Date-based apocalypses are stupid and wrong. Ever since people devised calendars, they've tried to pinpoint the day the world will end, but it hasn't worked even once. The apocalypse isn't going to follow our rules: like meaningfully-caught-in-the-wind plastic bags and meaningless crackheads, the apocalypse will cross the street wherever and whenever it fucking pleases. Here are three virtually inevitable world-enders that are guaranteed to kill most humans, force survivors into groups of helpless waifs or roving rapecycle hordes, and vindicate everyone who knows more about apocalyptic zombie movies than they do about feeding and cleaning themselves.
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Every so often, the Earth's magnetic field's polarity reverses. That is to say, it flips upside down. Imagine Jackie Chan, doing a flip. He starts out standing normally, but during the flip, his hands are on the ground and his feet are in the air. Right now, the magnetic field is standing on its feet, as it has been for the last 600,000 years. The bad news is that it flips about every 600,000 years. That means that sometime soon, a bad guy is going to walk through the door, and our magnetic fields will flip out. Compasses will point the opposite direction. Getting your compass updated is no big deal, but during this flip Jackie Chan (still playing the role of earth's magnetic field) is going to get disoriented and let his guard down a little. He can't protect us ("us" is played by Chris Tucker in this analogy), and we may get kicked in the chin by that evil Juntao (space radiation). This is where the analogy ends. In real life, when we get kicked in the chin by solar radiation, we get lots and lots of cancer. Everything else gets cancer too. So watch out for that happening sometime between now and 5000 years from now.
Every so often, a gigantic supervolcano erupts and kills pretty much everything on the continent it's on. Usually they come and go, only erupting once before destroying themselves and breaking up into lots of smaller volcanoes. But one supervolcano has stuck it out through numerous eruptions. This Velvet Revolver of the volcano world is the Yellowstone Supervolcano, and guess what? It covers most of Wyoming, it erupts every 650,000 years, and it last erupted exactly 650,000 years ago. The good news is that it only people living in states no more than one state away from Wyoming will actually be set on fire by the eruption. The bad news is that everyone else will be killed secondhand (probably by suffocating or freezing to death). If anyone survives they'll get to live in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, as the darkness caused by the ash will prevent anything from growing. That should be happening any moment now or within the next 10, 000 years.
Every so often, the world plunges into a period of freezing cold, glaciation, gigantic mammals, and Ray Romano. One of these conditions has already been met and it's just the tip of the iceberg (honk!) The ice age is once again upon us. Roughly every 100,000 years, the Earth gets nice and toasty for a little bit. But these warm, interglacial periods are brief, and then the weather returns to its normal state, only about eight degrees C colder, globally. That's really cold. On top of that, it'll disrupt a lot of climate patterns – notably the Gulf Stream that keeps Europe fabulous. Without that warming current, Britain will start to act like it really is – an island at the same latitude as Labrador. For the record: Labrador is terrible and its only export is gasoline-addled teens. When the ice age cometh, our only recourse will be either Red Planet-style Martian greenhouses (requires Gary Sinise), Logan's Run-style idiot-filled pleasure-domes (requires Michael York), or garbage bags full of gasoline (kind of fun at first, but gets old fast). Expect this to happen tomorrow or in as many as 10,000 years.ED PETRENKO
