People have been thinking about the end of the world ever since they climbed down from the tree and looked around carefully, but only modern science has provided systematic tools to analyze this phenomenon. Also recently – around the middle of the 20th century – man has developed tools of total destruction that could make this goal real, and certainly closer. The end of the world can have many variations.
It is enough to reject our world, the human world, outside the climatic framework to which the species is accustomed. Homo sapiens. The impact of a larger asteroid or comet, the eruption of a supervolcano (some of which are probably still dormant) – we have no influence on these factors, and each of them would change the planet’s ecosystem so much that there would be no place for us there. All of them pose equally real threats.
An accidental outbreak of nuclear war seems unlikely, but since Russian President Boris Yeltsin nearly pressed the red button in 1995 (following a false alarm), such a situation cannot be ruled out. The result would be a decades-long winter that would destroy civilization. Finally, it is possible to prevent the development and even survival of humanity by heating the atmosphere to a breaking point beyond which there will be no return to equilibrium. Some scientists say that this is where we are heading.
Climate threats will soon be joined by the dangers associated with the development of high technologies. The number of studied genomes of various microorganisms is constantly growing. And they are easy to modify. We are acquiring the ability to independently design bacteria and viruses. The effects of such activity, even if carried out with a noble scientific goal, may one day become uncontrollable, leave the secret laboratory and, like a mutated Spanish flu, set civilization back several centuries – or worse.
