In 1945, Albert Einstein said: "The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking." Seventy years later, in 2015, countries are still stockpiling nuclear weapons in preparation for nuclear war.
A nuclear war is not likely to be survived by the human species. Studies of the world's leading climatologists predict that a large nuclear war – especially one fought with strategic nuclear weapons – would create a post-war environment in which it would be too cold and dark to even grow food for many years.
And for those who think such a scenario is nothing more than a movie script, all they have to do is look at the world's nuclear arsenal. The Federation of American Scientists estimated that there are a total of 12,700 nuclear warheads at the start of 2022 held by nine countries – the U.S., Russia, the U.K., France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.
Conflicts between these countries can cause a spark that will lead to an all-out launch. Any nuclear war fought with even just a fraction of the operational and deployed nuclear arsenals will make Earth essentially uninhabitable.
Compared to nuclear weapons, biological and chemical warfare can be developed – and "weaponized" – much easier, even with limited resources.
There is a long history of governments all across the globe using chemical weapons against their enemies or even against their own citizens.
Treaties and international laws are one thing, and humanity's ability to find innovative ways of killing each other is another.
The Wuhan coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is the biggest pandemic in a century.
Increased urbanization, population density and international travel raise the risk that any new infectious disease will become a major outbreak. At the same time, antimicrobial resistance is rising – making infections more deadly.
Global pandemics will likely occur in the future but their danger is hard to estimate. A natural pandemic killing all humans is unlikely, but plausible.
So far, no disease has had the right set of characteristics to cause human extinction. But pandemics that are deliberately caused by humans through viral engineering could fit the bill.
As an example, gene-editing technology CRISPR can be used to cause harm, such as by genetically modifying bird flu to become airborne, said Dr. Steve Luby, an epidemiologist and director of research for Stanford's Center for Innovation in Global Health.
The eruption of a supervolcano could endanger global civilization and even be an existential risk.
There's a one percent probability that extremely powerful volcanic eruptions, which can create a "volcanic winter," could happen in the next 70,000 years.
The number of asteroids and supercomets that travel through space is huge, and there may be objects revolving around our sun that people are unaware of.
Some of these objects occasionally collide with distant moons or planets, including Earth.
A species-level impact is expected once every 70,000 years. The largest near-Earth asteroids have a diameter of more than one kilometer, and an impact could result in human extinction.
Smaller asteroids could still lead to hundreds of millions of deaths but humans are getting better at tracking them.
The International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) has been cataloging them and devising ways to deflect them – and maybe, one day they will be able to divert them.
In about 800 million years, Earth will become uninhabitable for humans because of the expansion of the sun. About 6.5 billion years later, the sun will expand enough to consume the planet in a fiery end.
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