HOW THE WORLD ENDS
Maybe it’ll be rogue AI. Maybe nuclear holocaust. Perhaps a pandemic unleashed by ancient viruses in the melting arctic permafrost. Maybe we’ll just descend into chaos and anarchy and war (that’s the bright side?).
My money’s on the asteroid. Not literally, of course. But I’m convinced that the chances of some piece of the Universe reaching out and touching us in a very unpleasant manner is just a matter of WHEN not IF.
This most recent close shave was detected 3 days AFTER it happened.This was three times the size of the one that hit Siberia in 1908 and flattened nearly 800 square miles of forest. If that hit a populated area instead? So… yeah. An asteroid that drops from space and takes out a good chunk of humanity – even if it’s not an extinction-level event – isn’t exactly a long-shot. And we are super-duper, amazingly, terrifyingly unprepared to even see it coming, much less stop it.
When people talk about the space program as something we shouldn’t “waste money” on, I’m like ??? Do you want to survive as a species or not? Because that’s what we’re talking about here.
Just my morbid 2 cents for today.