The Best Possible End of the World Scenarios

Grey Goo

The Grey Goo scenario is my favorite apocalypse scenario of them all. It involves nanomachines, tiny robots that are only a few molecules in size. All it would take is one self-replicating nanomachine to go haywire and start creating other crazy self-replicating nanomachines and, well, within days we would have all been consumed by the grey nano-goo.

2012

On December 21 (or possibly December 23), 2012, The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar used by the Mayans completes its thirteenth cycle. What this means is unclear, but there are a bunch of inscriptions all around the Mayan scene using this date as a baseline date and lots of people assume this suggests a “transition into the next world.”

The Nemesis Scenario

Before I say anything: This is called the Nemesis Scenario. It rules. Case closed. It involves the idea that there is a “companion star” to the sun. Many stars come in pairs, and the sun could potentially have such a twin that travels around in a giant ellipse, coming around once every few million years and attracting a bunch of pesky meteors and doing a bunch of other stuff that would certainly kill us. It is also extremely unlikely, but it’s called THE NEMESIS SCENARIO.

Plague

A disease wiping out a ton of (or all of) people seems like the most probable end of days scenario, but reading up on the potential spread of such a disease versus humans’ attempts to stop it is incredibly fascinating. The disease would have to kill slowly and lay dormant for awhile to ensure the highest rates possible, for example. This flash game involves many of these issues in a pretty cartoonish way in addition to inspiring a net-wide hatred of Madagascar and its impossible-to-infect seaport.

The Big Crunch

The Big Crunch is, very basically, the Big Bang in reverse. If all this expanding has gone on (and is going on), simple extrapolation dictates that eventually the universe will collapse. There’s a cool theory called the Big Bounce that claims this has already happened a bunch of times and that the Big Bang is always a result of a Big Crunch. Basically: Maybe I’ve already written this guide, maybe you’ve already read it.

Verneshots

Verneshots are certainly the winner in the category of “Greatest Doomsday Scenarios Named for Science-Fiction Writer Jules Verne.” They are a hypothetical volcanic eruption deep underneath the earth’s surface forceful enough to launch a bunch of earth into near-orbit. It is a lot like riding a geyser of volcanic gas into space.

Robot Apocalypse

The Robopocalypse need not be a brutal one, but it probably will be. We need robots, but after a certain amount of progress, robots won’t need us. In fact, by ordering them and making them perform mundane tasks, a sophisticated robot’s (artificial) life would probably be a whole hell of a lot better without us. Think about that before you, I don’t know, tell a robot to screw off or something.

Geomagnetic Reversal

Everyone knows (I hope) that the earth is basically a giant magnet with a north pole (where polar bears are) and a south pole (where John Carpenter’s The Thing takes place). Several times in recorded geologic history, the poles have switched. At the very least, this would do things like making compasses point south and making the 1994 Elijah Wood vehicle North even more confusing.

It might also expose us to cosmic radiation or kill us all in some other undiscovered way. Nobody really knows.

Ragnarök

Ragnarök is Norse mythology’s version of the end of creation. It describes a long series of events in which many major mythological players and more or less every human are killed. Some survivors ascend to various afterlives, and the earth is eventually covered by water. Two human survivors, Líf and Lífthrasir, repopulate humanity. All this involves “everything, everywhere” being afraid, giant wolves and swords that burn brighter than the sun. It’s all very interesting.

Large Hadron Collider

I’m not going to bother explaining any kind of physics crap: There’s this giant ring in Switzerland that will eventually move stuff real fast and smash it into other stuff. They don’t know quite what will happen when they finally fire it up. It “probably won’t” create a black hole that will destroy us, but if science likes one thing it’s creating tiny black holes.

Not performing a typo during the act of typing “Hadron Collider” is surprisingly difficult.

Mass Suicide as Evolutionary Endgame

This is the closest to a “philosophical” endgame as I’m willing to come, primarily because they usually tend towards boring speculative futurism that seems just a small logical step away from asking what would happen if one day rainbows started eating people.

There’s a school of thought saying that, as humanity progresses, our intelligence will eventually reach a point where we will realize that we’ve researched everything, blended with technology, and lived enough for a million lives. We’ll all kill ourselves. With the weird physical forms we’ll probably have taken at that point, it probably won’t involve a gun or a noose or anything, but interesting nonetheless.

Global Dimming

Everyone knows about global warming. Surely if there is a doomsday scenario that is currently in vogue, global warming is it. A cool side effect of global warming, though, could well kill us before melting icecaps or ultraviolent rays or whatever.

Global dimming involves a diminishing of natural light due to smog and similar aerosols. Were it to persist, we wouldn’t get sunlight and freeze and such. Fortunately, it’s been on the decline since aerosols fell out of style in the early ’90s.

Inevitability

The end of the universe is actually completely inevitable, which is sort of charming. Even if we manage to get the hell out of the way when the Sun explodes or when the Milky Way slams into another galaxy or when the dinosaurs inevitably come back, nature is hard-wired to decay at a molecular level. Protons only last 10^35^ years. Give it enough time and they just disappear. Same goes for everything else. After about one googol (10^100^) years, there’ll be nothing.

According to scientific estimates, energy fluctuations will randomly cause a new big bang after 10^1056^ years. That is a long time.