God Is a Terrorist

In his novella, Dawn, Elie Wiesel wrote:

God is a member of the Resistance movement, a terrorist.

Elie said a mouthful there!

Consider this:  Terrorism is a tactic useful to those who do not, for whatever reason, intervene directly—micromanage—affairs of great importance to them.  Terrorism is usually the tactic of choice of those who are deprived of sufficient resources to pursue their aims in more nuanced ways but who have the intelligence to understand how large systems are put together so they can take them apart with great economy.  Now, you may argue that God has no such limitations—that He uses precisely the degree of force required to achieve His goals—but this seems manifestly at odds with the gross nature of Acts of God.  Is God’s power in His understanding of Creation—exercised in the flap of a single butterfly’s wing more than His ability to directly intervene in our detailed affairs?  Certainly, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc. would seem to tell us “Yes!”.  Likewise the terrorist who unleashes his “systempunkt” has little control over the details of the consequences he unleashes as part of his judgment.

So, now that we have established that Fear of God is a direct result of God being a Terrorist (admittedly a loving a compassionate terrorist—as are most terrorists if you get on their good side) how might this manifest in these—The Last Days when God’s Judgment will purge the world by fire?  Certainly there are more than enough people who have put everything on the line for this destruction of the world by fire, as is prophesied in the Bible.  Indeed, it could be argued that the entire expense of the Iraq War has been due to just such beliefs in The End Time.  It is currently up to, what? 

Nearly $1 Trillion.

What if someone were to get a little—shall we say—impatient (so we’ll call him God’s Impatient Terrorist or GIT for short) for the unleashing of God’s Wrath?  What is the minimum amount of money GIT would have to come up with to unleash something sufficiently Biblical to qualify as God’s destruction of the world by fire?

It looks to me like it may cost no more than producing a relatively upscale indy movie…

Consider this:

Combustion and explosion of 0.75*10^19 g of methane would liberate energy equivalent to 10^8 Mt of TNT, ;10,000 times greater than the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons, implicated in the nuclearwinter scenario (Turco et al., 1991).

So what?  Where is this GIT character going to come up with 10^19g of methane, let alone detonate it?

Well let’s break this question down into two parts:

1) He gets it from ocean-dissolved methane (op. cit.):

Because methane is isotopically light, its fast release must result in a negative carbon isotope excursion in the geological record. Knowing the magnitude of the excursion, one can estimate the amount of methane that could have produced it. Such calculations (prompted by the methane-hydrate-dissociation model, but equally applicable here) have been performed for several global events in the geological record; the results range from ;10^18 to 10^19 g of released methane (e.g., Katz et al., 1999; Kennedy et al., 2001; de Wit et al., 2002). These are very large amounts: the total carbon content of today’s terrestrial biomass is ;2*10^18 g. Nevertheless, relatively small regions of the deep ocean could contain such amounts of dissolved methane; e.g., the Black Sea alone (volume ;0.4*10^-3 of the ocean total; maximum depth only 2.2 km) could hold, at saturation, ;0.5*10^18 g. A similar region of the deep ocean could contain much more (the amount grows quadratically with depth). Released in a geological instant (weeks, perhaps), 10^18 to 10^19 g of methane could destroy the terrestrial life almost entirely.

2) Now comes the “hard” part.  He detonates it by floating a tanker ship of liquid chlorine over a field of methane-hydrate and sinking it to the bottom, along with a bunch of spark generators.  BOOM!

But, oh.... that’s not nearly enough oxidizer to deflagrate, let alone detonate, 10^19 g of methane is it?  It will only burn about as much methane as there was chlorine in the tanker.

Gosh, maybe this wasn’t so Biblical after all…

Wait....

What’s that shaking?  An echo from the chlorine methane detonation?

For those of you familiar with the “fizzie” description of the Mt. St. Helens eruption, what comes next may not be too much of a surprise.

The combination of heat, shock and bubbles rising to the surface in a column over the methane-hydrate field puts this meta-stable system into an excursion releasing its huge potential energy—not in a detonation (at least not just yet), but—in a giant fountain similar to what happens when you shake a carbonated drink bottle up and then open it’s top. Then GIT will, for the mere price of a renting a filled chlorine tanker and some small pyrotechnics, have his Biblical destruction of the world by fire:

An epic spray of methane gas surges to the sky—but weighed down by mist it settles close to the surface of the ocean and spreads out rapidly to mix with air. 

And now we start seeing where GIT is heading with his Biblical terrorism (op. cit.):

Whereas pure methane is lighter than air, methane loaded with water droplets is much heavier, and thus spreads over the land, mixing with air in the process (and losing water as rain). The air-methane mixture is explosive at methane concentrations between 5% and 15%; as such mixtures form in different locations near the ground and are ignited by lightning, explosions2 and conflagrations destroy most of the terrestrial life, and also produce great amounts of smoke and of carbon dioxide. Firestorms carry smoke and dust into the upper atmosphere, where they may remain for several years (Turco et al., 1991); the resulting darkness and global cooling may provide an additional kill mechanism. Conversely, carbon dioxide and the remaining methane create the greenhouse effect, which may lead to global warming. The outcome of the competition between the cooling and the warming tendencies is difficult to predict (Turco et al., 1991; Pierrehumbert, 2002).

Now, the question becomes:  How many people are kind of, uh, disappointed that at the turn of the millennium Jesus didn’t come on a cloud to take them away from all this—how shall I say it—enrichment and how much money do some of them have left to—uh—donate?

Posted by James Bowery on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 at 07:07 PM in
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