Whenever Hollywood takes something out of its medium and turns it into a movie, its hard to take it seriously. Vampires got turned into movies and look what happeded. They sparkle and they are more likely to ask you to prom than kill you. And movies where the world ends and life as we know it almost abolished. Its hard to take that cheesy crap seriously. But there are at least 20 likely ways the world could end and I'll go through them seperately through forums.
Asteroid Impact
The most significant and the most likely is apocolypse via asteriod impact. There is no question that a cosmic interloper will hit Earth, and we won't have to wait millions of years for it to happen. In 1908 a 200-foot-wide comet fragment slammed into the atmosphere and exploded over the Tunguska region in Siberia, Russia. It had nearly 1,000 times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Bam. Yeah.
Astronomers estimate similar-sized events occur every one to three centuries. Benny Peiser, an anthropologist-cum-pessimist at Liverpool John Moores University in England, claims that impacts have repeatedly disrupted human civilization. As an example, he says one killed 10,000 people in the Chinese city of Chi'ing-yang in 1490. Many scientists question his interpretations: Impacts are most likely to occur over the ocean, and small ones that happen over land are most likely to affect unpopulated areas.
But with big asteroids, it doesn't matter much where they land. Close only counts with horseshoes, hand grenades, and big asteroids. Objects more than a half-mile wide—which strike Earth every 250,000 years or so—would touch off firestorms followed by global cooling from dust kicked up by the impact.
Humans would likely survive, but civilization might not. An asteroid five miles wide would cause major extinctions, like the one that may have marked the end of the age of dinosaurs.
For a real slap-in-the-face, look to the Kuiper belt. Its a zone just beyond Neptune that contains roughly 100,000 ice-balls more than 50 miles in diameter. The Kuiper belt sends a steady rain of small comets earthward. If one of the big ones headed right for us, that would be it for pretty much all higher forms of life, even cockroaches.
Next up- A Gamma Ray Burst.
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