1/18/2020
Somewhere in earth’s distant path, a meteorite showed up carrying a load of tungsten. This precious cargo randomly slipped into the gravity of a developing planet and was invited to be part of its outer structure. The collision between it and the metallic blob it crashed into created some microscopic stresses that lay inert for millions of years in the McKenzie Mountains of Canada. When the price of tungsten went astral due to governmental decrees that pushed for fusion reactors, the miners released it from its lair. It made its way into Pierre Leblatz’s plasma barrier walls and those internal stresses slowly showed up as lamellar tearing in a sheet of alloyed tungsten. For years it was pounded by extremely strong magnetic fields containing an insanely hot plasma on one side and a human fanned liquid coolant on the other. All was fine until Pierre allowed his crew to bring in a TV to watch the final game of the 2045 Stanley Cup series. The action was so intense on the rink that the employees stopped fanning and that tiny crack started growing. This is the real moment when all hell broke loose. No longer contained; Satan’s elixir was on a high-speed journey into the world of man. As it passed the vacuum barrier and gave its first tickle to earth’s atmosphere, any contained water vapor instantly flashed to steam. This expanded 1600 times its size pushing a huge pressure wave ahead of it that overpowered anything. First to go was Pierre’s crack crew that met death in a nanosecond. Their vaporized essence added to the total energy as they instantaneously blew out of the cooling facility and headed for Maine’s countryside. With a multi-billion-dollar plant and 3284 humans now gone in 3 seconds, the carnage finally subsided 8 miles out when the pressures reached equilibrium. The leading constituent of greenhouse gases is water vapor, not CO2, so the vaporized remains of over 5,500 people just became the equivalent of a small cloud resembling a grey tombstone.