The End of Ze World
A humorous look at existential risk from someone having an existential crisis
The world as we know it is going to end, and we’re all going to die (eventually). Oops, spoilers. Human beings will one day go the way of the Dodo bird, and the five billion species extinctions before it. In Earth’s history, over 99% of all the species that have ever existed have died out.
It’s why eccentric billionaires are in a dick-measuring space race.
Pondering the end of ourselves and the planet is a natural human curiosity because — humans are morbid creatures like that.
As a kid, I thought recycling would save the planet. As a teen, I thought reducing carbon footprints would, but we’re about to pass the threshold of no return on that one.
But both of the above planetary fixes hinged on the idea of us not blowing it up first, leaving a nuclear winter wasteland for cockroaches and tardigrades (and politicians probably) to redesign to their liking.
Now, as a morbid millennial, I wonder which of the many apocalyptic scenes I’ve seen in movies will lead to our perishing. Will it be AI cyborgs like in The Terminator (or The Matrix, or a hundred other movies)? Or will it be an asteroid like in Deep Impact and Armageddon?
Thankfully we have our top nerds on the case, figuring out the most likely global catastrophic risk and potential maneuvers away from said peril. Global catastrophic risk, aka existential risk, is:
“Any risk that has the potential to eliminate all of humanity or, at the very least, kill large swaths of the global population.” says Future Of Life
Is it just me or did the person who wrote that have a sense of humor about their impending doom?
If, like me, you’re looking to turn existential risk into an existential crisis — you’ve come to the right place. Now let’s look at all the potential ways the planet could implode.
Asteroid Apocalypse
Well, an asteroid took out the dinosaurs. If I had to put money on surviving something that took out the T rexes, my money would be on that stubby-armed bastard. That roided-out asteroid was half the size of Manhattan. Thankfully, an asteroid size that size doesn’t come around every day — and normally, space rocks that do come into our atmosphere, disintegrate. In fact, we get 100 tonnes of burnt-up space rubbish hitting the earth daily.
So, how likely is it that an asteroid rocks our world?
Luckily, we track asteroids. NASA and their global counterparts, accompanied by an army of home astronomers in their backyards, have crowd-sourced the job. They’ve mapped out 90% of the asteroids that are more than 1km in size. Phew. That’s only a 10% margin of error that we’ll be hit by an asteroid in the coming century.
For sanity’s sake, we’ll just ignore the massive near-miss of the 2019 OK asteroid, a football-field-sized asteroid that we only discovered the day before it nearly hit us. “The asteroid came within about 40,000 miles (65,000 kilometers) of the planet’s surface, or one-fifth the distance to the Moon”, explains NASA.
Sorry, did that hit a little too close to home? Please forgive me for that bad joke, it’s just that I’ve always wanted to be a standup comet.
If you ever want to shit your cosmic pants, NASA has an incredible interactive tool where you can look at all the asteroids potentially on a collision course with our blue marble:
But don’t worry too much, we have DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (click that link, you won’t regret it). DART is how we’ll move asteroids out of Earth’s alignment by doing a ninja-like space maneuver the equivalent of shooting a bullet with another bullet.
So breathe easy my friends, the space nerds have got this. Also, this is the least likely scenario of the end of ze world.
Sun Supernova
Our sun is much like my face, it’s radiant but aging. Also, like me, suns can get burned out. As ours moves through its aging cycle, that hell orb in the sky will eventually turn into a Red Giant and engulf the entire solar system. But that’s after it evaporates Earth’s water and murders us all with radiation, turning our planet into a molten sphere.
The good news though, is that it’s not big enough to turn into a supernova that sucks us all into a black hole.
There’s even more good news. The timeframe for Red Giantification is roughly 8 billion years, give or take a few million millennia. Elon’s distant billion-of-years-away progeny will (hopefully) have moved us safely out of the galaxy by then.
Atomic Armageddon
Now we’re getting warmer about the end of the world, with us dumb humans blowing it up. End of the Cold War, eat your heart out — we’re more technologically armed than ever, and now sophisticated computers are at the helm. Computers are increasingly run on AI. But meh, what could possibly go wrong in that scenario?
Currently, there are 9 countries that admit they have nukes, Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea. Luckily, these are all incredibly mentally-stable countries with no superiority complexes or short fuses.
It would go a little something like this:
Not everyone believes in the Kumbaya circle of nuclear-weaponed countries, however. Especially the clustered collective of atomic scientists who run the Doomsday Clock.
The mad scientists at the Doomsday Clock measure our impending nuclear doom in minutes and seconds. In 1947 when they began we were ‘7 minutes to midnight’. The minutes have gone up and down since, but have been a teensy bit alarming recently. In 2019 we were 2 minutes to midnight.
As of earlier this year, we’re 90 seconds to midnight.
Their current impending doom report mumbled something about ominous climate change, biological threats, military AI use, and Putin’s casual nuclear banter. The report forgot to mention it, but nuclear neighbors India and Pakistan are still fighting. But they’ll be fine, probably. As long as they don’t have a fallout.
The atomic scientists and I clearly are not the only ones worried about impending nuclear doom. Nuclear and science historian, Alex Wellerstein created the NukeMap. An interactive map where you can simulate your own digital nuclear explosion — complete with fallout. It’s had 344 million digital detonations so far.
In 2021 the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was put into place. The good news is that it has 93 signatory countries! The bad news is that not one of those is a nuclear-armed country. All 9 nuke countries refused to sign.
Supervolcano Shenanigans
I love volcanos. I even went volcano boarding off of one, it was a blast. The glorious ashole bastard known as Cerro Negro, a 2,388-foot cinder-cone volcano in Nicaragua.
I had another volcanic experience in Guatemala, when my friends and I sat on the rooftop patio of a hostel in Antigua watching the Volcan de Fuego erupt throughout the night. It’s beautiful watching nature’s fireworks (from the safety of a rooftop patio getting blazed on aguardiente drinks).
Volcanos are magnificent, but — could the gates of hell open up and spew volcanic ash of such magmatude that it blocks out the sun?
Volcanos erupt all the time, something I can attest to after that Guatemalan rooftop. In any given year 50–70 of them erupt, depending on seismic activity and their overall sassiness. Their eruptions range from touristy entertainment to locally devastating.
For a volcano to matter on an apocalyptic scale, it would need to be a supervolcano. Thankfully, only 20 of the roughly 1,000 volcanos are super sassy. One lives in the US, Yellowstone — although experts refer to it as the Yellowstone caldera complex (it got a complex from being incorrectly called a supervolcano).
Yellowstone only erupts violently every 600,000 years though. And since the beginning of human life, only two supermassive volcano explosions have happened. The last one was in New Zealand, and was 26,000 years ago.
Time is on our side here, and we’re extremely unlikely to see a volcanic apocalypse in our lifetimes. The most likely one to wreak magma havoc is Japan’s lava dome, which experts give a 1% chance of erupting in the next century.
I’ll take those odds on if we get to ‘live, love, lava’.
Climatic Cataclysm
Global warming, aka planetary menopause, is absolutely the most likely thing to wipe out humanity. I hope that spoiler wasn’t anticlimatic. And since we keep navel-gazing while knowing that devastation already looms, we have one foot in the grave and just got back from Costco to buy a bigger shovel.
Our collective brain freeze failed to fan the flames of climate change. Not even the nerds of NASA can fix this; there’s no Al-Gore-ithm they can program. And there’s no Cold War or nuclear winter that can stop global warming.
We’re past the tipping point, it’s too late to tell the icebergs to chill, and we’re officially in a hot mess. Our weather forecast is simply — dark, with a slight chance of survival. Climate change will continue to raise sea levels and devastate crops. Our only hail mary is to limit how many millions or billions will meet their maker.
According to the Climate Clock, because nerds love clocks, we have 5 years and 9 days to stop a global catastrophe. However, given the magma-like slow speed at which we’ve progressed since it became an issue in 1988 — and thrust onto the global stage by Al Gore in 2006 — I’m not holding my breath.
There’s no odds to predict this one, it’s happening. I’m sorry, there’s no happy ending on this one — sadly, there are still humans arguing whether it’s real. It would be a lot cooler if we could at least agree.
We’re a complicated species who are epically failing at a climactic Kobayashi Maru. So just get prepared for the canoe world order.
I can hear you saying, ‘Gee Robin, this is an upbeat post’, accompanied by an eye roll.
Yeah, it’s a little dark. I didn’t even get to AI cyborgs taking over like we’re living in a Matrix prequel. Or another pandemic plague, which we’ve proved were still vastly unprepared for. Then there’s the rise of an end-of-times supervillain, who is just hitting his villain arc now.
But the above shows that humans have weird priorities. We have tons of space nerds working on asteroids, and geologists working on supervolcano monitoring — and yet we can’t make progress on the apocalypses already killing our planet. People are weird.
But there’s a sunnyside-up to our impending demise — live in the moment.
If you’ve been looking for a push to take up that new hobby, finally take that vacation you’ve been putting off, or otherwise take chances in life — this is your preapocalyptic sign.
Do it before the end of ze world, which could be in 8 billion years, 5 years and 9 days, or, if you're a Doomsday Clock aficionado, 90 seconds.
This would make a great children's book!
How I learned to stop worrying and love the end of us