A structure Chad Muilenburg's company built in an undisclosed location outside Asheville;North Carolina.
Photo Credit:
Handout
, Chad Muilenburg
TORONTO – Signing a waiver ensuring a secret location
and being offered a cash bonus to finish by December 21, 2012 are all in
a day’s work for construction company owner Chad Muilenburg.
Muilenburg has built an underground, concrete structure with a generator room, three blast doors, solar power and a geo-thermal HVAC system for a client who is preparing for a disaster, and wanted it complete before the rumoured Doomsday, “just in case.”
“He’s not one of these that is convinced it’s going to happen, but he says ‘I have the ability to take care of building something to make sure that I am provided for, in case it is,’” explained Muilenburg in a phone interview. “Financially, it’s not a problem. So that’s why he did it.”
The building took nine months to finish, with a construction cost of $600,000, but “all in all” closer to a million dollars, according to Muilenburg. It can house between ten and twenty people.
A structure Chad Muilenburg's company built in an undisclosed location outside Asheville, North Carolina. Credit: Handout, Chad Muilenburg
Muilenburg’s construction company is located in the U.S. and is currently building the fourth such underground storage building. He says clients have different theories as to why they need such a shelter, but believes most are buying themselves an insurance policy.
“Environmental disasters can be endured with air, water, shelter, and food provided by the facility,” he wrote in an email to Global News. “Epidemic can be endured by removing oneself from the population. Civil unrest can be endured by being underground and safe.”
But Earth and Ocean Sciences Professor Colin Goldblatt says it’s almost impossible to tell how effective stockpiling and living in a bunker would be.
“In the face of a total collapse of our society…some people would survive and some won’t,” said the University of Victoria professor in a phone interview. “And maybe the people who’ve stockpiled a couple of years food supply—and don’t die of the flu because there aren’t any doctors around—well then maybe you’ll do better, but it’s probably not the best use of people’s energy.”
Goldblatt, who teaches about the evolution and death of planets in an Earth System Evolution course, says the only ‘one day of the year’ type of apocalypse is a nuclear war.
“Nuclear blasts set off fires, those fires create a lot of dust and soot, and up in the atmosphere they’re going to block the sun coming into the Earth,” said Goldblatt. “That’s going to make it a lot colder… we’ll have a kind of perpetual winter for a few years, and that’s going to lead to crop failures for years and ultimately starvation.”
The professor suggests lobbying politicians to pursue nuclear disarmament is a better strategy to mitigate this risk.
Goldblatt dismissed other events such as a massive earthquake (not a severe global impact) or a flood caused by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet (would take hundreds of years) as unrealistic apocalyptic scenarios.
He admitted an asteroid hitting Earth would be a worldwide catastrophe—but it could take thousands of years to affect everyone on the planet.
“If you happen to be standing where this asteroid hits, you’ll be gone in seconds…but for an asteroid impact in British Columbia to kill people in Toronto, well that’s not going to happen right away,” he explained. “It’s going to be the knock-on effect, the impact winter, and the kind of chemical changes [such as toxic gases caused by worldwide wildfires] that happen because of it.”
He added that an asteroid impact of the size that killed the dinosaurs is expected every billion years. The last one happened 65 million years ago, but timing is random.
Goldblatt’s genuine end-of-the-world prediction involves something called a runaway greenhouse effect, since there’s a maximum amount of energy that the Earth’s atmosphere can radiate out to space. He says it will happen in about a billion years from now.
“Once that amount of energy that we get from the Sun is more than the maximum that a hot, moist atmosphere can radiate out to space, well then all the Earth can do is get hotter and just keep getting hotter… then we’re toast basically,” he said.
Of course, these Doomsday-esque predictions are from a human perspective, as Goldblatt points out we’re in a mass extinction event right now.
“That’s being caused by habitat loss, in producing invasive species, climate change—all of those because of humans,” he said. “If you’re anything that’s not a human, then humans are the apocalypse.”
Muilenburg has built an underground, concrete structure with a generator room, three blast doors, solar power and a geo-thermal HVAC system for a client who is preparing for a disaster, and wanted it complete before the rumoured Doomsday, “just in case.”
“He’s not one of these that is convinced it’s going to happen, but he says ‘I have the ability to take care of building something to make sure that I am provided for, in case it is,’” explained Muilenburg in a phone interview. “Financially, it’s not a problem. So that’s why he did it.”
The building took nine months to finish, with a construction cost of $600,000, but “all in all” closer to a million dollars, according to Muilenburg. It can house between ten and twenty people.
A structure Chad Muilenburg's company built in an undisclosed location outside Asheville, North Carolina. Credit: Handout, Chad Muilenburg
Muilenburg’s construction company is located in the U.S. and is currently building the fourth such underground storage building. He says clients have different theories as to why they need such a shelter, but believes most are buying themselves an insurance policy.
“Environmental disasters can be endured with air, water, shelter, and food provided by the facility,” he wrote in an email to Global News. “Epidemic can be endured by removing oneself from the population. Civil unrest can be endured by being underground and safe.”
But Earth and Ocean Sciences Professor Colin Goldblatt says it’s almost impossible to tell how effective stockpiling and living in a bunker would be.
“In the face of a total collapse of our society…some people would survive and some won’t,” said the University of Victoria professor in a phone interview. “And maybe the people who’ve stockpiled a couple of years food supply—and don’t die of the flu because there aren’t any doctors around—well then maybe you’ll do better, but it’s probably not the best use of people’s energy.”
Goldblatt, who teaches about the evolution and death of planets in an Earth System Evolution course, says the only ‘one day of the year’ type of apocalypse is a nuclear war.
“Nuclear blasts set off fires, those fires create a lot of dust and soot, and up in the atmosphere they’re going to block the sun coming into the Earth,” said Goldblatt. “That’s going to make it a lot colder… we’ll have a kind of perpetual winter for a few years, and that’s going to lead to crop failures for years and ultimately starvation.”
The professor suggests lobbying politicians to pursue nuclear disarmament is a better strategy to mitigate this risk.
Goldblatt dismissed other events such as a massive earthquake (not a severe global impact) or a flood caused by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet (would take hundreds of years) as unrealistic apocalyptic scenarios.
He admitted an asteroid hitting Earth would be a worldwide catastrophe—but it could take thousands of years to affect everyone on the planet.
“If you happen to be standing where this asteroid hits, you’ll be gone in seconds…but for an asteroid impact in British Columbia to kill people in Toronto, well that’s not going to happen right away,” he explained. “It’s going to be the knock-on effect, the impact winter, and the kind of chemical changes [such as toxic gases caused by worldwide wildfires] that happen because of it.”
He added that an asteroid impact of the size that killed the dinosaurs is expected every billion years. The last one happened 65 million years ago, but timing is random.
Goldblatt’s genuine end-of-the-world prediction involves something called a runaway greenhouse effect, since there’s a maximum amount of energy that the Earth’s atmosphere can radiate out to space. He says it will happen in about a billion years from now.
“Once that amount of energy that we get from the Sun is more than the maximum that a hot, moist atmosphere can radiate out to space, well then all the Earth can do is get hotter and just keep getting hotter… then we’re toast basically,” he said.
Of course, these Doomsday-esque predictions are from a human perspective, as Goldblatt points out we’re in a mass extinction event right now.
“That’s being caused by habitat loss, in producing invasive species, climate change—all of those because of humans,” he said. “If you’re anything that’s not a human, then humans are the apocalypse.”
Read it on Global News: Global News | How the world will really end
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