The Cause Of Cormac Mccarthy's The Road

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Andrew Mullet Prof. Murray Eng. 11011 26 November 2013 The Cause of The Road This world, as we know it, will end. This is not a case of faith or even chance; eventually this planet will cease to exist. The most inevitable cause of the destruction of earth and all life on it will luckily not occur until approximately five billion years from now when the sun begins to grow. When it does, it will envelope Mercury, Venus and eventually Earth. The only question is what catastrophe will destroy, or render this planet uninhabitable, before that time. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the author gives a view of an earth that has been all but destroyed but gives the reader no specific cause for this broken world. Many ideas and theories have been given. Ranging from gamma ray bursts to nuclear…show more content…
These potential causes can be grouped together to be dismissed, having a similar end result. Nuclear war and the less likely, but still possible, gamma ray burst can be easily dismissed due to the lack of one key condition. A gamma ray burst is a type of explosion caused by a star nearing supernova. Its explosion sends a massive amount of radiation and energy in a very compact beam that could easily bake the planet with enough radiation that nearly all forms of complex life, humans included, would perish quickly. The resulting nuclear winter would occur causing the aforementioned minor ice age event, but it is the lack of radiation that prevents this from being a possible answer. This lack of radiation is also how we can excuse a massive nuclear war as the culprit. Though it may be a popular theory for the cause it would take a minimum of 100 accurately placed, Hiroshima sized, nuclear explosions to cause a nuclear winter. This would cause enough radiation to be released that human life would be nearly impossible regardless of other forces such as climate and

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