How the World Ends

Who knows how the world ends? All we know is that it’s only a matter of time, and the more you learn about end times scenarios, the more convinced you’ll be that our doom is inevitable.

How the World Ends – From the Likely to the Bizarre

The end of the world might seem like a distant and unlikely possibility, but once you start to look into ways the world could end, you’ll be amazed that there isn’t a galactic fireball in the sky or a zombie horde outside your door right now.

So which scenario is most likely? Well, this depends on who you believe, and how you work out the odds. On a long enough timeline, and taking into account all we know now, and discounting scenarios we have no current reason to believe will happen soon, the top five ways the world will end are:

Environmental disasters such as supervolcanoes or the Clathrate Gun effect
Nuclear war armageddon
Land-based meteor impact
Hegemonizing nanotechnology swarm (grey goo)
Shutdown of the Gulf Stream current system

Some of those sound unfamiliar? Click on them to see just how terrifyingly inevitable they actually are. The scariest thing about some of them is that they have actually happened before.

Never Forget

Meteor impacts have been responsible for a number of global extinction events in the past, and we can prove this by examining core samples taken from places like Antarctica.

Likewise, the Clathrate Gun hypothesis – a terrifying scenario we are probably very close to – states how large methane bubbles trapped in the colder parts of our oceans could set off an unstoppable chain reaction of rapid temperature increase. We also have evidence that this has already happened, and will probably happen again.

Think you know how the world ends? Take a look at our exhaustive catalogue of apocalypse scenarios below to find out which scenarios you need to start preparing for right goddam now!