[Old School Hound]

Great thread, Jet .  Let me get back on topic for a moment. I do often ponder what will bring about the end of life on Earth. While it won't be the mythical Jesus that ushers in the end of days, science and history does give us a clue as to what could be our ultimate demise.  We know that in  few billion years, the sun is going to go red giant on our asses and fry the earth. However, I think it highly unlikely that humans will be around when that happens.  Many scientists and futurists are convinced that man will eventually be supplanted by artificial intelligence.  Whether we are still human or some kind of AI ,  what will take us out before the big red sun bakes us? 

Certainly, we could do ourselves in---blow ourselves up.  Do we become more dangerous(more powerful technology and weaponry) or less dangerous(we learn from past mistakes-more cautious) as time goes on?  I tend to think we become more and more dangerous with time. Global warming followed by a runaway greenhouse effect could turn Earth into Venus . In fact, this is most certain to happen in about a billion years when the sun becomes about 10% brighter and the Earth's surface warms to 117 degrees and the oceans eventually boil away. It's very likely that man's careless and selfish use of the planet will hurry along the planet's demise, well before the billion year time frame.

What about a biological catastrophe- chemical or viral? We've seen how a worldwide pandemic can affect mankind?  What if a virus thousands of times worse than COVID was unleased on humanity?   The cosmos provides the most likely scenarios for our end, in my opinion.  A EMP from the sun could alter life as we know it on Earth but is not likely to bring about the end. Btw, we barely missed being slammed by a major solar storm in the summer of 2012 that would have taken years or decades to recover from.

In my opinion, the most likely scenario that will bring about the end of humans in a relatively short period of time will be from a comet or large  asteroid impacting the earth. We know what happened 66 million years ago(no, the Earth is not 6,000 years old) in the Yucatan Peninsula.  Dinosaurs ruled the earth(humans had not evolved yet- No Adam. No Eve) and a giant asteroid impacted and did away with the dinos.  What if the impact hadn't happened or what if it had occurred a few minutes earlier or later and, instead of impacting the shallow waters of the Yucatan, it had impacted the deep waters of the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans, which would have absorbed much of the energy. It still would have been a catastrophe with extinctions but some of the larger dinosaurs may have survived.  What then?

Would dinosaurs be here today? What new dinosaurs might have appeared? Would dinosaurs have developed human-like intelligence? Would mammals have remained in the shadows? Would humans have evolved found a way to survive alongside them?

It's only  a matter of time before the next impact with a comet or asteroid occurs. It's not an "if," but a "when."   Instead of  a man floating down from the clouds or a beast with seven heads and flames shooting out of its ass, the end is likely to be ushered in  by a runaway big ass rock or a dirty snowball.