It's seems to be the day of
reckoning as was seen with the Blood Moon sighting and prediction of an
asteroid strike that would end the world. And extinction by space rock
was also the subject of a comedy comedy You, Me and the Apocalypse,
which tells of an eight mile wide comet just 34 days away obliterating us
all. But there are so many other ways in which the human race could
be wiped out any day now. From catastrophic climate change to black
holes and robot wars, here are 10 apocalyptic visions that could end the
world as we know it...
GLOBAL WARMING
If the ice in Earth's polar caps melts, it will
cause the oceans to rise as much as 300 feet, which would be
catastrophic to human civilisation.
More than 75 per cent of the world's population lives below this altitude, including London and most other major cities.
Meanwhile, with water evaporating faster, trapping in more heat and
driving temperatures still higher, experts warn that Earth could end up
like Venus, where the high on a typical day is 900 degrees Fahrenheit.
A hotter planet could also unleash the spread of infectious diseases,
the acidification of the oceans, and an increase in droughts and
famines, as well as floods and land erosion.
A global temperature
rise of just six per cent will be enough to wipe out just about every
life form on the planet. Scientists at the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change) recently gave a five per cent chance that the
Earth's temperature will exceed 6.4 per cent by 2100.
GAMMA RAY BURST
Gamma-ray bursts are flashes of gamma-ray light,
probably caused by the merging of two collapsed stars, and are the most
powerful explosions of energy in the universe -as much as ten
quadrillion times as energetic as the sun.
So far, the bursts
-which are detected from earth about once a day -have happened in
distant galaxies millions of light-years away . If such an event were to
happen closer to home, the intense flash of gamma rays illuminating the
earth for ten seconds would cook the atmosphere and destroy the ozone
layer, causing a massive extinction event.
Astronomers point out
that double stars are almost completely undetectable and we would have
no advance warning until the moment it hits us.
PANDEMIC
Throughout history many deadly pathogens have emerged which have wreaked havoc on the human race.
The Black Plague killed one in every four Europeans in the 14th century
, while in just two years from 1918 Spanish flu took at least 50
million lives.
Recent possible pandemics, including SARS, bird
flu, and MERS, a coronavirus which originated in Saudi Arabia, have
eventually died down, but experts say it is only a matter of time before
one goes global. If nature wasn't enough to worry about, scientists
have been accused of engineering mutant versions of diseases which, if
they escaped from the lab, could threaten the future of humanity .
Last year, after researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
created a life-threatening virus that closely resembled the 1918 Spanish
flu, many disease experts were appalled.
Simon Wain-Hobson, a
virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, said: “It's madness,
folly. If society, the intelligent layperson, understood what was going
on, they would say , `What the F are you doing?'“.
ROBOT ASCENSION
The Terminator may be science fiction, but
robotic killing machines capable of thinking and acting on their own are
not far from becoming a reality.
The United Nations recently
called for a ban on killer robots -presumably because experts feared
that several countries were developing them.
Inventor Elon Musk,
co-founder of Paypal, said last year that artificial intelligence might
be the “greatest existential threat“ that humans face.
And
Stephen Hawking recently said: “The development of full artificial
intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Humans, who are
limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be
superseded.“
BLACK HOLE
Our galaxy is full of black holes, formed when giant
stars collapse in on themselves, and whose gravity is so strong they
swallow everything, even the light that may betray their presence.
In July this year, scientists from Durham University discovered five
previously unidentified “supermassive“ black holes, billions of times
the size of our sun, increasing fears one could come closer to earth
than previously anticipated.
George Lansbury , from the
university's Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, said: “Although we have
only detected five, when we extrapolate across the whole universe then
the predicted numbers are huge.“
Such a black hole wouldn't need
to actually swallow us up. One passing nearby could eject Earth from the
solar system and send us hurtling into deep space.
GLOBAL WAR
Many scientists are still worried about the classic end-of-the-world threat: global nuclear war.
There are massive stockpiles of
nuclear weapons around the globe which could trigger a catastrophe if they fell into the wrong hands.
Currently , nine countries are known to have nuclear capabilities,
including Russia, Pakistan and North Korea, which between them possess
around 16,300 nuclear weapons.
In 2008, the Physics Today journal
concluded that the detonation of 100 nuclear bombs -a fraction of the
number out there -would bring about a “nuclear winter“ causing
temperatures to drop to the lowest in 1,000 years, and “likely eliminate
the majority of the human population.“
Biological weapons are
perhaps an even greater threat to our existence, as they are easier to
develop. If anthrax, for example, were released into the air it could
cause fatalities in 90 per cent of the population exposed to it.
MAGNETIC REVERSAL
Every few hundred thousand years the planet's
magnetic field dwindles to almost nothing, then over a century gradually
reappears with the north and south poles flipped.
We know that
there have been about 170 magnetic pole reversals during the last 100
million years, and the last major reversal was 781,000 years ago
-meaning that the next one is well overdue.
New research
published last year from the European Space Agency (ESA) shows that the
Earth's magnetic field is weakening 10 times faster than we previously
thought, and that it might flip within the next 100 years.
Why
might such an event threaten our survival? The magnetic field deflects
particle storms and cosmic rays from the sun, as well as even more
energetic particles from deep space.
Scientist claims that
without this magnetic protection, these particles would strike Earth's
atmosphere, eroding the ozone layer with a number of disastrous
consequences to life as we know it.
SUPERVOLCANO
Volcanoes have form when it comes to making entire
species extinct. The Permo-Triassic Extinction -the biggest extinction
event of all time, when 95 per cent of all Earth's species were wiped
out 252 million years ago coincided with the largest known volcano
eruption in Earth history , in today's Siberia.
Many believe the
next Earth-changing eruption is long overdue, and point to the
supervolcano in American's Yellowstone National Park as the most likely
to destroy us.
The Yellowstone volcano erupts with a
near-clockwork cycle of every 600,000 years -and that last eruption was
more than 640,000 years ago. Scientists have
discovered that the ground in Yellowstone is 74cm higher than it was in
1923, indicating a massive swelling underneath the park.
Experts
predict that when it blows its top again the consequences for the world
will be catastrophic. Within minutes of the explosion tens of thousands
would be dead and the long-term effects would be even more devastating.
The sun would be blocked by ash, temperatures would plummet by 21
degrees, rain would turn to acid, and most if not all of the world's
humans would be wiped out.
ALIEN INVASION
There is every chance that, somewhere in billions
of galaxies, intelligent beings much more superior to ourselves do
exist. So if aliens did finally arrive at planet Earth in large numbers,
what can we most likely expect?
Stephen Hawking, who this year
helped launch a major new effort to search for alien life in the cosmos,
thinks it more likely that such creatures would come to Earth in search
of resources and bent on our destruction. He said: “If aliens ever
visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus
first landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native
Americans.“
Other cosmologists go further, supposing that
extraterrestrial invaders might plunder a vital natural resource, such
as the water from our oceans, bring with them pests with a taste for
human flesh or upset our planet or solar system causing Earth's
destruction.
ASTEROID IMPACT
An asteroid big enough to wipe out civilisation
on Earth, experts agree, would need to be at least a mile across -and
that kind of impact only happens once every million years or less.
It is believed the dinosaurs were wiped out by a six-mile-wide asteroid which slammed into Earth 66 million years ago.
In a paper by Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute,
researchers explained the greatest danger will be “clouds of dust
projected into the upper atmosphere“ creating an `impact winter',
affecting climate, and food supplies, and create political instability .
And Bruce Willis can't come to the rescue either --physicists claim it
would be impossible to nuke a Earth-destroyingsized asteroid hurtling
towards us.
