Apocalpyse approaches

Is the jig up? Is the Fat Lady clearing her throat in preparation for the highlight of her career?

We weigh the evidence for the likelihood of Armageddon being just round the corner

SCIENTISTS have suggested that early humans living about one million years ago came perilously close to extinction. The genetic evidence suggests that the effective population — an indicator of species viability — was about 18,500 individuals. Roughly the population of Mullingar.

But somehow we survived, although only time will tell if a large brain and an opposable thumb was a good idea for Team Earth.

Now, as the 21st century wears on, the number of ways that the world might come to a sudden end multiplies — extermination of life could arrive through Environmental Disaster brought about by our own hand, or perhaps by Heat Death: an unfortunate expansion of matter into a cold and empty universe.

There’s also cosmic expansion reversal, magnetic obversity, mass insanity, robotic revolution and not forgetting North Korea and Donald Trump.

Then again, the curtain could conceivably be brought down by artificial intelligence — although you'd have to say the smart money is on human stupidity.

The evidence, ladies and gentlemen

1. Climate change

The polar ice caps are the ones to watch. Seriously eroded polar regions could lead to ecosytem collapse with rising sea levels and temperatures playing havoc with crucial currents such as the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic Conveyor, El Niño etc.

CLIMATE CHANGE is happening, but our response, so far, is likely to prove woefully inadequate. Think Wile E Coyote running off the edge of a cliff and he hasn't looked down yet.

Quite simply, climate change is one of the favourites to end human existence on the planet; yet our response is negligible. The accepted wisdom is, "Ah sure, somebody'll do something about it. We'll muddle through." But as Marshall McLuhan put it: "There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We're all crew."

** If we can't sort out climate change by moderating human behavious, experts have suggested exploding nuclear mega-bombs at the periphery of the Earth’s orbit. Arguably, this would blast us further away from the sun, thus reducing global warming.

The plan is generally regarded as a tad risky.  

2. Natural disaster

Scientists regard volcanic super-eruptions as one of nature’s greatest killers. If enough became active, disaster. And we're not talking just a few cancelled flights, as happened with the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. In 2010 ash from the Icelandic volcano caused airline havoc, and thus overnight, almost, Eyjafjallajökull became the most copied-and-pasted word in history.

3. Alien invasion

To be honest, an unlikely scenario for the end-game. All the same, it's a bit foolhardy to be sending probes into deep space carrying our coordinates. "Here we are! And we're stupid gobshites!"

Uninvited visitors are seldom benign — just ask any Native American, Australian Aboriginal, Inuit etc.

* On the off-chance that aliens do arrive and demand "Take me to your leader", maybe you should just shuffle your feet and say, "Er, why don't you come and meet Graham Norton. You'll like him. Everybody does."

4. Gamma-ray burst

Gamma-rays originate in distant galaxies and are unfathomably powerful — as great as 10 milli-quadrillion times as energetic as the sun (a milli-quadrillion is one, followed by a zero, followed by 16 other zeros, multiplied by all the zeros you have on your calculator. Plus, in scientific terms, a few more.)

If one of those hits us. . . end of

5. Giant solar flares

These enormous magnetic outbursts from the sun bombard Earth with a torrent of high-speed subatomic particles. No let up. 365 days of the year, including Christmas. A rogue one could spell disaster; even cockroaches won't survive to tell their grandchildren.

6. Nuclear war destruction

Nuclear war is still the favourite to take us all down.

As far back as the 1960s European governments were issuing booklets explaining what the public should do in case of nuclear attack. Basically — get under a table, cover it with a sheet, and don't look directly at the blast. Sound advice, indeed.

7. Global epidemic

Never mind about nearly being wiped out a million years ago; we were nearly removed from the face of the earth by the Black Death during the 14th century; later, influenza took at least 20 million lives between 1918 and 1919; and Ireland still hasn't recovered its population after the Great Famine. Were it to follow the European norm, Ireland should have a population between 13million to 15million instead of its current 6million or so.

So huge swathes of population being wiped out is nothing new for mankind.

A mutation of something like AIDS, or by a bacterium running amok in the post-antibiotic age, could mean the game is up.

Vivienne Parry, Head of Engagement at Genomics England, believes that the end could be in sight if a transmissible deadly disease were to mutate in foxes, and then spread through biting. The foxes would transmit the disease to dogs, the dogs would bite humans . . .

Parry also has a scenario in which cats receive a highly contagious respiratory disease from bat droppings which they pass onto humans.

Apocalypse Miaow.

8. Asteroid impact

Cosmic bodies regularly hit Earth; one did for the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. An asteroid some nine miles wide slammed into the planet with a force equivalent to about 10 billion Hiroshima bombs. The impact occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, in shallow water.

A radioactive fireball consumed everything for hundreds of miles in every direction, creating tsunamis that battered over half of the globe's land masses. Colossal volumes of sulphur (from the mineral gypsum) were injected into the atmosphere, extending the "global winter" period that followed the immediate firestorm.

In short, that asteroid hit the worst place possible, seen from a dinosaur's viewpoint.

Were a similar-sized thing to hit us, it's goodnight all round.

Of course, luck plays a huge part — if that meteorite had delayed for a few minutes, it would have struck somewhere in the middle of the ocean, and the dinosaurs would have survived. . . you would be reading this in some sort of dinosaury language, perhaps with the help of a stegosaurus.

But measures are in place should an asteroid threaten. A NASA official told the US Congress that if a meteor were on track to strike the US, Americans should pray.

Even Pope Francis labelled this plan piss-poor.

9. Dark Comet

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the woman who discovered radio pulsars, believes that the end could come, not from collision with an asteroid, but through an encounter with a dark comet. If one of these comes visiting it won’t be the impact that will kill us, but the ensuing famine due to the sun being blocked. By and by, no crops, no food. Farmageddon. “Man will eat dog, and man will eat man,” she says. Like something out of Cormac McCarthy’s unrelentingly bleak cli-fi novel The Road. However, Dr Burnell does have a solution — although only of comfort to a few, and even then for a limited time. Head for Iceland, and as long as the volcanoes haven't joined in the chaos, the hot geysers should allow a vegetarian diet to be farmed, for a few decades at any rate.

10. Vacuum decay

Should the vacuum that encloses the universe collapse collapse, the resulting conditions would basically freeze the world, and we're not talking about it being a bit parky — this would be so cold that the laws of physics would change.  This is the ultimate ecological catastrophe — the universe would be wiped out. The Earth would be drawn into an elliptical path resulting in it being ejected from the solar system and being sent hurtling into deep space. Doors to manual, everybody.

11. Divine intervention

The Book of Revelation indicated that the world would end on September 23, 2017 (Saturday afternoon). Which it didn’t, as you'll have noticed.

But still, the bible could be right. It's all in there apparently: "And I saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns . . blah blah . . . blasphemy . . blah blah Antichrist. . .blah blah . . .smiting, no more begetting etc.

. . . . Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: Six hundred threescore six . . more smiting. . . gameth is up. End of."

[PEDANTIC NOTE: The Beast is 666. No argument about that. But the Neighbour of the Beast would be 664 . The number 665, as usually cited by those who like to banter about such a serous subject, would in fact be across the street from the Beast]

Bants aside, over the centuries the bible's final book has been taken very seriously. Using it as his lodestar, the 17th century Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, calculated a 'best before' date for humans of 4/11, 1996. The world would call it a day then.

Learned though the prelate undoubtedly was — his literary collection became the basis for the library at Trinity College, Dublin —  his prediction for the date of Domesday was, self-evidently, out of whack. Undaunted, his avid followers have recalculated and confidently predict that the end is definitely nigh-ish.