Top 20 Craziest Apocalypse Scenarios
#20: Totalitarian Dystopia
Accelerationist philosophy is the theory that western governments and culture are irrevocably broken and corrupt. As a result, they must be torn down - often with violence - and replaced with supremacist totalitarianism. It’s a theory popular with young people, especially men, who often are too invested in online activity. Totalitarian regimes like Russia and China have pushed the philosophy with coordinated misinformation campaigns. Hate, misinformation, and disinformation are spreading online like wildfire, as is rage. Far right wing parties are on the rise all over the globe. It’s not as far-fetched as it once might have been to imagine an Earth where accelerationism wins, tearing down the current world order and replacing it with isolationist, totalitarian regimes the world over.
#19: Resource Exhaustion
The world has lived in a centuries-long period of resource extraction and commerce. It led to accelerating technological growth and widespread prosperity. But the earth’s resources are finite. The 21st century is the start of the ‘find out’ era of human history. Climate change has increased water scarcity and drought. Overmining and deforestation have led to ecological disasters on almost every continent. The response of big business is to push for deregulation, to drill and dig further and deeper instead of devising better technologies. The depletion of valuable minerals like copper, uranium, and iron could easily result in worldwide economic and social disintegration. The 21st century could be an era of water wars, resource-scarcity-induced inequality, and even governmental collapse.
#18: Rogue Earth
Why Hasn't a Rogue Planet Destroyed the Solar System Yet? | Unveiled
Space is a mostly empty place, but space-based real, existential dangers are not impossible. One unlikely danger is a rogue star. Rogue stars are often intergalactic travelers, escaping the gravity of their home galaxy and hurtling through the empty vastness of space. A star entering our system could collide with the sun or, with its powerful gravitational pull, tug the earth. If its gravity were strong enough, it could pull the earth out of the solar system altogether. As we began our journey as a rogue planet, the oceans would freeze and the world would be plunged into eternal night. As one scientist put it, the only remaining source of heat on earth would be the slow decay of radioactive elements.
#17: Plummeting Fertility
Scientists around the world agree: even as the world population surges past 8 billion, we are in the middle of a worldwide fertility crisis. In the last half century, fertility rates have dropped by half. Men alive today have half the number of reproductive cells as their grandfathers. Women in their 20s today are less fertile than their grandmothers were in their mid 30s. Scientists agree that the cause of this disruption is pollution, specifically plastics. Man-made endocrine-disrupting chemicals have penetrated the entire food chain. The entire world is now suffused with plastic pollution, spreading these chemicals throughout nature. If this trend continues, humanity could become an endangered species.
#16: Another Species Replaces Us
Top 20 Zombie Apocalypse Survival Tips
There is an ugly truth to our existence that we try to not to think about: extinction is likely inevitable. Whether in a 100 years or a billion, it’s likely that humanity will end. If the Earth isn’t completely destroyed, what species will rise to take our place? Will orcas attack our boats and conquer the seas? Will bonobos and chimps, with their opposable thumbs, rise to create a real-life planet of the apes? Without human activity to cull their numbers, could birds evolve as the dominant species and usher in a second age of the dinosaurs? Scientists aren’t certain, but all could be possible.
#15: Mass Anarchy
Why Scientists Think The Sun Will Cause Mass Heart Attacks Soon | Unveiled
Human civilization took millennia to build, but it could conceivably collapse in a matter of days. Society is built on a series of vulnerable global connections. Any number of disruptions from resource shortages to climate change to terrorism could disrupt those systems. If the disruptions last long enough, the building blocks of the world are broken down. Law and order can fall to pieces in the blink of an eye, and anarchy can spread like a virus. A disruption to the social order is a scary thing. The most vulnerable will inevitably be the first to suffer. Human rights and compassion will quickly be subsumed by the law of the jungle: only the strong survive.
#14: Biotechnology Spiraling Out of Control
Bioengineering is the cutting edge of modern technology. Gene editing has led to revolutions in agriculture and medicine, seemingly launching us into a brave new world. But what if that same technology is the cause of our own destruction? Bioengineering of crops could lead to monopolistic control over an ever-more-vulnerable food supply. Worse, the technology is so ubiquitous that an industrious genius could conduct home-brewed bioengineering from home. Biological terrorism is an increasingly significant fear for law enforcement. In the right hands, biotechnology could be the ticket to immortality. In the wrong hands, it could destroy us all.
#13: Crop Collapse
Crop collapse may, unfortunately, be closer than you think. Thanks to the deadly combination of climate change and a lack of biodiversity among food crops, the food supply is in mounting danger. The lack of biodiversity in the food chain leaves crops vulnerable to disease Twenty percent of all plant species are in danger of extinction. Without significant changes, popular staples like bananas, avocados, and coffee could be gone by the end of the century. Where drought spreads due to the heating climate, famine is not far behind. Yemen and Syria, for example, are already suffering from multi-year famines. And where famines exist, migration and inevitably conflict follow.
#12: Mass Insanity
What If Humanity Had a Mass Relay? | Unveiled
A global collapse from mass insanity may sound far-fetched, but it's not as crazy as you may think. Mass psychogenic illness, or epidemic hysteria, occurs when psychological illnesses spread without an infectious agent - like a virus - being responsible. We may be in the opening stages of such an event. The Surgeon General of the United States has warned of a spreading loneliness epidemic. Deaths from despair - including self-harm and substance overdose - are on the rise, both in the U.S. and globally. Economic and social anxiety exist in significant numbers in most countries. It’s certainly possible that a mass insanity event could lead to anarchy and chaos. Unfortunately, it's more likely that widespread despair whittles away at society until there’s nothing left.
#11: The Sudden Death of Sol
Top 10 Craziest Lego Builds
This one may be far out there. According to the best understanding of astrophysicists, stars have a life cycle - just like people - but on a cosmic scale. Our sun is relatively young. In 5-7 billion years, it will expand into a red giant. After another few hundred million years, it will go supernova. But what if that process suddenly began without warning? In that case, the sun would expand greatly. It would literally consume Mercury and Venus, maybe even Earth. Even if we were spared this fate, the increased heat and luminosity would boil the earth into a barren rock. Fingers crossed that this remains a problem for any humans still alive in a few billion years.
#10: Catastrophic Volcano Eruption
Did you know that there’s a massive supervolcano buried underneath the western United States? It’s called the Yellowstone Caldera and it’s had three major eruptions over the last 3 million years. Ash from a major eruption could theoretically blanket the whole country -- over 3 feet deep in some places. There’d also be lava and explosions up to 40 miles around Yellowstone Park, but the ash is the real killer. Aside from clogging infrastructure and ruining crops, that much of it could cause a global winter, much like that from a nuclear bomb. A big enough supervolcano could change the global climate for up to a decade. Luckily for us, the experts say the Yellowstone volcano won’t erupt in the next couple thousand years. Probably.
#9: Cosmic Collision
The Highest Energy Cosmic Ray Ever Seen | Unveiled
You’ve seen dozens of movies where an asteroid threatens all life on earth and humans band together to stop it. Asteroids aren’t the only thing zipping around space though. A hypervelocity star passing too close could burn us up like a marshmallow in a campfire. Thankfully, a star flying at us would be pretty visible, what with all the fire, so at least we’d see it coming. You know what we might not see coming, though? A rogue supermassive black hole. They’ve been identified traveling through space at up to 5 million miles an hour. And one could tear up our entire planet and capture what’s left in the blink of an eye - IF the Earth got close enough, that is. We don’t know of any headed this way, but since they’re not directly visible… that’s also no guarantee.
#8: Solar Flare/Storm
4 Unexpected Discoveries On Solar System Planets
Of course, that’s all deep space stuff. We’ve got a perfectly good world-ender right in our own solar system: the sun! When the sun shoots off charged particles or plasma bursts, the earth’s magnetic field protects us from burning up completely. But severe solar storms still play havoc with electrical equipment. Experts say a particularly bad storm -- or one that happened when the magnetic field was weak, like during a magnetic pole shift -- could shut down sensitive equipment like, say, power stations for days - maybe years. So while this apocalypse isn’t the kind that just outright kills everyone… how would you feel about heading back to the dark ages?
#7: Man-Made Black Hole
What's at the Bottom Of a Black Hole? | Unveiled
As if all those cosmic threats weren’t enough, how about getting sucked into a nice home- grown black hole?! When they first powered on the Large Hadron Collider, panic writers went wild, saying it might create a microscopic black hole that would grow until it destroyed the Earth. Fortunately, it didn’t. In fact, despite all that panic, actually trustworthy scientific sources, like… y’know, NASA, were quick to point out that was extremely unlikely. If we did create a micro black hole, it would be small enough to slip through the space between atoms and it would be traveling at near light speed. That means the chances of it grabbing any mass at all -- let alone enough to be a problem -- are astronomical.
#6: A.I. Takes Over
Top 30 Craziest Fast Food Menu Items of the Century (So Far)
Actually, a lot of people would say they did see this one coming. Tech giant Elon Musk, for example, has said that AI is a bigger threat than nuclear weapons. In just the last few years, AI has advanced in leaps and bounds. The launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November, 2022 stunned the world with its capabilities. Generative AIs can produce art, videos, and emulate human voices. We’re getting closer and closer to artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Many thinkers have warned of the technological singularity, the point at which AI surpasses human intelligence, becomes self-improving, and we lose control. Meanwhile, tech companies are also working on AI-powered robots - including for military purposes …
#5: Alien Invasion
Could NASA's DART Mission Be Used to Stop Alien Invaders? | Unveiled
This is another one that you might have considered once or twice. We’ve only been writing about it since, oh, the 1800s! The basic idea is, we’re not alone in the universe. Hooray! But our new neighbors aren’t as friendly as we might like. Un-hooray. Anyway, they come over less to borrow a cup of sugar and more to… exterminate and/or enslave us. Unlike a lot of things on this list, this one actually offers us a chance to fight back. But no less a mind than the late, great Stephen Hawking has warned us that any species with the technology to travel here from another star system isn’t going to be too impressed with our nuclear arsenal.
#4: Actual Zombies
Is a radioactive comet or a necromantic virus going to start turning us into ghouls? Probably not. Is there a very real fungus that takes over the bodies of insects and bends them to its will? Yep! So we’d be in big trouble if a strain of cordyceps ever started targeting humans. Meanwhile, as Covid taught us, there are plenty of existing plagues that could cause a global pandemic. It might not be as cinematic as turning people into monsters, but there’s basically a new epidemic scare every couple of years. Remember swine flu and bird flu? Ebola? And that’s without even touching on antibiotic-resistant bacteria or the chilling idea of a bioengineered disease getting out of control. Look, all we’re saying is… wash your hands, okay?
#3: Someone Turns Off the Simulation
Top 20 Craziest Military Weapons That Actually EXIST
None of this is real! The world as we know it is a hologram! Sounds crazy, but it’s a real theory by actual scientists. The logic goes like this: If anyone ever figures out how to make a computer powerful enough to simulate a universe, they’ll do it. And since there’s no reason they could only do it once, they’ll do it a few times. Then, the people inside those universes do it and eventually there are more simulated ones than real. So statistically, that makes us just like Mario, here. And when someone gets bored of the game? We’d never see them reaching for the power button. Nor could we stop them. So… start yelling! Let’s hope Horton Hears a Who.
#2: Grey Goo Scenario (Von Neuman Machines)
Imagine a robot so small you can’t even see it. Not much of a threat, right? But what if it could make more of itself? And to do so, it could use any matter it found just lying around. Now we have a problem. If they don’t run out of power or matter, those machines could just keep duplicating until they convert the whole dang planet into… well, grey goo. This is a pretty easy apocalypse to avoid, in the grand scheme of things. All we have to do is not build the nanobots in the first place. It’s not like science has ever gone too far and created anything that got out of hand, right? RIGHT?!
#1: The Cosmic Bubble Pops
Did Scientists Just Discover That We Live in a Cosmic Bubble? | Unveiled
In this scenario, what we think of as the vacuum of space is actually pretty lively compared to the true emptiness outside the universe. That’s fine, just so long as the emptiness outside the bubble never gets in by, say… a microscopic wormhole. Or if some very complicated quantum processes just kinda feel like it. Which could happen at any time. It’s phenomenally unlikely to happen soon. But if it did? Hoo boy. A bubble of true vacuum would expand through the universe, incinerating everything in its path and leaving literally nothing behind. And moving at lightspeed, we wouldn’t even see it happening until it hit us. So how do you prepare for the sudden unexpected end of everything? You literally can’t. Sweet dreams!
Are you a doom-scroller or doomsayer who thinks they know the actual, bonkers way the world will end? Let us know in the comments below.
