Mankind's Nine Favorite Apocalypse Scenarios

The apocalypse is nigh and blah, blah. Isn't it funny and strange that a small number of people think that the world is going to end on 12/21/12 but we sensible folk know that it isn't? The international media complex thinks so, and hence, so must I. There are rules, and I must create online content–while I still can.

Regardless of the big dumb media's role in fanning the end-times flames, humans around the globe are very aware that some people believe everything is going to come crashing down around them tomorrow, on a mythic date that has long since been absorbed into the pan-cultural bloodstream. And when people have been sincerely anticipating the apocalypse for decades, the rest of us get to wondering what it must be like to believe in the end when the big day finally arrives.

We make the end of the world jokes, but a tiny little vision of our own ruined earth flickers past between the punchlines. Because we all have our own notion of how it will happen. Even if we conjure up images of zombies or a mushroom cloud when someone talks about the Big End, that's it: our brain's shorthand for the incomprehensible. Most of us don't sit around and work out scenarios for how the world will end; we pull from a grab-bag of cultural, scientific and religious cues that have accumulated over the years. That's how we think about the apocalypse.

As such, there are but a handful of basic scenarios that you're apt to picture when you consider armageddon over the next couple of days. Clearly, humankind has been doing this a while, and there are any number of end-timey avenues available to the armchair prophet. Yet your associative memory and your imagining of the mighty finale will probably draw from a relatively small pool. Lucky for me, those scenarios ended up tallying an SEO-friendly number, enabling me to distill the various fates of mankind into a handy listicle.

So here are 9 of our favorite things to think about when we think about the apocalypse. I have included a guide to the visual cues for each, so you'll know which End Time idea you're picturing as you digest the apocalyptic errata in coming days.

9. Overpopulation and ecological collapse

Classic, but a little out of vogue now. Old Tom Malthus first reared this specter over a century ago, and it's pretty simple stuff: Too many people sprout up, we exhaust the resources of the planet, and the biosphere collapses. Mass extinctions abound. We're left starving and miserable and eating each other in cans of Soylent Green. We wander urban wastelands and look for signs of life. Or, maybe, the survivors board a pleasure-barge spaceship, desert the ruined planet, and just send out CGI robots to file back with progress reports until an adorable waste transport unit reminds us how to live again. We think about how our recklessness and greed ruined everything.

Visual cues: Teeming, unwashed masses. Industrial backdrop. No signs of greenery or other life anywhere.

8. Alien Invasion

Obviously. There's little we love more than imagining various human-hating aliens descending from space, hellbent on extinguishing us all for no obvious reason. Its germ seems to lie in religious apocalyptica: humans are being wiped out for some cosmic purpose beyond our comprehension. It's not so much a War of the Worlds as the one world getting blown to bits. It's Childhood's End and an Independence Day where we are liberated from a functioning society. And it seems like the purest fantasia, but just 50 years ago when Orson Welles pretended on live radio that it was actually happening, real-life pandemonium ensued. Well aware of its supreme far-fetchedness, we think about how we remain gullible to the prospect.

Visual Cues: Scorched earth. Slimy aliens, possibly operating death machines. Lasers.

7. Collision with a Celestial Body

Another simple favorite. It is not our fault if an asteroid smashes into the planet. There's nothing we can do to avoid a deep impact like that, nor is there much we can do about colliding with Niberu or that planet from Melancholia. It's just a thing that happens, and tough shit. We think about statistical misfortune.

Visual cues: Tidal waves. Demolished buildings. A naked Kirsten Dunst. Earthquakes.

6. Catastrophic Global Warming

We're going to get global warming no matter what now. But we might get it worse than we think; the Arctic melts, the seas rise, huge parts of Africa and Asia get too hot to live in. It's the end of nature. An Inconvenient Truth proves true enough, and humanity must cope with hundreds of millions of refugees, new conflicts over resources, and a defunct food production system. Cities get flooded. Maybe not quite Waterworld, but almost as much of a mess. We think about a tipping point that we've passed and a world that is hostile to us and definitively out of our control.

Visual cues: Flooded cities, cracked, arid desert. Melting glaciers, lonely polar bears.

5. Mass Technological Failure

Clearly, we're terrified of losing access to the many niceties that pad our lives. Say we run out of oil, not too too long after the peak. Machines sit idle. The lights go off, modern society shuts down, and the warlords take over. There are riots and looting and anything goes in the never-ending dark. A Revolution rises up, but it is mostly boring and bland. Father and son take to the road to try to survive amidst the violence of the world. What little fuel is left is hoarded by sadistic biker gangs in hockey masks until Mad Max faces them down. Without technology, civilization crumbles and we're left contemplating a world that is at once bucolic and barbaric.

Visual Cues: Rural farmsteads, vicious warlords. Roving bands of bloodthirsty ne'er do wells.

4. Mass Technological Overload

But we are also terrified of losing control of our technology. Usually, machines become smarter than men. Vernor Vinge's Singularity turns out to be an unfortunate moment after all, and SkyNet empowers the robot army to wipe the planet clean of fleshy bipeds. Predator drones turn themselves on, terminators stalk the earth and travel through time to ensure their dominance. We think about how we are but fragile meat husks before the tide of unthinking but ever-calculating robot carnage.

Visual Cues: Sad enslaved humans in robo-factories. Sad soldier humans in bunkered up in eroded buildings. Arnold Schwarzenegger and red-eyed, steel-toothed killing machines.

3. Contagion / Zombie Apocalypse

So much fits under the contagion umbrella, from bioterror to the zombie apocalypse to a regular old epidemic wiping out mankind as we know it. There's an outbreak, and we're all screwed. It jumps from person to person, it leaves the dead a grave danger to us all. It spreads like wildfire, quarantines are attempted but useless. Corpses litter the streets. We think about diseases when we think of the end maybe because it reminds us of how tightly knit we all are; we talk, trade, and share public spaces with each other. The end by contagion exploits our human ties.

Visual cues: Heaps and heaps and heaps of dead bodies. Staggering hordes. Survivors holed up in warehouses.

2. Nuclear Holocaust

It's still the ultimate swift end to humanity: the bomb falls, and the mushroom cloud engulfs us all. Done. Our nuclear paranoia has ebbed some since the Cold War, but not much. There's still Iran and Israel and Pakistan and India and Russia and the United States, all with nuclear bombs pointed who knows where or the grand fear that they will be soon. Radiation suits and melting flesh, entire genres of dystopian fiction, a thousand horror movie plot lines. We remain awed by the greatest existential threat man ever built himself.

Visual cues: What else?

1. Divine Rapture

The four horsemen of the apocalypse arrive to wipe the world clean. The Second Coming is a lot messier than the first. It really is the ultimate apocalyptic scenario, and the one perhaps taken most seriously by the most people. The good are Raptured away, the jerks are dragged to hell, and those middlers head to purgatory. It's nice. It's comforting. It makes easy moral sense. This is an end-of-world scenario I can live with. We think about the Rapture when we are tired of thinking about all of the other ways it could end.

Visual cues: Jesus, various flashy monstrosities from Revelations. Fresh angels and bummed out Buddhists.

Bonus

Here is what I think about when I think about the apocalypse:

Temperatures rise and rise and rise until the Arctic and the permafrost is melted and we've got runaway global warming. Most of the planet is a sauna, and rising sea levels and storms have leveled once-great cities. Populations concentrate in the North–Canada, Russia, the U.S., Greenland–where temperatures are still tolerable. The rich fortify themselves on up, because millions of migrants are fleeing what have become the hellscapes of Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. Civilization erodes, and disease spreads without health services, killing millions more. Much of the sad scorched planet is left inhospitable, and there's conflict and war between the dwindling northerners. Life is shit for the vast majority of humanity. Not with a bang, but with a multi-decadal whimper, man is brought to his knees.

But that's just me.