The Last Days on Earth

ABC’s 20/20 program recently counted down the seven most likely ways for the world to end. This informative, yet extremely depressing, show was titled Last Days on Earth.

Science superstar Stephen Hawking was on hand to offer his opinions. He said that natural and cosmic disasters could end everyone’s party, but he also added that the biggest threat to humanity may be humanity itself.

The program ranked the seven calamities from the least likely to the most. Let’s count them down and then have a good cry.

7. Death of a Star. Most of us don’t think the sun will burn out in our lifetime. The problem is, we could be victimized by another star burning out, especially a star in our galaxy. When a star burns out, it causes the biggest explosion in the universe.

This explosion is accompanied by gamma.ray bursts. If we get hit by one of these, it will burn off the top layer of our atmosphere. That would wipe out the ozone layer and blast everyone’s molecules to bits. Buildings would be OK, so the entire world would be one big ghost town.

Another galactic calamity is a black hole, which sucks up everything like an enormous vacuum cleaner. Earth isn’t close to a black hole, but scientists recently made the distressing discovery that black holes are not stationary. They can move. We just have to hope they don’t visit our neighborhood.

6. Intelligent Machines. If you’ve seen movies like A.I. or I, Robot, you can envision what it would be like for machines to run amok. The scientists on 20/20 couldn’t say exactly how the machines could stage a techno-coup d’etat. The scientists just said that giving machines the ability to think for themselves could lead to bad things.

5. Asteroids. As bad as it sounds for a huge asteroid to smash into the earth, we may not have to worry about this one too much. For one thing, scientists will be able to give us years of advance warning about a runaway asteroid. Even better, astronauts might be able to use a space platform to divert an asteroid away from the Earth. So I think this won’t be a problem.