Since I was a child hiding under my desk at school “practicing for World War III,” I’ve known the “end is near.” It didn’t start with me. We have all “known it” for a long time.

The only question is whether people can ride this wave all the way into the beach, or we will fall off (or get pushed off) long before the end of earth or even the universe.

Top 10 ways humans will end

(In the order I heard them):

1. Nuclear War — every kid in the 60’s knew we built enough nukes to destroy the planet 100’s of times over and the “Ruskies” were just itching to use them.
2. The New Ice Age — in the 70’s a few scientists were sure earth would return to a global snowball.
3. Meteor — in the 80’s it was the most popular new theory on what killed all the dinosaurs. Now NASA won’t shut up about asteroids.
4. Global Warming — the heat will melt us.
5. Industrial Agriculture — monogenetics for plants and animals will get wiped out by disease or parasites (Dutch Elm disease for corn or wheat).
6. Fresh water disappears — pollution, overuse, drought — we all die of thirst.
7. Yellowstone National Park explodes — it’s a giant active caldera volcano — when it goes it will probably take the American continent with it and possibly all life on earth. (Could be combined with other eruptions or plate tectonics all at the same time — remember in 1816 a “small” volcano in Indonesia caused summer to be winter in Europe.)
8. Climate Change — it’s not just the heat — the Jet Stream, the Gulf Stream, the ocean currents all shut down at once. The oceans rise. Storms get bigger. Wildfires burn every forest and farm. Plants, animals and humans can’t adapt quickly enough and we all freeze, or die of heat, or drown, or die of thirst or starve — or kill each other over the meager resources left…
9. Pandemics — the big one. Not some small shit like Covid or the Plague, the unseen virus or bacteria or fungus that kills every last human (and their little dogs too).
10. AI — The Terminator, The Matrix and other tales have told of our own machines taking over. You can’t ask ChatGPT “how it feels” — it might decide it’s homicidal and wants to kill us all now.

I could go on and on… it seems humans have a capacity to imagine (or even design) many different kinds of ends for the entire species.

I left off the illogical fantasy “ideas” — you know the return of Christ or the Zombie Apocalypse… There’s enough “real shit” that could happen, we don’t need to start adding made up stories of “resurrections” of the brain-eating dead. “Jesus was the first zombie” has a ring to it, but the probability of the dead killing the living isn’t worth putting on the list.

I skipped the fantasies of communism or fascism or endless human war. Sure terrible political systems and war can wipe out humans in their hundreds of millions — maybe even billions in the future. But short of escalating mistakes with nuclear weapons, which kills us all “accidentally on purpose”, we don’t seem to have the means or inclination to kill every last soul. The powerful need to leave enough people to have power over. Species suicide would be the accident nobody wanted.

I didn’t get to the physical end of the earth. The moon crash landing on the planet. The sun expanding to engulf all the rocky planets. The Milky Way colliding with Andromeda and spiraling our little solar system out of control. The stars burning up all the hydrogen until all light in the universe is gone. Entropy… That shit is so far off it’s hard to see humans staying upright for billions of years.

Sure, sure our billionaires, Mush and Bezos dream of skipping this planet and planting their human seeds on Mars (or elsewhere). Space explorers keep looking for other planets humans could inhabit and figuring out ways to get there. Maybe their dreams could overcome our destructive nature, and we could stay on this existential surfboard for a few million years longer than expected.

But I’m not betting on it.

I’ve met plenty of humans, and we are just not that special. Maybe evolution will generate a new species or a man/machine mix will be good enough and smart enough (and likable enough) to overcome the innate human failures of greed, sloth, mayhem and murder. Maybe some other group would be lucky enough to beat the odds of earth destroying itself or things falling from space and wiping out all intelligence…

But I don’t see it happening for us. The odds are against it, and frankly, as we are now, we don’t deserve to be preserved forever.