12 Things That Could Destroy Earth

time and again Earth has faced scenarios pushing us to the brink of our existence whether it's a giant asteroid that's slammed into us or an invisible virus creating a worldwide pandemic danger is ever present but despite these interferences Humanity has always figured out how to claw our way back but for how long will one of these 12 scenarios end life on our Blue Marble forever and How likely are they to happen number 12 World War II breaks out bombs shelters rations the last time we had a world war was in 1939 are we on the

brink of another one with global tensions rising and battles erupting all around the world the possibility of a World War becomes greater and greater every year regardless of how things escalate this war would be unlike anything else we've experienced Advanced military Technologies the fight for natural resources and nukes would all be possibilities the Battlegrounds could be the United States Russia or potentially Taiwan so if World War III were to happen how would you survive if you're not up for an armed resistance you'd better get out of the big cities which are often targets head for

rural areas make a survival kit and just maybe start thinking now about a move to a safe haven very far north or very far south will it be Greenland New Zealand or Antarctica of course all this is assuming a world war with con ventional weapons but what if there's something much worse but before we get to that let me show you something that the whatif team has been using these days something we're super excited to tell you about it's a browser called Opera this browser is just a better way to surf the Internet it's safer

it's more secure and just makes everything faster one of my favorite features of Opera is the tab Islands you know sometimes I'm researching multiple stories at once and before you know it I've got dozens hundreds of tabs open but with tab Islands I can easily group the tabs to stay organized it's also got a built-in AI chatbot called Arya with just a few clicks you can highlight any text online and ARA will give you more information on the subject I use it all the time when I'm trying to get through more complex science articles plus

there's a built-in VPN ad blocker and messenger Tab and it's even got this feature called Lucid mode that automatically sharpens blurry videos say goodbye to 480p if you want to browse the internet like it's 2024 well check out the link in the description to download Opera it's totally free and it's the best way to explore the internet number 11 an allout nuclear apocalypse a regional nuclear war would kill Millions but it wouldn't end the world pull a couple of Heavy Hitters into the ring like the US and Russia and all bets are off a 300

kiloton bomb explosion will vaporize anything people included but this is just a start if multiple nukes went off every explosion would create a giant Fireball as hot as the sun's core you think that's bad it gets worse the dense black carbon smoke would spread across the Northern Hemisphere freezing the Earth and causing a nuclear winter for up to 10 years 90 9% of the population of the US Europe Russia and China could starve to death assuming you survive the blast seek shelter immediately for the week or two after you'll want to hunker down indoors to

avoid radioactive fallout hiding inside the thickest concrete or underground might protect you from the radiation but how would you escape the harsh nuclear winter New Zealand anyone if human beings don't end up killing each other on Earth well there could be another thing that does number 10 alien invasion yeah I'm talking about aliens and not because they want to enslave us like we see in the movies what if it's because they're hungry for that one thing that even we can't get enough of before I tell you what that is do aliens even exist well the

Drake equation estimates that there's a 53 to 99.6% chance that we're the only intelligent life in the Milky Way so if aliens are out there how would they even get to earth maybe they'd use a futuristic spacecraft or travel via Wormhole and maybe they'd pop by because they're hungry for energy a type 2 alien civilization could potentially have a Dyson Sphere a ball that orbits their Planet harvesting solar energy and looking for new sources like our sun yikes and if our sun goes well you can say goodbye to virtually all life on Earth humans would

freeze to death our crops would cease to exist and our once Blue Marble would become a Barren Wasteland okay okay maybe a little unrealistic let's move on to something a little more likely number nine asteroid hitting Earth a truly massive 96 km wide asteroid would finish us all off shrink it down to 12 km wide and it might leave a few of us standing it would still be horrific the sight of the impact would get very very hot tsunamis would rise from the oceans billions of us would die the impact would spawn an enormous dust

plume engulfing the globe it would block out the sun and a deep freeze would set in for thousands even millions of years now chances are small but if it happens what should you do well scientists tell us an underground bunker would be the best option now if you can't swing that well at least stay away from the Impact Zone and clear of coastal areas with tsunamis but sooner or later you're going to freeze to death or things could get really really hot number eight super volcano just like a super llarge asteroid could take us out

so could a super volcano 200 200 million years ago Earth was hit by a super volcano which wiped out 75 % of the species on Earth it was so strong it ripped apart North America from Africa and plonked the Atlantic Ocean bang in the middle and did it stop with just one massive eruption yeah sorry that's a no for 600,000 years the central Atlantic magmatic Province or Camp erupted again and again lava covered everything volcanic ash rained down but you won't believe the thing that got us it was pollution CO2 and carbon levels skyrocketed causing

sweeping environmental destruction so is there a massive eruption waiting to happen today well below the surface of Yellowstone Park sits a giant Caldera we don't think it'll erupt anytime soon but in the distant future it might if it does erupt we'll expect a repeat of what happened 200 million years ago luckily geologists are monitoring Earth for seismic activity but can anyone save us from a zombie apocalypse number seven zombie apocalypse the corps fungus creates zombified ants growing around their brains and taking over their nervous system could this jump over to humans and create a Bonafide

human zombie well scientists suggest that our body temperature is simply too high for the fungus to survive but what if this fungus somehow did take over our systems big cities like New York London and Hong Kong would be the first major targets of an event like this and due to the ceps spreading via spores it would be incredibly difficult to a avoid getting infected the zombies would slowly take over major metropolitan areas if you live in more rural areas of the world you'd likely be safe for now number six another pandemic yeah that's right another

pandemic if you're watching this you were lucky enough to survive the covid-19 pandemic but will you survive the next one our world is changing and for the worse in the next few decades the probability of a novel disease outbreak will grow three times due to population growth changes in our food systems and closer contact between humans and animals scientists predict another pandemic will hit us within the next 59 years and a new virus could be a more dangerous killer it might mutate faster or we might not make a vaccine for it as quickly as we

did with Co instead of 7 million people who died from the virus it could be tens of millions during the co pandemic a bit of bioengineering went a long way in creating mRNA vaccines that saved our lives but can the same synthetic biology that saved Our Lives kill us off too number five synthetic bi ology in a secret lab somewhere could someone create a virus or super bacteria that will wipe out the human race imagine a super virus that spreads silently it leaves its victims asymptomatic for weeks only to turn deadly after that prolonged gestation

due to how much the world travels and how much smaller everything has become well the virus can spread more quickly and reach more people now that is something that could wipe out Humanity unless you're just someone who never sees people then maybe you'll be safe but if the virus doesn't get you I bet the next apocalyptic scenario will number four catastrophic climate change what if the average temperature Rose 4° C well it doesn't sound sound like a huge deal but a 4° c rise in temperature would destroy life on Earth as we know it sea

levels would rise by a half meter to a full meter and maybe even more by the year 2100 cities like New York London and Venice would see extreme flooding food production would go Haywire we'd see heat waves in the tropics and frequent high-intensity tropical Cyclones our coral reefs would be destroyed and that's not the end the water would keep rising in the coming centuries in a world like this Humanity might not go extinct but Earth would only be able to support just 1 billion people let's hope you're one of the lucky few okay that sounds

bad but what happens if it suddenly gets harder to breathe number three Oceanic anoxia o icean oxygen concentrations are declining today are we in danger of an oceanic anoxia event after all it did happen 450 million years ago a drop in oxygen levels persisted for 3 million years and 85% of marine species vanished now if phytoplankton were part of the vanishing marine species well the ocean's ability to remove carbon dioxide would be compromised driving our climate crisis into overdrive plus atmospheric oxygen would go down now thankfully a fullscale Oceanic anoxic event would take thousands of

years to develop so for the moment take a deep breath while you can number two ecological collapse okay so maybe we'll still have oxygen to breathe but are we on the brink of a major ecosystem collapse it happened over 250 million years ago during the perian Triassic period healthy ecosystems thrive on a set of balanced interactions between animals and plants predators and prey every species has a critical role to play if all the species playing a particular role within the ecosystem disappear well that means the first Domino has fallen and the collapse of our world

is imminent a startling loss of biodiversity like we're witnessing today is the beginning of the end just imagine if we lost all the bees our best pollinators we'd have to say goodbye to much of our fruit and humans would be far less healthy yeah robotic bees anyone yeah speaking of robots well here's the thing that's most likely to kill us all off number one killer robots you know even the deadliest effects of large scale global warming are a few years away but AI that can kill us it's here in a world where AI gets smarter

than us humans can be enslaved by the very intelligence we've created or wiped out by one programmed to kill us yeah we're speeding toward the dangerous point of Singularity where AI takes over human intelligence yeah let's just hope our new robot overlords are willing to play nice but if they're not I have an idea what if instead of humanity getting wiped out we progressed into a hyper Advanced civilization well that sounds like a story for another what if