Now I don't mean to alarm anyone, but the world is on the brink of destruction at all times. You may think, "Nah, that can't be right," but I shit you not, there are numerous ways our way of life could be obliterated without warning at any second. In the past few weeks, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have moved the Doomsday Clock to three minutes to midnight, indicating just how scarily close humanity is to Extinctionville, which is already home to the dinosaurs, the dodo, and coming soon, the panda bear. Don't believe me? Read on....
1) Nuclear War
Undoubtedly one of the most likely ways the world could end is through the use of nuclear weapons. Just look at the Cuban missile crisis, that insane stand-off between the USA and the Soviet Union when the threat of nuclear war between the superpowers was so close that the entire world had a collective shit attack. But I'm sure our generation will be fine, it's not as if there is a powerful nation out there run by an insane dictator with nuclear capabilities... Oh, wait.
2) Climate Change
The Day After Tomorrow was a shit movie, but it made a valid point. The way we're messing with the environment is doing serious damage and could totally screw the global eco-system. Roughly 30,000 species go extinct every year because of humans being dicks to the environment, conceivably leading to un repairable damage to the food chain, which could ultimately fuck the entire planet. Goddamn humanity.
3) Supervolcano Eruption
Yellowstone Park in Wyoming is home to a supervolcano and this bad boy is in fact still active. If it were to blow in our lifetime, the world wouldn't have to worry so much about the profuse levels of lava it would expel (though the people of Wyoming may have their concerns), no, the real danger would be in the gargantuan amounts of ash it would release into the Earth's atmosphere, blocking out sunlight around the world and killing crops everywhere. A few of you out there may be thinking, "So what? I never liked vegetables anyway." You people will not be a loss to the gene pool.
4) Death From Above
In 1908, an asteroid hit the Tunguska region of Siberia with 1000 times the explosive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Movies like Armagedon would have you assume that under such a circumstance we'd probably just launch a missile to solve the problem, but because of the lack of funding in space exploration we currently don't have the technology to destroy or escape such a threat. There isn't even a guarantee that we'd have any prior notice of it, and in that case we wouldn't even have time to find a rock to hide under. Remember the dinosaurs? That would be us. Another outer space threat (nooo, not aliens) is a solar flare, a massive flare of thermonuclear radiation that the sun randomly lashes out like a fiery whip, if one of those bad boys touched off the Earth we'd literally be flash-fried.
5) Overpopulation
Okay, so this one is not as immediate as the rest, but it's also one that is undeniably inevitable if left unchecked. The Chinese government have already taken steps against it by imposing birth limits. Due to its ever burgeoning population, citizens of Tokyo are reduced to living in cubbies the size of morgue drawers. The tight squeeze of huge populations has been historically shown to lead to starvation from sheer exhaustion of resources, ease of widespread disease, rioting, and war: now that's what I call a recipe for an apocalypse.
6) Pandemic
During the First World War, Spanish influenza killed about 1% of the world's entire population. Has that sunk in? Good, now consider that modern transportation is so much more advanced than it was a hundred years ago, that now infections can spread worldwide faster than ever before. Swine Flu, Bird Flu, Smallpox, Ebola: just a few of the things that could make our lives so much more interesting. And brief.
7) Biological Weapons
Remember getting warnings about anthrax being delivered by post? Oh, what fun times. Biological weapons are one of the most serious threats out there because not only can they be just as destructive to human life as a nuclear weapons, but they have the added benefit of being much easier for mass murderers to construct; if you listen carefully, you can almost hear ISIS shout "yaaay!" in the distance. But listen to me rattle on, I haven't upset you, have I?
