Earth’s end is a highly favorite choice of movie makers and writers all over the world. They have come up with different scenarios of how Earth will end in coming years. Aliens, time travel, AI all possibilities have been touched.
However, we present to you 7 highly possible ways Earth could meet its end in near future.
Humans are becoming highly dependent on the machines and are developing self-aware machines to automate many things. All of you must have seen Terminator movies, where artificial intelligence (AI) becomes self-aware and starts terminating humans. Humans are currently on path shown in movies. We have self-driving cars, robot waiters and even AI helpers like Alex, Cortana, and Siri.
According to the Center for the Study of Existential Risk, machines will be capable of achieving about 90% of human-level intelligence by 2075. Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking said, “It would take off on its own, and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded. We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can’t know if we’ll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it.”
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1996 movie Independence Day showed Aliens invading Earth and humans uniting to defeat them. However, in real life, Alien life has not been confirmed yet, but there is a possibility of humans meeting some alien life form in near future. The scary thought is that we do not know what will be the intentions of those aliens.
It has been suggested however by Department of Defense, that a World of War style invasion may happen and even if aliens do not posses any threat, their foreign pathogens can be fatal for us humans.
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Scientists are constantly working on creating better drugs to expand human life span. This means creating better superbugs to fight infections and other diseases. This involves modifying the genetic code of these bugs and this also has a negative impact.
Many movies have shown scenarios where an unstoppable super virus affects humanity and either kills everyone, or turns everyone into zombies. It is possible that scientists create something that even they cannot control and the Center for the Study of Existential Risk (CESR) considers this as high priority and extremely dangerous. We have already seen influenza killing over 50 million people worldwide in 1918 and plague wiping out almost the entire Europe in the 1300s.
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Dinosaurs lived on the planet for millions of years before they were wiped out by the 110 mile long Chicxulub impactor asteroid hitting Earth 66 million years ago and changing the atmosphere of Earth completely for another millions of years to come. Earth has its defense mechanisms in order to protect itself against smaller sized asteroids, but most of the scientists have said that there is a possibility that Earth’s end might come at the hands of an asteroid impact.
If any asteroid of that size hits Earth again, similar impact could happen again, as the resulting change in the atmosphere might kill the crops, animals and us humans in a very short span of time.
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The United States of America was the first and only country to use nuclear bombs in any war in human history, when it dropped two atom bombs on Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing and affecting millions of people. Now with many countries having numerous nuclear war heads and constant infighting amongst some nuclear powerhouses like Russia, US, UK, India and Pakistan may lead to a full out nuclear warfare.
This nuclear warfare will send so much soot in the atmosphere, that it will create an artificial nuclear winter, reducing Earth’s temperature and blocking the rays of Sun. This will mean crops will die and climate won’t be suitable enough for humans to survive.
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The Sun is the reason why we are able to sustain on Earth and why we exist. Scientists have calculated that the Sun will be able to provide us for at least 4-4.5 billion years, before its supply of helium and hydrogen runs out. After that, it will start to release dangerous solar flares of high heat and will start to expand continuously. Once that starts to happen, it will engulf everything in its way and Earth will become a casualty of the Sun dying in coming years.
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It is estimated that by 2050, Earth’s population would be close to 10 billion people. The Earth has limited resources for its inhabitants and we have already used up majority of what the planet could give us. There have been no efforts of replenishing that stock and need for food will increase by 70% in the coming 30 years. By 2050, majority of the developing nations will be short of food, fossil fuels and mass pandemonium and riots will ravage the Earth.
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