there's a hell of an earthquake,
and we've got windows, now they have fallen out.
Got a hell of a... [speaking indistinctly]
- [speaking indistinctly] Emergency.
- Cypress section of the West Grand freeway has come down.
narrator: These quakes were caused by movement
along the famed San Andreas Fault,
the tectonic rift
that keeps the West Coast on constant alert.
But the true threat to the western coast of North America
lies far from San Andreas.
Many scientists now predict
that a massive 9.0-magnitude earthquake
is likely to strike the Pacific Northwest,
produced by a fault line many have never heard of.
- The certainty is there. It's 100%.
We will have one of these earthquakes.
We just don't know when.
¶ ¶
narrator: 50 miles out to se
from the Oregon and Washington coasts
is a fault line known as the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
Running 700 miles along the coastline,
from Northern California to Canada,
it's where two massive tectonic plates meet.
Chris Goldfinger is an expert
on this potentially unstable geological phenomenon.
- What we're looking at here
is the entire Cascadia plate boundary system,
so we're looking at North America over here--
the bumpy part.
This is the fault itself, the Cascadia Fault.
This is the part where they come togeth.
narrator : The two plates are jammed together
and have been stuck for several decades now.
According to Goldfinger and other geologists,
it is inevitable that the plates will shift.
- They will build up sort of elastic energy like a spring,
and eventually, it'll have to give.
narrator: How exactly do seismologists know
this is going to happen?
Because it's happened before.
- Well, we know this because of an amazing feat
of geologic detective work.
narrator: Using mud samples extracted from the ocean for,
geologists made a shocking discovery
that massive earthquakes actually occur regularly
in this region.
- There has been one of these Cascadia Subduction Zone quakes
ranging from magnitude 8 all the way up to magnitude 9.2
every, you know, about 250 years.
narrator: Geologists were also able to pinpoint the exact year
of the last earthquake--
1700.
- What we have here is a short core section
that includes the A.D. 1700 earthquake.
narrator: And that led them to a stunning conclusion.
If the last earthquake happened more than 300 years ago,
we are way overdue for the next one.
[whooshing and rumbling]
An earthquake off the coast of the Pacific Northwest today
would be far more devastating
than the one that struck in 1700,
bringing with it the kind of apocalyptic destruction
foretold in the book of Revelation.
- We've moved in; we've built all these big cities,
having no idea about plate tectonics or earthquakes
or anything else.
narrator: The cities of the Northwest
will take a direct hit.
According to scientific models,
the entire northwestern seaboard
will experience up to five minutes of severe tremors
as the fault gives way.
- Really, at any given moment
we could start feeling that shaking.
I have a tough time wrapping my head around it.
narrator: The shaking will be enough to cause horrific damage
in cities like Portland and Seattle,
cities that were never built to withstand a major earthquake.
- Those are gonna crumble.
Parts of town, low-lying areas,
in those places, the soil will actually liquefy.
It will turn watery, soupy, because of the shaking.
narrator: Those caught in collapsing buildings
are not likely to make it out alive.
- The next Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake
will be the biggest natural disaster
the United States has ever faced.
narrator: The potential damage estimates are mind-numbing.
50% of all bridges will collapse.
16,000 miles of road will be impassable.
The electrical grid will be shredded.
- Surviving the earthquake is just the beginning.
There won't be any fuel.
There won't be any water.
Pretty quickly, we'll be essentially transformed
into a third-world country.
narrator: But the destruction won't be over.
15 to 20 minutes after the quake,
a second, even more devastating phase
of the disaster will start:
a massive tsunami.
[rumbling]
Because the fault lies along the ocean floor,
within minutes of the earthquake,
along the Cascadia Subduction Zone,
a tsunami will roar ashore.
- It's best described as a wall of water,
and this wall of water can travel inland,
and it's going to seek out the lower-lying areas.
narrator: With some 71,000 residents
living along the coast,
this disaster could dwarf the first.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA,
has estimated that an additional
12,000 to 13,000 people could die.
- You've got maybe 10 or 15 minutes
to get to a tsunami evacuation route
and get to higher ground.
narrator: The devastating tsunami
generated by a massive 9.0 earthquake
isn't just theory.
Asian cities have recently been pummeled by two of them.
- The largest earthquake in 40 years
has devastated large parts of southern Asia.
The quake struck under the Indian Ocean
just west of Sumatra.
narrator: A massive wave crushed cities
along the Indian Ocean
over the Christmas holiday,
triggered by a 9.1-level earthquake
on the floor of the Indian Ocean,
generating waves as tall as 100 feet,
laying waste to all in their path.
[both crying]
Nearly 1/4 million people across 13 cities were killed.
- Helicopters are being used
to pluck survivors from the sea and coastline.
narrator: In 2011,
another disaster of apocalyptic proportions
would echo that destruction.
- The nation of Japan
has suffered a colossal historic earthquake
that sent ocean waters racing over land.
narrator: The Japanese tsunami
revealed a new modern danger.
- There are two nuclear plants north of Tokyo
th are in ouble tonight.
The officials there say they have lost control
of two reactors,
and this is a very disturbing development.
narrator: The Fukushima nuclear plant
sat vulnerable on the coast of Japan,
drawing seawater to cool its reactors.
The destructive force of the tsunami
caused castrhic core meltdowns.
Three reactors suffered explosions,
releasing radiation.
- Officials ordered residents
in a six-mile area of the plants to evacuate.
narrator: The radioactive seawater,
drawn back into the ocean,
created a toxic plume that continues to stretch across
the Pacific Ocean toward the United States.
- Lab results may soon give us proof
contaminated water has traveled
5,000 miles to our shore.
narrator: The complete damage may not be known
for generations,
and Jan was actually preped for such a disaster.
The Pacific Northwest is not.
And there are as many as seven nuclear reactors
along its coast.
- We have the science in pretty good order;
the preparedness and the mitigation,
essentially not at all.
narrator: The Cascadia rupture, when it comes,
will be an epic calamity
and, for believers,
a possible sign that the apocalypse is near.
- When they're talking about the end of time,
they're talking about some enormous magnitude
of an earthquake, something unprecedented.
narrator: But a cataclysmic earthquake
is just one of the natural disasters
predicted by John in the book of Revelation.
Another threatens to rain down ash and hellfire.
- It almoslooked lik thcore of a hydrogen bomb
or an atom bomb.
narrator: 2,000 years after John of Patmos
chronicled his seven signs of the apocalypse
in the book ofevelation,
our modern world is plagued by catastrophes
that mirror his predictions for the end of the world.
While some of the seven signs
seem open to wide interpretation,
other warnings seem hauntingly direct.
- We know that this was not a fantasy.
John had somethi very specific in mind.
narrator: There's little disagreement among scholars
that the passage refers to a huge volcanic explosion.
John of Patmos lily witnessed such carnage
during his lifetime,
as entire cities were destroyed in the blink of an eye.
¶ ¶
79 A.D.,
Mount Vesuvius in southern Italy explodes without notice
generating a destructive force
equal to 100,000 Hiroshima bombs.
It completely buries the crowded city of Pompeii
in fire, smoke, and ash.
¶ ¶
When the site is excavated more than 1,500 years later,
archaeologists discover chilling evidence
of the true power of Vesuvius.
Many of the stone buildings and frescoes buried under ash
were still intact.
The doomed residents were frozen in place,
their fear, shock, and the futility of any escape
were seared into the archeological record
in the form of ash castings,
perfectly preserving their tale of terror.
- And it's horrible, horrible catastrophe.
They said you could see the ashes from that volcano
as far away as Rome.
narrator: John of Patmos, the author of Revelation,
lived in the time of Vesuvius.
The eruption was so powerful, so deadly,
that he likely used it as a basis
for one of his visions of the apocalypse.
If Vesuvius was the inspiration for John's imagery
in the book of Revelation,
where might a volcanic eruption occur
that could fulfill his chilling prophecy?
Perhaps along the deadly Ring of Fire.
The ring is made up of 452 distinct volcanoes
circling the Pacific Ocean.
It contains 75% of the world's active volcanoes.
The same tectonic subduction forces
that caused catastrophic earthquakes
also trigger these volcanoes to erupt.
¶ ¶
- The volcanoes are all along the margins
of this so-called "Pacific Ring of Fire"
and are all being generated by a similar process.
One tectonic plate is going down underneath another one.
narrator: In the United States,
the Ring of Fire cuts along the western edge of the continent,
from Alaska down through Northern California.
Ten of these are high-threat volcanoes
that could wreak havoc in the U.S.,
dishing out the kind of apocalyptic destruction
th could signal the end ofays.
At the Cascades Volcano Observatory
near Portland, Oregon,
Seth Moran monitors each of these volcanoes
minute by minute.
He's taking no chances.
- You know, it's important for people to realize
that a number of the volcanoes that we live nearby
have the potential for erupting.
It's not just Indonesia; it's not just Iceland
where these things happen.
They can happen here too.
- President Carter formally declared
the state of Washington a disaster area
and flew tonight to the Pacific Northwest
to look at the devastation
from the eruption of Mount St. Helens.
¶ ¶
narrator: In 1980, Mount St. Helens
became America's worst volcanic disaster.
- We are told that some people were burned to death
in their cars 15 miles away.
- It almost looked le the core of a hydrogen bomb
or an atom bomb plume going up.
It was boiling.
narrator: And no one saw it coming.
- 1980 for a lot of people was an awakening to the reality
that volcanic eruptions can happen
in Washington, in Oregon.
- What did youose in this?
- Everything. - So far, everything.
narrator: 57 people were killed.
- It was really the pyroclastic flows,
the ejection of gas and rock,
which erupted and then blew down and around
the sides of the mountains and down some of the valleys.
That was one of the main reasons
why we saw people killed
in Mount St. Helens.
narrator: Emergency officials in America's northwest
are now preparing for the next major eruption,
because it's not a question of if it will happen, but when.
John Schilling runs
Washington's Volcano Hazard Program
out of this office near Seattle.
There's one volcano he fears above all others:
Mount Rainier.
The mountain's unique geology
makes it a potential powder keg.
- You've got this very precarious rock,
and on top of that
is perched a lot of glacial snow and ice.
There's more snow and ice on top of Mount Rainier
than all of the other Cascade Range volcanoes combined.
narrator: And the scary thing is,
Rainier is perched right on the edge
of the Seattle metropolitan area.
When it blows,
all that ice and rock will rain down
on the 3.6 million people living nearby,
unleashing a phenomenon known as a lahar.
¶ ¶
- "Lahar" is an Indonesian word that basically means
a mud flow that comes from a volcano,
and it's sort of like cement.
It can carry boulders; it can carry rocks;
it can carry trees.
You do not want to be in the path of one of those.
narrator: The towns and villages near Seattle--
Tacoma, Orting,
Sumner, and Auburn, to name a few--
lie smack in the path of this potential volcanic avalanche.
And given the speed at which a volcanic disaster unfolds,
evacuation may be impossible.
- Being able to get everyone to safety
within a very short amount of time,
in 40 minutes or so, is, you know, a real challenge.
They may have only, you know, 12 to 15 minutes.
narrator: An eruption of Mount Rainier
would certainly be catastrophic
for those living in the volcano's blast zone.
[rumbling]
But would the destruction be enough
to signal the apocalypse?
- It's obviously got to be an enormous catastrophic event,
something that shakes the Earth,
something that would be recognized all over the world.
narrator: A world-ending eruption
would likely come in the form of something larger,
like the volcano that exploded in Indonesia
some 70,000 years ago
at what's now called the Toba Crater Lake.
¶ ¶
According to geologists,
Toba likely caused six years of a global volcanic winter.
Temperatures dipped rldwide.
Vegetation died off,
and more than 1/3 of the globe's surface
was covered with ice and snow.
Recently, the Toba super-volcano
has started acting up.
In 2015, the magma chambers beneath it
have been showing new signs of life.
A volcanic eruption on that scale
would reshape the entire planet,
but there's another force at work
reshaping the planet right now.
The book of Revelation predicts the end of times
will come with drought and famine,
and that is already happening.
narrator: In the book of Revelation,
written just decades after the death of Christ,
author John of Patmos details his vision for Judgment Day.
In it, the apocalypse is signaled
by the arrival of the four horsemen,
each bringing a different calamity.
The first is thought to be the Antichrist.
The second brings world war.
The third horseman brings a new plague upon man.
narrator: So scholars interpret the passage
as foretelling a future
where a drastic food shortage
will cause famine on an apocalyptic scale,
the kind of food shortage caused by a worldwide drought.
- Drought is one of the plagues that comes at the end times.
The book speaks of destruction when water ceases,
and you have drought, and you ha conditions
of violent heat and wildfire.
narrator: Right now, just such a scenario
is unfolding in California.
A deep drought is threatening to bleed the Golden State dry.
Could this be the sign the book of Revelation warned about?
- We're atop the NBC News bureau in Los Angeles,
where the hottest days of the year are arriving
with no relief from the blistering drought here.
narrator: It has barely rained in four years, almost five.
- Currently they're in a drought
that is registering as one of the worst
in the last millennium.
narrator: In Tulare County in California's Central Valley,
wells have run dry,
and more than 5,000 people lack access to running water,
forcing authorities to truck in thousands of gallons.
- California is no stranger to drought,
but what's happening here is unprecedented.
The governor of California has declared a state of emergency.
- We're in an historic drought,
and that demands unprecedented action.
This is the new normal.
narrator: For the first time in its history,
California has adopted emergency measures
for individuals, businesses, and farmers.
- Californians have been called upon to conserve water.
Some towns have cut down their water use
by up 40%.
narrator: With no rain falling
and little snow accumulating in the mountains,
the state's reservoirs have fallen
to perilously low levels.
- Folsom Lake, the primary water source
for hundreds of thousands of Northern Californians,
is losing 1.4 billion gallons every day.
narrator: Shane Hunt oversees the Folsom Lake Reservoir,
which supplies a large area outside Sacramento.
- This reservoir holds 977,000 acre-feet of water.
At capacity, right now, it's sitting a little over 160,000.
As you can see behind me,
it kind of looks like the moon.
¶ ¶
This lake level illustrates clearly
what four years of drought has done to California.
It's pushed our water supply system
pretty much to its limits.
narrator: It's not just apocalyptic believers
that see this epic drought as a sign of coming Armageddon.
Some scientists have peered into the future,
and they also see things getting much worse.
the middle of the 21st century,
the American West is expected to face megadroughts,
droughts that last as long as 20 years.
It's a phenomenon some parts of the world
are already experiencing.
- It's a humanitarian disaster.
The African nations of Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia
are plagued by an unrelenting drought and famine.
And an international aid agency
says millions are at risk of dying.
narrator: In Africa, the giant Sahara desert
is spreading south at a rate of 30 miles a year.
As desert lands gobble up ground,
the inevitable effect is less farming
and less food production,
a vicious cycle that threatens social stability.
[percussive music]
But drought brings with it another kind of catastrophe:
wildfire,
a curse straight out of Revelation.
In the book, author John of Patmos
warns of an angel hurling fire down on Earth,
helping spark the conflagration
that will signal the end of days.
- The idea that fire comes from heaven
is seen as a divine judgment.
It causes great havo on the Earth.
narrator: In the wake of the drought
stalking the American West,
wildfires are consuming more land than ever before.
- Wildfires burning in Califora
have now reached historic proportions.
The total damage now ranks
among the most devastating California has ever seen.
narrator: In 2015, thousands of fires broke out
across the West,
the most ever in a single year.
- It's the busiest season that I've experienced
since my working career began in the Pacific Northwest
25 years ago.
In terms of the numbers of fires
and the acreage actually burned,
it looks like it's gonna be the top year.
- The last couple of years in particular
have exceeded everything historically
in terms of acres burned and the severity of burning,
the number of homes destroyed, and the cost.
¶ ¶
narrator: This season, California experienced
one of the worst fires in its history.
North of San Francisco,
50,000 acres of the state's famous wine country burned.
- I wish it was a dream. I really do.
I don't want it to be like ts.
- Entire neighborhoods were incinerated here.
More than a thousand homes are gone,
the third most destructive wifire in California history.
[horns and sirens blaring]
narrator: Even the temperate forests of Washington State
are burning for the first me in memory.
- This image allows us to plot the fire perimeter
and shows us just how close it gets to a particular community,
and where the greatest threat is at any given time.
It's a very large fire.
We can see that it came right up to the edge of the town,
engued some of the outlying subdivisions,
and has basically surrounded the town,
coming right up to the backs of the Columbia River
before it stopped.
[fire crackling]
narrator: Entire towns are surrounded by forests,
and it is only a matter of time
before the inhabitants of one or more of them
become trapped in an inferno.
- I worry, in a nightmare scenario,
that there may not be enough time
for lines of traffic to get out of these towns
before a fire comes through.
narrator: The long-term trends are frightening.
The number of acres in the U.S. that burn each year
has doubled in the last 30 years.
By 2050, that number could double again.
- In the West,
we're going to continue seeing a ramp up
in the frequency of these really extreme
mega-fire-type years.
narrator: Perhaps most telli for true believers
is that the single largest cause of wildfires
is lightning strikes...
[thunder crashing]
Echoing the angel casting lightning bolts from Heaven
in the book of Revelation.
All it takes is one strike,
and parcd forests like this
can be consumed like so much kindling.
- Trees will be hit by lightning.
Sometimes trees will split, fall apart, or explode,
and if it gets windy or it continues to be dry,
then that fire's likely to spread.
narrator: Could these conflagrations,
sparked by lightning,
be the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy
of fire from above?
- People do read those as if they were happening today
when they see the catastrophic wildfires
that happen in the West and all over the world.
narrator: Wildfires, volcanoes, earthquakes,
they're all described in the book of Revelation
as signs of end times,
but perhaps the biggest apocalyptic signal
could be microscopic.
[dramatic music]
narrator: In the book of Revelation,
author John of Patmos predicts the end of man
through seven signs of apocalyptic vision.
In it, four horsemen appear,
ushering in Armageddon,
one bringing war...
[rocket booms]
- ISIS wants followers to carry out attacks in the U.S.
narrator: Another famine...
- They have walked for days, even weeks,
in search of food and water.
narrator: And finally, yet another
sending plagues raining down on mankind.
- "I looked, and behold"...
- A quote like that can be read
as if it were predicting some kind of plague,
some kind of illness,
some disease that spreads and can't be stopped.
narrator: Humans have fallen prey to major diseases
throughout history,
many of which seem to fulfill the prophecy
in the book of Revelation.
The Black Death, or bubonic plague,
spread through Europe in the 14th century,
killing as many as 75 million people in four years,
over half the European population.
- Many people said, "This is it.
"This is what the book of Revelation said would come.
It's a plague."
[thunder crashes]
¶ ¶
narrator: But what would be the impact of a major plague
on our modern world?
Some argue it would spread quickly enough
to become a biblical disaster.
Consider the Ebola virus that tore through Africa.
- Ebola has broken out in an urban area in Conakry,
the capital of Guinea in West Africa,
population 2 million.
- In Liberia, it's getting worse by the day.
Too few doctors and hospitals, too many patients.
narrator: In August 2014,
Ebola made it to New York,
igniting fears of a deadly plague in this crowded city.
- Craig Spencer, the New York doctor
who tested positive for the disease,
showed no symptoms when he landed
but later developed a fever.
narrator: People feared the city's transport system
would become a carrier of disease,
delivering the kind of epic plague
foretold in the book of Revelation.
- In a region like this, you ride the subway,
you ride a bus,
you could affect hundreds and hundreds of people.
- 5.5 million people ride the subway every day.
It's like-- so you're shaking hands
with 10,000 people every day
when you just touch one of those railings.
It was the closest we've been to a real bad global pandemic.
narrator: But the virus did not become airborne,
and health officials were able to contain the disease.
Next time, Americans might not be so lucky.
Somewhere on the planet,
the next highly contagious, species-killing virus
is waiting for the right moment
to jump from animal to human.
- When we look back on every modern pandemic,
every virus that's gone global,
it has an animal origin.
narrator: Peter Daszak and his colleagues
at EcoHealth Alliance
monitor viruses that are potentially dangerous,
and there's a new one that's got them spooked:
the Nipah virus.
- It emerged from fruit bats.
These are these giant tropical bats
that eat fruit and fly around at night,
and somehow the virus got into a pig farm
and then started to infect people.
narrator: In Malaysia, in 1999,
more than 100 people caught the virus from pigs
and succumbed to an onslaught of brutal symptoms.
- The virus gets into your nervous system
and into the brain,
causes what's known as encephalitis,
swelling of the brain.
By the time it's in your brain, it's really too late.
You go into a coma, and you die.
narrator: Desperate to keep the epidemic in check,
the Malaysian authorities
euthanized more than a million pigs.
[gunshot]
But despite the effort,
the virus has since resurfaced in the country of Bangladesh,
a development that has American disease experts alarmed.
- Sudd this vis has a real chance of becoming pandemic,
and we're really concerned about it.
narrator: What could turn Nipah into a worldwide contagion
worthy of a biblical disaster?
It wouldn't take that much.
If the deadly virus mutates into something airborne,
something humans can catch om each other
and not just from animals,
the result would be catastrophic.
- The lethality is incredible.
The death rate now in Bangladesh is way above 70%,
so that means that if you get infected,
you got a 70% chance of dying.
¶ ¶
narrator: How might the Nipah virus or one like it
arrive on American shores?
[plane engine roaring]
In our modern age,
with its crowded hubs of transportation,
the speed with which an infected person
could spread a deadly contagion across the globe
has increased exponentially.
- Airplanes now are taking people
potentially infected with something
from one part of the world to the opposite side of the world
daily by the millions.
narrator: If the Nipah virus lands in a city like New York
and becomes airborne,
then a nightmare scenario might quickly become real.
¶ ¶
[siren wails]
Before the virus can be detected,
it will have spread.
- By the time the person who was originally infected
feels really sick, goes into the hospital,
you've already got 50 people
moving around in the population.
We don't know where they are.
narrator: In this scenario,
the deadly virus spreads like wildfire.
If it is lethal, hundreds, then thousands
die within days.
- I don't think we've prepared as people, as a society.
I don't think we really know
what the chaos is gonna be like.
If we get a true pandemic, a true plague,
we're gonna see rioting,
and there's gonna be panic on the streets.
narrator: If a virus like Nipah strikes,
our hospitals and wards would be overwhelmed,
the rise of superbugs.
- These bacteria are deadly,
with a fatality rate approaching 50%.
narrator: Superbugs are infectious bacteria
that can't be stopped,
not even by antibiotics.
Others are clinging to life tonigh
after apparently contracting a terrifying superbug.
- The head of the CDC calls it a nightmare bacteria
that's mutated so much,
even the most powerful antibiotics can't fight it.
- We're seeing more and more resistant bacteria
that are resistant to multiple antibiotics,
that just can't be treated.
narrator: Today, superbugs infect
roughly 2 million Americans a year,
but in the coming decades,
doctors are worried those numbers will skyrocket
as antibiotics lose their punch.
Bacteria have an astonishing ability to mutate,
and what few germs survive an antibiotic can replicate,
forming a new, resistant strain.
- There are basically there bulletproof bacteria
that we can't get through.
We've seen some strains of bacteria
that used to be resolutely defeated
and treated quickly with certain antibiotics,
and now we basically can't do anything to stop them.
narrator: If these current trends continue,
once treatable infections will turn deadly.
Even diseases thought to be beaten could rise again.
- You could see really rampant pneumonia;
you could see tuberculosis.
The Dark Ages could return.
You'll see whole families decimated.
narrator: As the book of Revelation prophesied,
disease could bring the end of the world as we know it,
but some catastrophes are beyond our control,
like one new sign of the apocalypse
that could strike us from on high.
¶ ¶
narrator: Almost 2,000 years ago,
John of Patmos, a follower of Christ,
recorded his visions for the end of days
in the book of Revelation.
¶ ¶
Famine, plagues, earthquakes, and war
all signal the arrival of Armageddon,
ushered in by the dreaded four horsemen of the Apocalypse.
For centuries, believers have kept a vigilant lookout
for the seven signs foretold in scripture,
warning of terrible destruction raining down from the heavens
on the day of reckoning.
¶ ¶
- The falling star could be read as an asteroid
destroying the Earth in some catastrophic way.
narrator: It was an asteroid impact in the Yucatan
65 million years ago
that delivered a destructive blast
a billion times more powerful
than the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima
and Nagasaki,
strong enough to end the age of the dinosaurs
and destroy 95% of all life on Earth.
But perhaps the danger from the heavens
comes not in the form of an asteroid
but from the very star that gives our fragile planet life--
the Sun.
It is only a matter of time before the Sun explodes
in an eruption of magnetic energy so powerful
that it would decimate humankind's way of life,
causing the kind of chaos
promised in the book of Revelation.
- Your attention, please.
The GOES 12 satellite indicates
that a major X-ray event is in progress.
I repeat, a major X-ray event is in progress.
- Looks like X-rays are rising rapidly.
narrator: These scientists are trained to watch the Sun,
desperate to detect the kind of solar explosion
that could threaten life on Earth.
- Do you have a threshold reach time yet?
- Zero two at 1850 UTC.
narrator: This is just a drill,
but 24 hours a day,
the Space Weather Prediction Center
monitors the Sun from inside the headquarters
of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
in Boulder, Colorado.
Here, screens display real-time data and video of the Sun,
collected by satellites in space,
all to give warning if the Sun erupts
in what's called a coronal mass ejection,
commonly known as a solar storm.
- It's essentially a magnetic explosion on the Sun
of a very large magnitude.
We're talking hundreds of thousands of times
larger than an atomic bomb
in terms of energy output suddenly.
narrator: A geomagnetic solar storm
can disrupt or even fry electrical systems,
and if a major solar storm were to hit Earth,
the results would be catastrophic.
¶ ¶
- It's relatively well-accepted
that it could cripple the power grid of this nation.
- It would end civilization as we know it worldwide.
[explosion booms]
¶ ¶
narrator: In 1989,
a solar storm called the Hydro-Quebec storm
struck Canada,
its impact stretching as far south as New Jersey.
6 million people in Quebec were left without power.
[electricity buzzing]
The East Coast of the United States
came dangerously close to sharing the same fate
when the coils of a transformer
in a nuclear power plant in New Jersey
melted from the surge of the geomagnetic solar storm.
Luckily, power was diverted to a backup generator,
but there are about 2,000 similar transformers
across the U.S.
that could melt down in a more powerful storm.
- Even if we lost a few hundred of them,
it would be catastrophic,
and you could lose all of them.
narrator: The result could be a worldwide blackout
that could last four to ten years
before all the ruined equipment
in the infrastructure of the grid is replaced.
- If we had a nationwide blackout
that lasted only one year,
up to nine of ten Americans could die
from starvation, disease, and societal collapse,
and that's because we're an electronic civilization,
and everything depends directly or indirectly on electricity.
narrator: Communications,
transportation,
banking and financial systems,
industry,
even food and water depend on electrical systems.
- There's only a 30-day food supply
to feed the 320 million Americans.
We resupply our grocery stores
out of big regional food warehouses.
narrator: That food must be kept fresh
by air conditioning systems, refrigerators,
all of which run on electricity.
Without it, there would be widespread famine.
There would be no phone service.
Gas pumps wouldn't operate,
and cars would run out of fuel.
But that's not the biggest threat.
Nuclear power plants across the world
could melt down
without pumps to cool their radioactive cores.
- They were just like radioactive bombs going off.
[explosion booms]
narrator: Today, there are over 100 nuclear reactors
in the U.S.
All are vulnerable to a solar storm.
- And the radioactivity will follow the weather patterns
and get distributed over where our population is located.
narrator: More than half the United States
would be turned into a deadly radioactive environment.
¶ ¶
The possibilities of a solar storm disaster are very real.
- There's a one-in-ten chance
that the big one will hit in the next decade.
narrator: The Earth came close just a few years ago.
In 2012,
the planet missed getting hit
by one of the largest solar storms ever detected.
- Based on what we know now,
physicists are just now realizing
how close we came to getting clobbered
by waves of solar energy,
a mass ejection of clouds of the Sun's plasma
that would have crippled satellite communications
and the power grid.
narrator: If the eruption on the Sun
had happened a week earlier,
the planet would have been in the direct line of fire.
The total economic impact alone
could have been around $2 trillion.
That's 20 times the cost of Hurricane Katrina.
So how exactly could we protect ourselves?
- Over the past 12 hours,
there have been two M-class flares.
narrator: The Space Weather Center continues
to watch the Sun minute by minute, day by day.
If they see a solar superstorm headed towards Earth,
the center will immediately notify the institutions
that need to react:
the government to inform the people,
utility companies to power down their equipment,
and airlines to get their planes out of the sky.
¶ ¶
But the question is, will there be enough time?
A geomagnetic storm could reach Earth
in as little as eight hours,
bringing with it the kind of global destruction
foretold in the book of Revelation.
¶ ¶
The onslaught of a solar superstorm
isn't the only thing
currently threatening man with extinction.
The book of Revelation predicts
the end of times will come with massive floods,
and the waters are already rising.
¶ ¶
[dramatic music]
narrator: For centuries,
believers have looked to the Bible's book of Revelation
for signs of a coming apocalypse.
Author John of Patmos warns of many natural disasters,
like drought and famine,
that could signal the end of days.
From Old Testament to New,
no disaster has come to symbolize a day of judgment
like a great flood.
The biblical deluge
chronicled in the story of Noah and his family
lasted 40 days and 40 nights,
washing the Earth of man's evil,
but two passages from the book of Revelation
speak not to a temporary flood
but a permanent changing of the Earth's surface
in the time of final judgment...
¶ ¶
First, by heat...
narrator: And later, by flood.
- Some people suggest that that could refer to
the mountains covered with water and the rising of the oceans.
narrator: Unlike some of John of Patmos's predictions,
this one is backed up by as many as 99% of scientists.
They agree that the heating of the Earth's surface
and the unstoppable destructive rise in sea levels
is already happening.
¶ ¶
Many climatologists now predict that by the year 2065,
sea levels could rise as much as 10 feet.
- The main contribution to global sea level rise
is global warming.
It's the expansion of the seawater as the oceans warm,
and it's the melting of ice--
melting of glaciers,
the melting of continental ice sheets,
and all that water flowing into the oceans
and contributing to even more sea level rise.
¶ ¶
- The reductions of the glacier
are accelerating rapidly each and every year,
and, you know,
this is as good of a signpost of what we're dealing with
when it comes to climate change as just about anything.
narrator: In September of 2015,
President Obama stood in front of Exit Glacier
in Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska
to drive home a point.
The two-mile-long mountain of solid ice is melting.
It's lost more than 800 feet since 2008.
¶ ¶
- It's possible that we will lose
most of the west Antarctic ice sheet
and perhaps a chunk of the Greenland ice sheet,
enough ice to give us maybe in the range
of 20 feet of global sea level rise.
You're talking about flooding of the major costal cities.
25% of the population
lives within that range.
You are talking about tens of millions of people
across the world who will be directly impacted.
¶ ¶
- Welcome to sea level rise in the year 2015, folks.
narrator: Philip Stoddard isn't just the mayor of South Miami;
he's also a scientist.
And when he's seen how the sea levels around Miami
have risen to dangerous levels,
he knows the world is changing.
- Normally those rocks there
constitute the edge of the water,
but today, you see the water's coming over the top.
That's the first time I've seen that.
The water should be about 2, 2 1/2 feet
below those rocks.
Or at least, it used to be.
narrator: On this day,
Miami is experiencing a king tide,
the highest tide of the year,
but the rising global sea levels
have taken this typical event
and made it potentially catastrophic.
According to Stoddard, it's only going to get worse.
- I think in 2100,
Miami will be reduced to a series of islands
that'll be about 10% of its land mass still above water.
So it'll be very much like the Florida Keys is now.
- And what about the Florida Keys?
- They'll be underwater.
¶ ¶
narrator: The Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development
lists Miami as the number one
most vulnerable city in the world
when it comes to the rising of the ocean.
The city is trying to ward off the inevitable.
Keren Bolter evaluates the risks of low-lying property
in the Miami area.
- We're here in Miami Beach in Purdy Avenue.
They are raising the road 3 to 4 feet.
The water was getting higher than the road.
Now that they've raised it and added pumps
and storm water infrastructure
to get the water out,
the streets are gonna stay dry.
narrator: Karen says the city will spend around $500 million
in the next five years
for pumps to keep the rising seawater off the streets.
¶ ¶
It may not be enough.
- It's really a Band-Aid fix.
There's too much water for the pumps.
Our maps show that if nothing is done,
by 2100, Miami is going to be shrinking
to a much smaller land mass.
¶ ¶
narrator: As the global waters continue to rise,
by the year 2500,
San Francisco's AT&T Park will be a swimming pool.
¶ ¶
In the Boston area, if the sea rises 25 feet,
Harvard University could be underwater.
- In about 200 years,
the top of the Lincoln Memorial will be underwater.
¶ ¶
narrator: It's that kind of apocalyptic destruction
that doesn't have to be imagined.
It's already happened in some of our major cities.
The rising waters put our coastlines in danger,
but a single violent storm
can take those already high waters
and drown a city with storm surges.
- In Staten Island, rescuers in boats today
went house to house in this still-submerged neighborhood.
narrator: By 2012,
New York City had already seen
a foot of rise in the waters along the coast,
but Superstorm Sandy's deadly storm surge
conspired with rising sea levels
to cause devastating flooding
across New Jersey, New York City, and Long Island,
uprooting buildings, flooding subway systems,
and bringing infrastructure to a grinding halt.
- All you need is an extreme event
to wipe out, essentially, a coastal city.
We saw New Orleans was nearly destroyed by one extreme event,
Hurricane Katrina,
and with ongoing global sea level rise,
it may no longer be viable to even have a New Orleans.
narrator: It's a devastating scenario being played out
more and more around the world.
- Sea level rise will generate tens of millions of refugees
or hundreds of millions of refugees.
[people chanting indistinctly]
- If we literally saw hundreds of feet of sea level rise,
we would have to massively relocate
a growing global population competing for less food,
less water, and less land
simply because there is less land.
¶ ¶
narrator: Earth's transformation
into an actual water world
would certainly be a disaster
of biblical proportions,
but some warn the end of times
may come about before the ocean waters drown us.
Our own inventions could turn on us,
leading to the fulfillment of a prophecy
from the book of Revelation.
narrator: The New Testament's book of Revelation
builds a terrifying road map to the end of days.
Each of the seven signs
in author John of Patmos's apocalyptic vision
promises to unleash a horrible calamity
signaling the end of times.
Scholars still look to these ancient texts
for prophetic clues...
- So that you would say, "Ah, he said this would happen.
"And look. It happened.
Now we know the end is coming soon."
narrator: Starting with four horsemen
bringing war, plague, and famine.
- This is a book about fear.
A great deal of it is about fear.
narrator: And while modern catastrophes,
like earthquakes, superbugs,
and the threat of world war,
provide a terrifying echo
for the book of Revelation's warnings,
for many believers,
no prediction in the book is more fearsome and insidious
than the one in Revelation 9.
narrator: For centuries, biblical scholars
have struggled to identify this threat.
What could they be,
these locusts with the faces of men made of iron?
- There are some people who could interpret this
as some kind of killing machine.
narrator: Today, humanity has given birth
to a dangerous new era of machine intelligence.
The threat from artificially intelligent machines
is very real,
and their rise could prove eerily similar
to the warnings in Revelation.
- Computers could take over the world.
narrator: This is not
a Hollywood special effects studio.
These area real military robots
being developed today by more than 50 nations,
including the United States, Germany,
China, Russia, and Israel.
[electronic beeping and whirring]
The U.S. military already deploys
human-operated drones to eliminate targets.
These remote-controlled killing machines
keep humans safely off the battlefield.
The next step will be killing machines in a humanoid form
so they can adapt easily to human-based weapon systems.
- They'll look a lot like the Terminator.
Battlefield robots will probably look humanoid
because one of the big goals of the military
is to use currently existing trucks and tanks
and different weapon systems,
so you want a machine that fits into those weapon systems
like a human.
narrator: So far, these battlefield robots
are in the complete control of the humans
who've created them,
but what will happen when these killing machines
are implanted with artificial intelligence?
- Artificial intelligence is really about
human-level intelligence put into a machine.
narrator: Consulting firm McKinsey & Company
estimates that since 2009,
corporate America has invested $14 billion
in artificial intelligence and robotics.
- There's a real intelligence race going on
with that kind of intelligence.
narrator: Scientists have been creating
increasingly smarter and more independent computers
since the late 1990s.
- Oh!
- Kasparov, after the move C4, has resigned.
narrator: It was in 1997 that IBM's Deep Blue
famously trounced chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov
after just 19 moves.
- The computer was programmed to scan through
thousands and thousands of chess moves,
whereas humans only look at a few moves at a time
and use our intuition to figure out which move would be best.
narrator: Computers are now learning
to think for themselves,
and the human mind is proving no match
for its microchipped rival.
A February 2011 special edition of the game show "Jeopardy"
created a sensation
when IBM's computer named "Watson"
beat the show's former champions
by accessing 200 million pages of specific facts.
- [electronic voice] Who is The Church Lady?
- Yes. [laughter]
- [electronic voice] Hedgehog-Podge for 400.
narrator: Today, Watson has learned to analyze.
It's developed general intelligence.
- You could ask it questions; it could anticipate problems.
You feed it a lot of raw data about your corporation,
and it will answer questions
about how you should run your business.
narrator: The idea might seem benign at first,
but if this freethinking artificial intelligence
is combined with military technology,
some worry it sets the stage
for an apocalyptic disaster.
It's only a matter of time
before there is a battlefield robot
with the artificially intelligent brain of Watson,
a Watson who can choose when and whom to kill.
- Right now, we're developing weapons that kill autonomously.
Drones, in the very near future,
will be drones that assassinate people
without a human in the decision-making loop.
narrator: And those humanoid robots?
These steel-clad super soldiers won't just be lethal puppets;
they'll be autonomous,
using sophisticated computer algorithms
to select their targets on their own.
- The danger with a computer being the one to decide
whether or not to kill a human being
is that, well, it might make a bad decision.
It could end up killing people
who a human being would recognize
that should not have been killed.
Should we let a computer decide for itself
whether or not to kill a human being?
narrator: Inventor Ray Kurzweil says that by 2029,
we'll have machines that are as intelligent as a human
at the price of a desktop computer.
And after that, he predicts the arrival
of what he calls the singularity.
- The technological singularity
is the time coming up in our future
when we share the planet with smarter-than-human machines.
narrator: The problem is,
if computers become smarter than humans,
they might just decide they want the planet to themselves,
revealing themselves as the locusts
with the faces of men made of iron,
as predicted in the book of Revelation.
- How do we control machines
that are thousands or millions of times more intelligent
than we are?
- Super intelligent AI could kill us
by pursuing whatever goals that it had,
and it would try to do anything it could
to pursue those goals.
- At some point when they become super intelligent,
thousands or millions of times more intelligent than we are,
they may see us merely as obstacles
and may want to eliminate us.
narrator: Artificial intelligence
doesn't need a humanoid body to kill mankind.
So much of today's world
is already controlled by computers--
not just robotic weapons
but driverless cars,
elevators,
air traffic systems;
even heart pacemakers these days
are linked by Wi-Fi to computers.
An artificially intelligent network of machines
could take command of our modern infrastructure
in nanoseconds.
- The more we enmesh ourselves
with smart homes and smart grids,
the more we entangle ourselves with AI and automation,
the more vulnerable we become.
- It is entirely possible that one day
computers won't need humans anymore.
What do computers need?
They need a little bit of energy to power themselves;
they might need some basic materials for their hardware;
and that's about it.
It's entirely possible that at some point in the future,
they'll be able to take care of that for themselves,
and they won't need us anymore.
narrator: For now, humanity is still in control
of the machines,
but if current trends continue,
yet another apocalyptic vision from the book of Revelation
may just come true,
with metal-clad demons swarming the Earth
and overthrowing mankind.
Or could the apocalypse come about
because of huge changes
in one of the planet's greatest resources?
narrator: In the New Testament's book of Revelation,
John of Patmos sketches visions of an apocalyptic nightmare
ushered in by seven signs.
- [speaking indistinctly] Emergency.
narrator: Earthquakes, volcanoes,
famine, and plague...
- Even the most powerful antibiotics can't fight it.
narrator: All seem poised to come true.
¶ ¶
But the next prediction seems to foretell
the death of our planet's lifeblood:
the oceans.
narrator: More and more, coastlines around the world
are witnessing the phenomenon of the red tide,
a sea turned blood red as in the book of Revelation.
- "Red tide" is a term used to describe
what scientists like to call harmful algal blooms.
narrator: These deadly organisms
not only turn seawater from blue to crimson;
they poison the creatures that live in it.
- In the last year, over 400 very young dolphins
have washed up on shores of the Gulf of Mexico,
and scientists are not sure why.
narrator: Could the ocean itself be dying?
Is this prophecy being fulfilled?
In 1987,
one such outbreak poisoned more than 100 people
off Prince Edward Island in Canada.
The victims ate infected shellfish
drawn from the seabed.
- Three people died,
and over a hundred people got sick.
The unique thing about this particular toxin is,
it causes permanent short-term memory loss
in humans if it doesn't kill you.
narrator: In the last few years,
toxic blooms have been dramatically increasing
in waters off the American coast.
In the spring of 2015,
scientists measured one of the largest in the area's history.
- Never have we seen an event
that has occurred basically from mid-California
all the way to the northern tip of Vancouver Island.
narrator: Vera Trainer and her team
launched an expedition like this one
to measure toxicity levels in the water.
- So I'm gonna have a concentrated sample
of what's ever in the water.
These are the phytoplankton.
You can even see a little swimmer in there.
That huge bloom off California,
they just had to dip the net once quickly,
and it was full of these cells.
- Okay.
narrator: Back at the Fisheries science lab,
Trainer and her team evaluated the samples.
What they found was shocking:
a deadly neurotoxin called domoic acid.
- The levels of toxin that were measured
were levels that we've never seen before.
narrator: What's even more frightening
is that this poisonous algae can be found across the globe.
- We know we have big problems with these toxins
in Scotland and Ireland,
also Portugal and Spain,
South Africa.
narrator: Where is this oceanic plague coming from?
Are the red tides a side effect of climate change,
the threat of apocalypse realized,
or both?
- Like, it was actually a little bit cooler than normal
along our coast.
narrator: Climatologist Nick Bond
studies ocean temperatures
and has detected a huge patch of warm water
off the northwest coast
that may be causing this region's toxic red tides.
- Some of the peak anomalies have been
as much as 6 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit above normal
over large chunks of the ocean,
talking about thousands of miles across.
narrator: He's calling that abnormal patch of water
the blob.
- The kind of more or less circular pattern to it
is why I started calling it the blob.
narrator: The blob may be the root cause
of another toxic phenomenon
that has believers seeing the apocalypse.
- Many of the prophecies in the book of Revelation
speak of all the sea creatures dying.
When people see the destruction of many sea creatures today,
that is taken by some as evidence
that this is the end time.
¶ ¶
narrator: In frightening scenes playing out around the world,
hundreds of thousands of sea creatures
are washing up dead or dying on the planet's beaches.
- I haven't seen anything like this.
I'm concerned about what's killing the fish.
- Marine biologists in California
are racing to solve the mystery
of what's killing hundreds of the state's wildlife.
From San Diego to Los Angeles and up to San Francisco,
birds, dolphins,
even some whales have been dying.
narrator: The deaths of these ocean creatures
have implications far beyond the beach.
Nearly 1 billion people
depend on fish for their primary source of protein.
Overfishing has driven fish stocks down
a staggering 90% since 1950.
The poisonous algae blooms
could signal a death knell
for an already hobbled ecosystem
and usher in a biblical disaster.
- What I can tell you this year
is that our entire coastline is closed
to shellfishing and Dungeness crab fishing.
- They are warning the public
not to eat Dungeness or rock crab
caught off the California coast, saying it could be deadly.
- So if this is a window of things to come,
what's gonna happen in the future?
narrator: In the 21st century,
it's not clear if the decline of the ocean can be reversed.
The damage may be too great.
- What upsets me the most is that
I'm not sure how we change that direction.
It's such a huge task.
narrator: Seas of blood,
the oceans dying--
two revelation prophecies
that seem to be coming true right now.
The ocean's perilous state
is an alarm signal for all of us,
but is it too late for man to save himself?
- The book of Revelation could be read as a wake-up call
to say, "We've got to change before the world is destroyed,
"not simply by a catastrophe from on high
but by our own actions."
narrator: For now,
no one is better at causing the extinction of species
than humans,
which, to believers, may be
the clearest new sign of the coming apocalypse.
narrator: In the book of Revelation,
most of the seven apocalyptic signs
envisioned by author John of Patmos
descend on humankind from forces beyond our control.
¶ ¶
- John wrote the book to warn people
not to think that God wasn't watching the world.
narrator: Earthquakes,
fire from the heavens,
drought--
to believers in the seven signs,
all of these apocalyptic disasters
have already set the stage for Judgment Day,
but when it comes to facing our own extinction,
at least one sign has been brought on by ourselves.
narrator: The book of Revelation
warns of divine judgment
for those who destroy the earth,
and most scientists agree,
the planet and the creatures on it
face a dim future at the hands of man.
- A lot of people don't realize that many familiar animals
are actually in amazing amounts of trouble.
narrator: Over the past century,
41% of amphibian species
and 26% of mammals have come in danger of extinction.
There are fewer than 30,000 lions left in the world.
That's down 93%
from the lion population in the 1940s.
Tigers survive only in tiny pockets
of remaining habitat in Asia.
By the year 2050,
the polar bear population is in danger
of shrinking to 1/3 of what it is now.
In the last half billion years,
life on Earth has been nearly destroyed five times
by events like the Toba volcanic eruption,
an intensive ice age,
and the asteroid that smashed into the Gulf of Mexico
65 million years ago
that likely destroyed the dinosaurs.
Now scientists say the Earth
is on the verge of a sixth extinction.
- What's different about this event
is that we humans are causing it.
narrator: Humans are destroying the places where species live.
2/3 of all the life on Earth
lives in tropical rain forests,
but those forests are being destroyed
at a rate of 25,000 miles a year.
If mankind continues to decimate those rain forests,
estimates say that by 2060,
there will be none left.
- And we're burning those forests.
That destruction puts billions of tons of carbon
into the atmosphere each year.
We know that global warming
is moving species up mountaintops
to the point where they may be nowhere else for them to go.
¶ ¶
If current trends continue,
we might eliminate 1/3 or more
of all the different species on the planet.
narrator: Is this final extinction becoming a reality?
The extinction of one species in particular
could have apocalyptic consequences.
¶ ¶
This researcher is trying to stop the death of two species:
the honeybee
and the humans who depend on it for their very survival.
- This is a lot like cancer.
narrator: Researchers have found that more than 42%
of all managed honeybee colonies
died in 2015.
That's well above the death rate for the four years before.
- We've been seeing these very high rates of managed colonies
dying for no real clear, distinct reason.
[bees buzzing]
narrator: Why are the bees dying?
It seems to be due to man.
[bees buzzing]
Tiny parasites called varroa mites
have begun to infect and spread a deadly virus from bee to bee,
and a person
probably brought this parasite to the United States
without knowing it,
smuggling bees from Asia.
- We think that it came in through
the illegal import of some bees that had a infection.
narrator: Pesticides are being sprayed
by beekeepers and farmers.
- We've seen them accumulate in the colony,
and they're probably weakening the bees' immune system.
narrator: And farmers are plowing up more and more land
where the bees used to forage,
instead planting corn and soy, which isn't good for bees.
- We're not getting the same nutrition in colonies.
narrator: So how would a bee extinction
lead to a human extinction?
The crops that feed us rely on bees to pollinate them.
They are a crucial hub in our food chain.
- One in every three bites of food we eat
is directly or indirectly pollinated by honeybees.
So this is an example of a plate of food
that contains food that was pollinated by honeybees,
and this is the same breakfast
without the presence of honeybees.
If we want to eat anything but gruel,
if we want to eat the vegetables
and the fruits and the nuts in our diet,
we need insect pollinators.
narrator: As the human population grows
to 9 billion,
we'll need more food to feed ourselves
in the next 50 years
than the last 3,000.
The extinction of bees would lead to widespread famine.
If humanity is causing our planet's global extinction,
then we might just be
those who destroy earth
in the biblical prophecy.
¶ ¶
Many believe that the signs of the apocalypse are upon us
as predicted in the book of Revelation.
The waters are indeed rising.
A great war does indeed seem imminent.
Great earthquakes seem poised to wreak havoc
on our major cities,
and our own modern technology
leaves us vulnerable to a host of catastrophes.
But as these seven signs play out,
is our fate sealed?
Many true believers see Revelation's dire predictions
as a cause for hope.
- This book can be read as a warning to the human race
to transform its ways and change
so that the world is not destroyed.
narrator: The world can heed the ancient warnings
of John of Patmos and take action.
- I think that there's always something that folks can do
to prepare for an emergency,
whether it's a car accident
or a subduction zone earthquake and tsunami.
- And if we start preparing,
then we will be in a much better position when it occurs
than we are now,
and perhaps we will have the ability to rebound,
to adapt
and survive.
narrator: In its final chapter,
the book of Revelation is not a nightmare of destruction.
- There are visions of beauty and glory at the end of it.
narrator: Despite all its horrific visions,
Revelation ends with a vision of a brand-new world,
a better world,
one that humanity can still create for ourselves
if we heed the signs.