In fact, the chaos associated with traffic in developing countries is becoming all the rage among a new wave of traffic engineers in mainland Europe and, more recently, in the United Kingdom. It's called "second generation" traffic calming, a combination of traffic engineering and urban design that also draws heavily on the fields of behavioral psychology and -- of all subjects -- evolutionary biology. Rejecting the idea of separating people from vehicular traffic, it's a concept that privileges multiplicity over homogeneity, disorder over order, and intrigue over certainty. In practice, it's about dismantling barriers: between the road and the sidewalk, between cars, pedestrians and cyclists and, most controversially, between moving vehicles and children at play.

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But the implications, especially in the United States, are nothing less than radical. Reversing decades of conventional wisdom on traffic engineering, Hamilton-Baillie argues that the key to improving both safety and vehicular capacity is to remove traffic lights and other controls, such as stop signs and the white and yellow lines dividing streets into lanes. Without any clear right-of-way, he says, motorists are forced to slow down to safer speeds, make eye contact with pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, and decide among themselves when it is safe to proceed.

The name Verneshot comes from Jules Verne's book "From the Earth to the Moon" in which a huge cannon shoots astronauts into space.

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The blast would trigger a magnitude 11 earthquake, bigger than any quake ever recorded.

But this would be just a prelude to the main event.

Immediately after the explosion, pressure would plummet in the pipe that carried the gases, causing it to cave in from the bottom upwards.

The collapse would travel up at hypersonic speed, erupting with unimaginable force at the surface and hurling as much as 20 gigatonnes of rock into the stratosphere.

The energy released would be equivalent to 120 billion tonnes of TNT, or seven million of the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War.

Debris would rain down from the sky, and dust would blot out the sun to cause the same kind of climate changing effects as an impact from space.

A large piece of rock from a Verneshot blast landing on the Earth would produce a crater in the same way as an asteroid or comet.

An object ejected from the Deccan Traps could explain why the Chicxulub crater, linked to the extinction of the dinosaurs, is so lopsided.