20 Ways The World Could Come To An End
For full story go to http://discovermagazine.com/2000/oct/featworld/
I thought this would let you know that something else can happen.
Natural Disasters
#1 Asteroid impact
#2 Gamma-ray burst
#3 Collapse of the Vacuum
#4 Rogue black holes
#5 Giant solar flares
#6 Reversal of Earth's magnetic field
#7 Flood-basalt volcanism
#8 Global epidemics
Human-Triggered Disasters
#9 Global warming The Earth is getting warmer, and scientists mostly agree that humans bear some blame. It's easy to see how global warming could flood cities and ruin harvests. More recently, researchers like Paul Epstein of Harvard Medical School have raised the alarm that a balmier planet could also assist the spread of infectious disease by providing a more suitable climate for parasites and spreading the range of tropical pathogens (see #8). That could include crop diseases which, combined with substantial climate shifts, might cause famine. Effects could be even more dramatic. At present, atmospheric gases trap enough heat close to the surface to keep things comfortable. Increase the global temperature a bit, however, and there could be a bad feedback effect, with water evaporating faster, freeing water vapor (a potent greenhouse gas), which traps more heat, which drives carbon dioxide from the rocks, which drives temperatures still higher. Earth could end up much like Venus, where the high on a typical day is 900 degrees Fahrenheit. It would probably take a lot of warming to initiate such a runaway greenhouse effect, but scientists have no clue where exactly the tipping point lies.
#10 Ecosystem collapse
#11 Biotech disaster
#12 Particle accelerator mishap
#13 Nanotechnology disaster
#14 Environmental toxins
Willful Self-Destruction
#15 Global war
#16 Robots take over
#17 Mass insanity
A Greater Force Is Directed Against Us
#18 Alien invasion
#19 Divine intervention
#20 Someone wakes up and realizes it was all a dream
