Original subtitles

Walls of water pulverizing everything they encounter, while the oceans

swallow the very ground beneath us. Could the tide of a biblical flood wipe

humanity from the planet?

Leading minds join forces to craft scientifically plausible scenarios of

Armageddon.

and find the secret to human salvation in the face of ultimate disaster.

Can I get a water?

So is it true that it doesn't rain in this desert at all? It hasn't rained in

some parts of this desert for 400 years.

We've all heard accounts of the biblical flood.

It's one of the oldest worldwide cataclysm stories there is. And many

have a similar myth.

There are great flood stories in almost every society around here. An ancient

event by which the whole world was flooded.

Hey look, it's raining.

But there's a flaw to the biblical flood story. There just simply isn't enough

water on the planet to flood the entire Earth.

Even if the ice caps melt, there'd still be plenty of dry land.

The total amount of water on the Earth has probably remained more or less

since it was put there 4 billion years ago. It evaporates, forms clouds, and

those clouds rain and snow on the land.

That water flows down.

through the rivers and streams, and returns to the ocean, continuously

water throughout planet Earth. So you can't really flood the entire planet,

without bringing a bunch of water in from outside the planet.

It's conceivable that lurking out in the very frozen depths of space are planet

-sized objects that may be largely composed of water.

It is not inconceivable to imagine a water -rich asteroid making its way to

Earth's orbit. And it could contain enough water to fill the Earth's oceans

thousands, millions of times over. When objects come into the solar system from

the sunward direction, they can sneak up on you.

There could be one heading here right now, and we wouldn't even know it.

NASA is reporting that an enormous object has just struck the moon. The

came in very fast, about 18 kilometers per second. The moon was hit by a

rogue... comet. Asteroids that might hit the Earth are often difficult to

detect. Reports from all over the globe are describing a spectacular ring

forming in the sky.

What you're seeing up there are the remains of the comet, literally billions

pieces of ice. NASA officials say the comet was over 1 ,000 miles across.

The team is now looking through the data. We hope in the next few days to

the science that we expect. Get an idea of the composition.

Understand its properties.

Since yesterday morning, some of the driest places in the world are now

intense rainfall.

The State Emergency Operations Center remains at a level one or full

Noah and other scientists are trying to determine whether the rain and the moon

collision are related.

The idea of water coming from outer space is not that far -fetched. At one

the Earth was molten and then dry, and that water probably came from outer

space.

Sometime between 3 .8 and 4 billion years ago, when the Earth was still very

young, it was bombarded in a period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment.

Over this time, perhaps 100 million years or so, the Earth was constantly

hit by asteroids and cometary material.

And it's probable that a large amount of the water we now find on the surface of

the Earth came during that time.

But what if a large icy body were to come to Earth just as they did billions

years ago?

In that situation, if it falls apart close enough to the Earth, the material

from it may begin to orbit the Earth on its own.

It is likely that upon breakup, it would form an accretion disk.

Almost like the rings of Saturn on a smaller scale, the inner part of the

interacts with the outer part of the Earth's atmosphere.

Material would begin to be dragged down into the Earth's environment.

As these ice chunks come down into the atmosphere, it has to start coming down

as rain.

It's unlikely that it would start raining everywhere on the planet at the

time. The rains would just seem unseasonably strong.

And we'd see heavy rain in humongous quantities where we've never seen it

before.

One of the first effects we might see is severe flash flooding.

Any place on Earth where rainfall is somewhere rare, the ground's impermeable

there. So none of that water would be getting absorbed. It would be very flash

flood prone.

In deserts, one would intuitively think that soils would be so dry that they

would absorb the moisture very quickly.

But that ground is very hard packed.

It just does not soak up the water very well.

When you get rain in a desert, it'll all hit the ground and it all starts

funneling into channels that may not have been used for a hundred years,

even a thousand years.

We have just introduced a whole bunch of water into a landscape that can't deal

with it and that has to funnel it off in the torment.

It could be a very dangerous situation.

It'd be almost like a wall of water coming down a gully from miles away.

It'll mow down whatever's in its path.

If something as spectacular as an object like this striking the moon in a

flooded Earth scenario were to happen, I think the first reaction of scientists

would be shock and awe, like just about everybody else. Oh, my gosh, what just

happened? But soon after that, I think there'd be a lot of people who would

start trying to figure out what the impact is going to be on everything from

climate to survival.

Hello, everyone. Good evening.

We've confirmed the rain is coming from the debris of the accretion disk.

Small particles of ice enter the atmosphere, they vaporize, dramatically

increasing the level of moisture.

The result is the unprecedented rainfall that began two weeks ago, setting off

monsoon -like rain cycles in hundreds of locations across the globe.

Keep in mind that we develop all our science based on what we currently know.

When we look at changes, we think we can model it, but dumping a whole bunch of

additional water into the system, that would be...

an extraordinary change.

All of a sudden, regular cycles that we can predict are thrown off. It's

impossible to accurately predict what the final water volume will be, but

on the current rate of atmospheric saturation, we believe the rain will

to fall for over 300 years.

Most people won't realize the dangers early on.

People might even find it a bit thrilling at first.

But within a few months, other problems will begin to present themselves,

hitting us hardest where we're most vulnerable, in our highly populated

What you see in a flash flood in a desert is that there's water that

and runs very quickly.

In a city, a flash flood behaves very similarly.

You have a lot of surfaces that can't soak up the water. You have a lot of

buildings that are going to funnel the water down in very particular ways.

Even though we think we design things nicely in cities, we only design them to

some threshold values.

And those threshold values are now going to be exceeded by this particular

scenario. That water has to find any route it can to get to where it wants to

go.

The basement level of a building, anything standing in the way of that

isn't going to be standing for long.

The collapse of the St. Louis Arch has become a symbol of the destruction

by the rain crisis.

Fatalities now number in the hundreds of thousands.

Some places on the globe enter their 60th straight day of rain.

Experts have linked the catastrophic volume of rainfall directly to the

collision of the icy space body with the moon.

The ISLS's Dr. Ronan Price says flash flooding is the least of our worries,

the real threat to civilization is the rise in the global sea level caused by

the rain.

It's impossible to accurately predict what the final volume of water will be,

but our figures lead us to believe that the sea level will rise at least 12 ,000

feet.

As massive rainstorms sweep the globe, sea levels start to rise.

And billions of people on coastlines around the world are now in danger.

Coastal infrastructure around the world is extremely susceptible to changes in

sea level. It is one of the nightmare disasters for any urban planner.

As seawater pours in, city infrastructure begins to corrode. Cities

maybe a sense of invincibility.

But urban areas are designed with drainage systems that typically only can

handle floods of a certain size.

Superstorm Sandy is a great example of how seawater can come in and completely

destroy a city's electrical and transportation system.

One reason it's so crippling is because it's saltwater.

Salt water contains sodium chloride, and ionic compounds like sodium chloride

are dangerous for two main reasons.

Number one, it's highly corrosive.

Number two, it's electrically conductive.

So when this salt water hits the high -voltage power lines, it's going to

completely electrified. If someone steps into electrified water, whatever

current that water is carrying is going to go through that person's body and

game over.

Electrocution is not the only threat from saltwater inundating our electrical

infrastructure.

The saltwater is going to begin getting into the power transmittal system.

It's not just the grid. It's everything from the substations to the wires that

run from one place to the other.

So things will be shorting out. Power grids are going to fall one by one in

rapid succession.

And with the world flooded, the lights will go out.

Permanently.

Interestingly enough, too much water could lead to less water to drink

the sewers are going to back up into reservoirs and suddenly everything gets

mixed together and there's no drinkable water.

As the sewage may mix with the drinking water sources, infectious diseases will

develop.

People will suffer from gastrointestinal disease like cholera.

People with cholera develop profuse diarrheas.

and quick dehydration.

Unless adequately and quickly rehydrated, it's a come and die very

Health authorities are cautioning residents to stay clear of toxic

water. If you are in a flooded area, remember to avoid tap water, even if

running and looks clean.

It could still be laced with contamination that could make you sick

you. Only drink and wash rooms with water from sealed containers.

Inland medical centers along evacuation routes are unable to take in the surge

of patients from coastal areas.

Some have set up intake shelters in local gymnasiums or stadiums. Those with

fewer resources are turning patients away.

victims to keep moving further inland if they need medical attention.

At this point, you'd see hundreds of thousands of people lost.

You'd like to think that governments around the world would come together to

find a solution.

But what could they do?

With an accretion disk of ice and water surrounding our planet, one of the

options we have is to vaporize it.

To use large, space -based parabolic mirrors.

The beauty of using the reflectors to focus the sunlight on these objects is,

first of all, you don't have to supply the power. The sun does that for you.

second, they can be designed such that they have a very wide beam so that you

can cover a lot of area at a time.

You may ask yourself, is there going to be enough energy to melt this ice from

these beams?

Just think about using a magnifying glass to burn an ant, and a magnifying

is just a few inches across.

Now imagine you have a single parabolic reflector that's the size of a football

field, and you can have many of these all focusing on the same icy object, and

you could burn through a large chunk of ice really quickly.

The challenge...

to taking on this project is will you be able to get up enough reflectors in

enough time to remove enough of the ice such that it's no longer a threat to

earth the problem with building a big spaceship and sending it into space to

destroy this debris is that you're sending it into the debris field that

meant to destroy the very strength of the large reflectors is their weakness

they're a large target for collisions

You have to remember that these particles are circling the Earth at

kilometers per second, which is faster than a bullet. So any small piece that

hits your spacecraft is likely to destroy it.

You're probably going to destroy your spacecraft almost as soon as you put it

there.

Efforts to use large reflectors to melt away the debris ring failed in

spectacular fashion this morning as the ray of hope was destroyed as pilots

attempted to get into position above the debris.

The spacecraft was designed jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency and

cost over $2 billion to construct.

Money some claim would have been better spent on evacuation efforts here on the

ground.

Realistically, there's no way to stop the rain from the accretion disk from

falling. When thinking about how to get rid of it in space,

I'm fresh out of practical ideas of how to do that. So I think the next thing I

would do is turn to the community of scientists and engineers and politicians

and figure out what the heck do we do on the ground to live with the changing

situation. We'll be left with no other option than to protect ourselves and

survive on Earth.

We're going to see all of the coastal cities wiped out. And it's really not

the people who are on the coast who are going to be affected.

I think the people in the Midwest, people in much of the United States,

have a false sense of security that was totally unwarranted.

A simple example is sinkholes.

Sinkholes generally occur in what we call karst terrain. And a karst terrain

an area that's underlain by limestone or gypsum or some sort of a rock that can

dissolve.

Basically, the rainfall passing through the atmosphere becomes sufficiently

acidic to actually erode limestone underground.

Sinkholes can be anywhere from several feet to hundreds of feet deep. People on

the surface.

may be completely unaware that they're standing above a giant hole underground

until a heavy rainstorm causes a collapse.

There are some sinkholes that are many miles across in different parts of the

world. Places like China, Vietnam, Jamaica.

Within the United States, we actually have some cities that are built on

-prone areas.

Cities like Nashville.

Tonight we have our reporters live on location.

Three people had to be rescued after ignoring warnings about driving into

floods.

Others thought about it, then backed off. Before venturing in, orders early

hesitated, but as the water rose, the passengers climbed onto the roof.

A large icy body from somewhere deep in the solar system smashed into our moon

and has created an accretion disk surrounding our planet.

The debris from that accretion disk is now falling to Earth. Sea levels are

rising and the entire planet is beginning to flood.

The scene in downtown Nashville was one of pandemonium after a 35 -story

apartment building was swallowed by a sinkhole.

The building collapsed at approximately 1015 last night, killing at least 143

people and injuring over 300 more.

Thousands of Nashville residents have already evacuated to the Smoky

while others, fearing that the crisis will only get worse...

chosen to make for higher elevations in Colorado's Rocky Mountains.

Many of the people we've spoken to are reluctant to leave their homes, despite

the knowledge that the floodwaters are at their doorstep. We're searching

address by address to make sure we don't miss anybody.

I don't think we'll have the resources to react.

I think we're going to be able to save some people, but once they realize the

magnitude of the disaster, it's going to be incumbent on those people to save

themselves with assistance, but they'll have to make a commitment to

cooperatively evacuate.

201, 202.

Go ahead. Be advised, female on rooftop, looks like she might have an infant

with her.

We're coming.

Hold on.

Unlike a normal flood that we're accustomed to, this one is not going to

People who are going to stay home thinking that they're going to wait out

flood are just wrong.

They're going to have to move or perish.

Hey, good. Got it.

We also have experience with weather forecasts being sometimes drastically

wrong. Some people, they'll think, well, hey, maybe the flood won't happen.

Maybe the flood will happen someplace else. My home will be okay.

Can you take us to Indianapolis?

No, ma 'am, Indianapolis went under two days ago.

Oh, my God.

We've seen evacuations from floods like Katrina and Fandi, and we've seen how

devastating those are.

That's nothing when you consider the number of people that we'll have to

evacuate is far greater than anything we've ever experienced before.

We know how to evacuate a few thousand people. Thank you so much. You're

welcome. We don't know how to evacuate 50, 100 million people.

Look up the hill here.

But there's another problem here.

Let's say, by some miracle, we are able to evacuate people from low -lying

areas. At best, that's just a stopgap. The accretion disk orbiting the planet

has enough water to flood the Earth.

There are going to be more and more people squeezed onto smaller...

Parts of land as they have to move up to higher elevations.

The temperatures drop here as low as minus two or minus three sometimes.

Most reasonable estimates are that we need about one acre of food -producing

land per person per year to survive.

So as we move higher and higher, the land gets smaller and smaller and less

arable, we're going to starve.

If human beings are going to find hope in the face of this global flood, we're

going to have to build it.

One option we might have to manage all this water might be to use a technique

that's thousands of years old.

Dams.

The water wall's construction would be ongoing until the final water level is

reached a little less than 400 years from now.

Ultimately, the wall would approach 13 ,000 feet.

Essentially a man -made mountain range. If there was a proposal then that one

city could be saved with a sea wall of humongous expense, my best guess is that

engineers would be queuing up to do it because of the engineering challenge.

I really believe you would want to build what we call a ring dam or a ring levee

to keep it from collapsing on itself, and you can do all those designs, and

can calculate the strength of materials, you can calculate how much material,

and it's all existing technology.

As you can see from the projections and budget in your packet, the enormous

expense and resource requirements make this project impossible for any one

nation alone.

If we can get the political will behind it... The construction project might be

possible, but the scale is unprecedented.

It truly is amazing when we start thinking about what it would require to

this. To put some human perspective to this, we were in a hurry to build the

protective levee system around New Orleans.

It still took us four years to protect 120 miles, and probably an average

of the levees there was 22 to 23 feet.

And 22 to 23 feet compared to 10 ,000 feet, it's not just the ratio of the

heights that makes the difference.

It's the whole volume. If I double the height, the volume goes up by a factor

four.

You'd have to rip down some reasonable -sized mountains to get enough material.

Transporting material is going to be a problem.

There's two main ways of doing this. One is to try to get the material as close

as you can to the source hydraulically.

and actually pump it in a slurry into the place. A lot of levees are

this way. If you start trucking it, huge trucks, the biggest we now have, might

be 150 cubic yards at a time.

And you start looking at how many trucks it would take running 24 hours a day,

doing 100 loads, and you still come up with these numbers that are just

enormous.

After extensive research, we believe the best candidate city for this project is

Madrid. With the proper infrastructure, we project that Greater Madrid can

sustain 20 million EU citizens.

Its elevation ensures decades of construction before water levels reach

city. We believe that this plan is the only one that ensures the preservation

a significant number of lives.

The Madrid Dam Project is using an existing technology to save an existing

But this project has one big problem. The resources it's using are enormous.

Realistically, we'll only be able to create a project on this scale once.

So Madrid may end up being the last city on Earth.

That means that most people on Earth are going to be left outside the dam to

die.

Billions and billions of people with no food.

Boise, Idaho is underwater.

Tucson is underwater.

Hong Kong is underwater.

As Europe fights to save Madrid, billions of people around the world are

drowning.

But if history has taught us anything, people don't give up.

Those who are left outside of the Madrid wall, the great minds there, will come

up with new and different solutions.

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the day the rain started.

The sea level has swelled to over 3 ,500 feet.

As Europe fights to save Madrid, billions of people around the world are

drowning. Engineers in charge of building Madrid's Great Dam remain

that construction will stay ahead of the rising water. The willful destruction

of entire countries and cultures would represent an unspeakable crime against

humanity. Those not granted entry into the city limits of Madrid are asking,

what will happen to the rest of us?

People from other areas would try to get into this city that has the dam.

Ultimately, most of them would fail.

There would be riots. There would be looting. People would try to get each

other's boats. People would try to get weapons.

That leaves billions and billions of people with no solution.

People would be very desperate, but luckily the dam is not our only hope.

will be other efforts, different approaches to survival.

The real question is, what sort of habitat could we exist on? We might have

build floating cities.

At this point, there are still places where human civilization is functioning,

places at high altitude like Denver, Colorado.

It's places like these where people will be trying to engineer a future for

humanity. Okay, so this is our current R &D facility.

We're still in the prototyping phase, though production has begun on some of

components. This is a 115th scale working prototype of the azimuth engine.

There'll be 57 of these thrusters placed around the perimeter of the ship.

Denver already has a strong military presence and a lot of...

high -tech infrastructure to build projects of this scale. We have Lockheed

Martin, we have Northrop Grumman.

These are large government contractors.

In fact, Northrop Grumman already makes aircraft carriers and submarines.

You couldn't find a better place to try to build a future floating city.

Weeding the charge to find America's answer to the Great Flood is a

of companies now headquartered in Denver, Colorado.

Given more than 75 % of the entire U .S. defense budget last week by an

emergency act of Congress, they are charged with creating a real -life

Ark for humanity.

The President's budget request next year in the February time frame will be

ready to talk about a little more certainty where the dollars are.

this floating city plan say it will be completed well ahead of Europe's Madrid

Dam project.

now been underway for nearly two decades.

Practors claim that this floating city needs to be much more than a big ship.

It's to have a chance at saving the human race.

A floating city is not as far -fetched as it sounds.

We already know how to build large ships, but these vessels aren't designed

be self -sustaining.

The floating city will have to function long after the last supplies and fuel

have been stocked.

Well, I think the biggest problem is you've got to have food in order to

survive. You might think in this new water world that we could just eat fish,

but there's a problem with that assumption.

With this massive influx of fresh water from space, the saltwater sea life is in

big trouble.

We would wind up with a lot of fish floating on the surface of the ocean and

lot of fish washing up on the shores of all the continents in the world.

It would not be a pretty sight.

The silver lining here is that not all marine species would go extinct.

There are some that could adapt to these new circumstances.

Salmon is a saltwater fish that goes up into fresh water to spawn every year. So

these are fish that we could probably farm.

We might not be limited to sea life alone.

There's a new technology today to create man -made floating wetlands.

It's made of foam that floats infused with microfibers that will host bacteria

that filters the water and allows a range of species to survive by cleaning

pollutants in the water. So we can maintain these habitats for these

exploit them for food.

More hope for humanity might be coming in the form of an enormous floating

but not anytime soon. Engineers are saying the massive arc won't be

for another 65 years. That still promises to be nearly a century earlier

the massive Madrid Dam.

By now, all of the small chunks of ice in the inner accretion disk have been

deorbited by atmospheric drag.

And that's because the small objects feel a greater drag force. So the small

objects are going to slow down and deorbit earlier than the larger objects.

When the large objects begin to deorbit, that's going to create an entirely new

problem.

With a huge portion of what's left of the human population packed into one

the completion of the Madrid Dam would be a monumental event.

are the secret to keeping the interior of the dam wall from breaking down.

You can think of them as a giant bilge pump.

They're running more or less constantly, recycling the water that seeps into the

dam and feeding it back into the sea.

We take one offline every four days for maintenance.

With that rotation, we have been able to keep these pumps online. And as you can

see, they're going strong.

This city and this community are safe.

The inner edges of the accretion disk are going to interact with the Earth's

outer atmosphere. And it turns out that the less massive an object is, the more

drag force it's going to feel. So the small objects are going to slow down and

deorbit earlier than the larger objects.

By now, atmospheric drag has deorbited all of the small chunks of ice. But

that's not all the accretion disk has to offer.

There are still large chunks up there.

And the planet is now nearly completely covered with water.

When these large chunks of ice begin to fall, they're going to hit Earth's new

global ocean, and they're going to create giant tsunamis.

Tsunamis in deep water travel very fast, you know, 100, 300 miles per hour,

depending on water depth.

Tsunamis such as the one that devastated Japan in 2011 can travel at the speed

of a jumbo jet, 600 miles an hour, and can grow to be 100 feet high.

Tsunamis caused by falling debris from the accretion disk could be much worse.

If we have a bunch of space debris coming in, then we know that... One hits

ocean, and another one's going to hit the ocean.

These are going to generate waves.

When those waves come together, we get a phenomenon we call interference.

They add to each other in height. So you can get a wave that's twice the size of

the original waves.

This makes the tsunamis that hit Japan look like Calvin and Hobbes playing in

the bathtub.

Sea walls are not a good defense against tsunamis.

Two things happen to sea walls in tsunamis. Some of them fail, and fail

catastrophically.

The other thing is they just don't stop the water.

Once the water is above it, there's so much momentum going over it that it's a

recipe for disaster.

Oh, my God!

Once the structure's breached, you're likely to get a massive failure.

Water will find its path through.

You only really have to have one point of weakness, one point where the water

reaches the wall, and the whole lot will eventually come tumbling down.

The last remnant of human civilization has just been submerged.

Just think of the impact of that.

We're left with this question.

If the sea wall, the most impressive structure ever created by humans, can't

stand up to this global ocean, can anything?

The last Earth -bound city has just been wiped from the face of the Earth.

What's left of humanity is now a floating city on Earth's new global

But we haven't seen the worst of what's to come.

It may seem impossible to design a floating city that can withstand these

of enormous waves.

But the fact is we probably could.

People have been sailing for a long time, and the use of a ballast has been

perfected. A ballast is basically weight below the waterline, and the whole

purpose of it is to keep the ship level while it's sailing.

You can do creative things with a ballast. There's a ship called the flip

that by simply adjusting the ballast on the ship can take it from sailing level

and make it go vertical.

It's a challenge to do that, but they've been doing it since the 60s. And in

this configuration, when the ship flips vertical, it's very, very stable, even

in the roughest of seas.

It ought to be theoretically possible to scale this up and make something much

larger than the flip ship.

and do exactly the same thing to get a very stable configuration.

since the Earth was transformed by a raging tide and a global flood.

If we can hold on, there is an end in sight. The accretion disk will dissipate

over time, and eventually it will be gone.

Unlike most astronomical phenomena, which take millions or billions of years

take place, it is conceivable that an accretion disk around the Earth

in... less than a few human lifetimes. As that object breaks down and loses

its icy exterior, the disk itself will begin to diminish.

In the end, all that may be left is a new tiny moon that was once the rocky

of this icy body that had come in from the outer solar system.

In the biblical flood, the waters eventually receded and the Earth was

In our scenario, that's not the case. The waters aren't going to recede. When

the accretion disk is finally depleted and the rains stop, we'll be looking at

completely different world.

There would be no more dry land on the planet. The Earth's oceans would have

been doubled or trebled in volume.

If you think about a water world, what happens to the forest?

What happens to surface plant life?

Most of it may die.

Earth itself will survive.

Earth has survived for four and a half billion years, and it's gone through

dramatic changes, cataclysms, volcanism, asteroids, comets. The planet will

survive. The big question is, will we survive?

After all this devastation, there is one bright spot.

We're left on a world covered by water. And after all, water is one of the

foundations of life itself, an incredible source of energy.

We will be able to survive on into the future.

It'll be different, but life still exists in the global ocean. And on top,

beings will carry on.