Solar flare. (Image by NASA/GSFC/SDO.)

If you’re like us, you’re totally burned out on all the absurd, disingenuous ways that marketers are trying to connect their wares to Earth Day. Perhaps part of the problem is that no one really knows what they’re talking about when they say they want to “save the Earth.” Save the Earth from what?

We’d have a better sense of our mission if we spent some time contemplating the threats. So in order to breathe some life back into the most worn-out secular holiday since Something on a Stick Day, we’ve decided to expand on Eric Roston’s list of ways the Earth could actually be destroyed. Know thine enemy!

1. Power grid destroyed by electromagnetic flux from the sun, taking our civilization back to the 19th century. Oh and all the nuclear power plants melt down.

This is a real thing that could happen tomorrow and yet who ever talks about it? I mean aside from NASA and the Department of Defense.

Basically the idea is that the sun could experience a geomagnetic storm so big that if the Earth were in its path, it would induce huge currents in our transmission grid, possibly blowing out so many transformers that it would literally take years for the grid to become operational again.

According to a study by Metatech corporation, a storm with a strength comparative to that of 1921 would destroy more than 300 transformers and leave over 130 million people without power, with a cost totaling several trillion dollars. A massive solar flare could knock out electric power for months.

If the grid really were toast, nuclear power plants that couldn’t be supplied with enough oil for backup generators would eventually melt down. Scientists say we are basically unprepared for what’s known as a Coronal Mass Ejection from the sun.

Solution: More science.

[R]esearchers don’t know what a thousand-year [solar] storm might look like; data on such dramatic events are pretty hard to come by. But [Mike Hapgood of the British research and technology agency RAL Space] says scientists could get a better idea by analyzing more data, including observations from a century or more ago.

2. Ye olde asteroid

Does this one even bear mentioning? Some of the worst action flicks ever made are about this eventuality, and we’re reasonably sure this is what finished off the dinosaurs. If a rock several miles across is headed for us, there’s little we can do — even blowing it up would simply break it into smaller pieces rather than change its trajectory.

Solution: Whatever they did in those terrible action movies. Or restart the Apollo program, launch a probe to intercept the asteroid, and then attach a rocket to it to divert it from its path. Whichever is easier.

3. Antibiotic resistance

This is by far the most preventable disaster out there. Here’s how Roston sums it up:

THREAT: Humanity loses its evolutionary arms race with infectious bacteria. The crisis begins with children needing more rounds of ever-stronger drugs to knock out common ailments, such as strep throat. Drug-resistant staph infections grow more numerous and serious. A reinvigorated Black Death returns?

Solution: Start policing the use of antibiotics in livestock, which are the breeding grounds for these superbugs. Also, more science, so we have yet more antibiotics in the drug development pipeline.

If you’d like more hair-raising tails of planetary doom, including the possibility of supervolcanoes and total ecosystem collapse, check out the full list at Bloomberg.

Some things that look awful up close can look kind of beautiful from space. Like this enormous open-pit copper mine in northern Chile.

From NASA:

The La Escondida Mine, an open-pit mine in northern Chile, produces the most copper of any mine in the world — some 360 million metric tons per year. Its impact on the Atacama Desert environment can be seen by comparing the 1975 image, taken before mining began, with the 2008 picture. The blue and white areas in the center of the 2008 image are the mine’s infrastructure and pits. The darker blue object at the lower left is a waste reservoir.

Here’s the mine picture juxtaposed with the same landscape seen in 1975:

Witchcraft at Salem Village by William A. Crafts, 1876

A little ice age around the time of the 1692 Salem witch trials led to crop failures and shortages of fish, which put everyone in a mood to find a scapegoat, says a newly resurfaced 2004 Harvard thesis by economist Emily Oster. And who did they find to blame for climate weirdness? We’ll give you a hint: She weighed the same as a duck.

When crops failed, “people would have searched for a scapegoat in the face of deadly changes in weather patterns,” Oster wrote. Thus, desperate people traced their troubles to unpopular neighbors and outcasts allied to the devil.

In other words, lacking an explanation for climate-related woes, Salem locals pointed fingers at witches. And then they pointed other things at them, like burning torches.

Alan Burke at the Salem News notes that other historians remain unconvinced.

Danvers archivist Dick Trask, an expert on the era, was not surprised to hear the climate-change theory. Nor was he convinced. He’s heard all of the explanations and says, “These theories tell us more about the present than they do about the past.”

But whatever, he’s probably a witch.

What are we going to do in a world where the plastics we rely on contain more than 50 endocrine disruptors (that we know of) — and where oil, the feedstock of all that plastic, gets more expensive by the day?

According to the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, we make better plastic. The group made this almost parodically cool video to remind us that plastic isn’t beyond redemption. After all, it’s possible to make it from substances that are renewable, in forms that aren’t a hazard to our health.

We asked UMN IonE who did the soundtrack on this video; we’ll update when they get back to us.

Last fall, cows that were grazing on federal land in Colorado took refuge in a cabin, then froze to death or were trapped by cows’ general inability to figure out how to exit things, reports the AP. Now their carcasses are 1,000-pound blocks of frozen meat, and rangers aren’t sure how to dislodge them.

So they’re going to blow them up.

“Obviously, time is of the essence because we don’t want them defrosting,” [said Forest Service spokesman Steve Segin].

The other options include using a helicopter to haul out the cows and, I am not making this up, burning down the cabin.

Blowing up animals in remote areas is a surprisingly common tool of forest rangery, apparently.

“We’ve used them as a means of disposal to remove dead horses, elk and other animals in areas where it’s impossible to get them out,” [said Segin].

Every year, America misses out on 1.2 million megawatt-hours of electricity, enough to power a small city. Where’s it all going? Literally, it’s being flushed down the drain.

With the right kind of technology, we could harvest the energy of water running downhill through America’s infrastructure, including canals, tunnels, pipelines, and existing dams, reports Susan Kraemer at Earth Techling.

The key is “micro-hydropower” devices, which can harvest small amounts of water power. For human-made waterways, there’s Hydrovolts “Big Canal Turbine.”

And for slow-moving streams and rivers there’s the Vortex Induced Vibration for Aquatic Clean Energy converter.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has identified 191 sites in the U.S. on federal property where technologies like these could be deployed, fishing nearly free energy right out of the water.

It goes 200 miles on a third as much battery power as an electric car. It has airbags and an enclosed cockpit. It’s gyroscopically stabilized, like a Segway.

It could be the future of transportation.

Think of it as either an electric velomobile on steroids or the Nissan Leaf on a crash diet — either way, two wheels plus ultra-efficient electric transport means that once oil gets really expensive, Lit Motors‘ C-1 electric motorcycle could be the best vehicle on the road.

The C-1 was unveiled on Tuesday at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm Green conference in Laguna Niguel, Calif., but it’s still very much a prototype. It won’t be available for at least 18 months, and it will cost $24,000 when it arrives.

But once it comes out, its electronically-controlled power train will be capable of some pretty impressive stuff.

Lit’s website brands it “a rolling smartphone” and Kim himself describes it as an app that could be programmed to pop wheelies, corkscrews and other BMX tricks.

That’s right — it’s staggeringly fuel-efficient, it’s adorable, AND you can train it to do tricks. It’s like the world’s best vehicle and the world’s best pet in one.

Traditional Chinese medicine shop in Hong Kong. Photo by Mailer Diablo.

It’s probably best not to make all your meals out of pink slime and enriched HFCS, but a word to the wise: “Natural” doesn’t always mean safe. A new DNA analysis reveals that traditional Chinese medicine often contains carcinogens and other poisons not listed on the label.

In the herbal preparations, Bunce and his colleagues found members of 68 different plant families, among them plants of the genera Ephedra and Asarum. Both can contain toxic chemicals such as aristolochic acid, a compound banned in many countries because it causes kidney disease and cancer of the upper urinary tract.

Not that the ingredients that are actually on the label are much better, reports Kai Kupferschmidt at ScienceNow.

Some products contained material from animals classified as vulnerable or critically endangered, such as the Asiatic black bear and the Saiga antelope—just as the producers claimed.

The researchers involved believe that these toxins could be a major reason why Taiwan has the highest rates of upper urinary tract cancer in the world.

Street artists have started covering walls within the no-go zone of Chernobyl with advertising from the world’s nuclear power companies — and a portrait of America’s favorite family with a nuclear safety officer dad.

It’s pretty effective, as art goes. Areva’s slogan — “Our energies have a future, a future without CO2″ — takes on a whole new meaning when it’s wheatpasted to the crumbling plaster of what was once a school until the town’s children were irradiated by the worst civilian nuclear disaster in history.

Skip to 1:06 if you’ve had enough ruin porn and you just want to see the Simpsons mural.

Fortunately, there is a less violent solution. When there was a bike lane present, the same researchers found that motorists were 20 percent more likely to give cyclists the requisite three feet of clearance.

Or, for maximum effectiveness, maybe we could combine bike lanes and straight up shooting people who get in our faces, in some kind of unholy Nuts-n-Gum style hybrid.

Okay, that’s probably not a sustainable solution. It’s very Baltimore, though.