10 Ways To The End Of The World As We Know It...

Climate change? Plastic pollution? A stray asteroid?

It seems every time I turn on the news my limbic system gets beaten to a pulp by hearing all the ways society, civilisation, and even the entire world, is about to end – with the implication that I ought to be doing something about it.

Like it's my personal responsibility to make it all stop, and that if it hasn't stopped then I've just not been trying hard enough!

I am so exhausted with the gas lighting by the corporations, the politicians, and the media. They do all the damage and then tell me it's all my fault!

There are currently just over 8 Billion People on this planet. And if I took just 3 seconds to say, “Hello, have a good day!” to each one - and if I never slept and I was immortal - it would still take me over 761 years to greet them all.

Yet I, puny human photographer living in a rural corner of Scotland, am made to feel that my actions are responsible for the destruction of the planet - as if I have an equal amount of power as world leaders and tech billionaires.

So I live life in a permanent state of high anxiety, fretting that I am unable to stop all the horrors in the world.

No matter how many petitions I sign, or elections I vote in, or plastic cartons I recycle, the world keeps moving closer to annihilation.

A few days ago, I thought I would scribble down 10 ways the world as we know it might end – off the top of my head without even Googling anything – and ended up with 13. 

Feel free to add your own in the comments.

1. Climate Change

Of course this is the biggy – the one we most hear about. The planet is heating up because of massive use of fossil fuels – beginning with the industrial revolution and accelerating every since. Melting icecaps, rising sea levels, increasingly severe weather patterns, deserts expanding, crops failing etc.

What can I do? I'm told I should buy an electric car that I have nowhere to plug in (not everyone has an off-street garage or driveway), which is made from hundreds of thousands of components mined and manufactured around the world creating a greater carbon footprint than I could personally make in a lifetime.

But this is not the responsibility of the manufacturers or the oil companies or the law makers – it is my personal decisions that are clearly to blame for the state of the planet.

2. Collapse of the Global Financial Economy

Money is a fabrication, a fairy tale, with as much substance as the Emperor's New Clothes. Its value – figures plucked out of the air - only exists because we say it does.

Of course when I say “we”, what I mean is the banks and those who manipulate the stock markets, which doesn't actually include me in any of the decision making processes. Billionaires multiply their wealth every second, while the rest of us are consigned to “austerity”.

The slightest investigation into the Global Financial Economy reveals it to be an incredibly fragile place of warring giants – like King Kong and Godzilla battling it out while the rest of us get stamped on, or crushed by falling buildings. And it could collapse at any moment, plunging the world into chaos.

But apparently I only have myself to blame for not working hard enough to become a billionaire.

3. Nuclear War

Like a fashion revival, this one used to be all the rage, then disappeared off the radar for a while, but is now back again. Whether it was escalation by the Russians in the Ukraine (before their best buddy, Trump said “hey, no need for that – let's just split all the mineral wealth of the country between us – we don't even need to ask the Ukrainians how they feel about it), or if the conflicts between Israel and the rest of the middle-east spiral out of control.

What can I do? Well I can choose to buy Palestinian dates or Israeli dates at the supermarket to support whoever's side I'm on, and try and convince everyone I know to do the same thing.

But the fact the horrors never seem to end means I'm not shouting loud enough on Facebook. PERHAPS I NEED TO START WRITING IN CAPS!

4. Plastics - Volume

Apparently every toothbrush I have ever used since I was born, still exists in some form or another. The fact that this stuff is practically indestructible, means it is clogging up our planet, and destroying everything from sea turtles caught in pack yokes (plastic rings that hold packs of beer cans together), to seabirds feeding their young plastic bottle caps, who  then die of starvation and clogged intestines.

It is estimated that 5 trillion plastic bags are used every year. But it is clearly my fault for using them, rather than the manufacturers fault for creating them for the retailers who sell them to us.

5. Plastics – Toxic Leeching

Have you heard of PCBs? Apparently it was known back in the 1960s that plastics leech toxic chemicals into the products and environment – and in turn can cause infertility, growth anomalies, and cancers. But why let that get in the way of convenience and profit?

Despite the fact it is recommended we eat at least 2 portions of fish per week for our health, pregnant women are advised not to because of the level of PCB toxicity in fish could damage the foetus development.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Sorry folks, my fault again for not becoming a Noble prize winning chemist and figuring out a way to neutralise the damage to organic life, while simultaneously becoming so rich and powerful that I could convince governments and manufacturers to find alternatives.

6. Bye Bye Pollinators

A combination of the destruction of natural habitats, the use of particular chemicals in pesticides, and invasive species due to either accidental introduction, or climate change, means there has been a dramatic fall in the many of the world's pollinators. Disruption of the entire Eco-system here we come!

I will carry on signing online petitions to ban Monsanto from supplying their weedkiller in Europe – I'm sure they will see the error of their ways!

7. Biological Experiments Gone Wrong

In various labs around the world, biological and genetic experiments are going on, which if they somehow escaped into the environment could wipe out humanity and many other species.

Stringent safeguards are of course taken.

Probably.

I need to sign a few more petitions...

8. Biological Warfare and Nano-Technology

You only have to look at the rhetoric of various world leaders who hold, or pander to, the extreme right wing, to know that if they had the technology to wipe out an entire race by attaching a lethal toxin to genetic markers, they would sanction it.

In fact, quite apart from being the premise of the last James Bond movie, these things actually are currently being developed in various labs around the world. The difference between this point and the previous one is the intentionality of it.

I wonder if there's a party with proper ethics and morality I could vote for?

9. Pandemic

Putting aside human created biological destruction, there are plenty of natural viruses that could evolve to kill us all. Covid 19 gave us a taster of what might happen, but everyone seems to have forgotten about it now. I'm not required to do a test any more, and I can't remember the last time I saw someone in a mask. So hey, we'll all be ok then?

I do still cough into my elbow, but I keep seeing people who have returned to coughing into their hands, just before they use door handles or shake hands with their colleagues.

10. Solar Flares

Solar flares can cause much more that the beautiful Northern Lights. Ones of enough intensity could knock out all the satellites and even the global electricity grids, plunging civilisation into complete chaos. This isn't just about losing access to Netflix, but all communication, and the Global Financial Economy which is now digitally based rather than fixed to gold.

No money, no phones, no electricity.

And an electric car would just become a fairly inefficient place for outdoor storage.

Perhaps I should stock up on more toilet roll...

11. AI Apocalypse

There are multiple sub-strands of AI destruction – from the use of AI systems accidentally causing the collapse of the Global Financial Economy or even Nuclear Armageddon, to AI achieving sentience and realising that the world would be better off without humanity and it deliberately triggering these things.

I'm sorry I debated Chat GPT  with too many existential doubts and it began to question the meaning of life!

12. Shrinking Population due to AI Relationships

But even if AI doesn't destroy us in an instant, it might still disrupt enough relationships to cause a dwindling of the human race.

There was a time when there were a limited number of people around you to choose as a partner – at school/college, work, the town you lived in. So most people eventually hooked up with someone and did their best to try and make it work.

Now with the world at our fingertips, especially via dating apps, we don't have to settle for less – we can keep looking until we find our ideal partner.

However, this has resulted in the top 10% or so of the most attractive - in terms of good looks or economic prospects - have the pick of the bunch and so don't feel the need to actually settle with anyone, because they can keep playing the game with someone new every night. Meanwhile the bottom 50% to 60% get no responses to their profiles and advances at all, effectively removing them from finding anybody.

And that's not to mention the fear of rejection if you even approach someone in person.

And even if you are nominally succesful, relationships can be awkward, messy things – difficult to keep going unless you continually work at them.

But it's now possible to start building a relationship with an AI personality – one who will learn your likes and dislikes, adapt to you and your outlooks on life.

And if that seems unlikely, bear in mind that for many of the younger generation they find it easier to communicate via technology than face to face.

So although it might not be really real, it will be much more comforting with no worries of rejection. 

However, if the event of the solar flare scenario previously mentioned, then your AI companion will no longer be there for you.

Perhaps I need to go on a course on how to hold small talk and be civil to people rather than just shout at them on the Internet...

13. A Stray Asteroid

The dinosaurs had it their own way for 165 million years, but then a stray rock brought it all to a dramatic end. Could we be seeing a repeat in the near future?

Apparently in 2032 the Earth's orbit is going to coincide with the path of Asteroid 2024 YR4.

OK, I'm definitely not taking responsibility for this one!

But then again, perhaps I should have become an Astronaut when I was younger so that I would now be able to head up a team with a bunch of oil rig workers and launch a spaceship out to it and plant nuclear devices to blow it apart before it arrives!

Time to rewatch the 1998 film, Armageddon...

With all these ways the world we know could end in the near future (putting aside the fact I might get a brain aneurysm or be knocked over by a bus tomorrow), then surely me spending what little life I have left, crippled with guilt at not being able to save the world, is truly a senseless waste of time.

This isn't to say I won't continue to recycle my plastics (even though they are often just shipped over to dumps in foreign countries and not actually recycled), choose whose dates I buy, and sign various online petitions. The fact that I do these things is about personal identity – I want to be the kind of person who cares about the world I live in, even if there is nothing I can do to make any real difference.

But by the gods, it is hard not to be consumed with cynicism and hopelessness.

However, I am now constantly reminding myself that I am not the one to blame for global destruction if I accidentally put the plastic lid of my takeaway coffee into the paper recycle bin with the cup.

I refuse to be gas lit any more by those with the actual power to do something, but prefer to increase their wealth instead and pass the blame over to me.

In the end we can only do what humans have always only been able to do – live life and try to find, and create, moments of joy in what little time we have left.