A Comparison of Various "Ends of the World as We Know It"

A video recently put of on Youtube titled "Muslim Demographics" announces that due to declining European birth rates, in fifty years, Europe as we know it will be gone. And what will be left behind is a Muslim Europe full of mosques, with everybody praying to Mecca five times a day. And no alcohol or cartoons of Mohammed, either.

Well I don't know about you young people, but I have had quite a few "Ends of the world as we know it" in my lifetime. I believe my first one was when the NHL expanded beyond the original six teams. It was 1967, they said the world would never be the same again. And they were right. Who could have ever imagined that one day a team with the unlikely name "The Mighty Ducks" would win the revered Stanley Cup.

So here are a bunch of currently pending "End of the world as we know it" scenarios with my star rating and commentary on each one.

Global Warming ***: Due to green house gases released from burning fossil fuels, the temperature of the earth goes up a few degrees, the polar ice caps melt, sea levels go up, and things get even warmer. Now what I like about this is the shorter winters, and less of a drive to the nearest beach. What I don't like is extra hurricanes, tornadoes, and killer bees invading Canada along with malaria. Also big problems may occur with 400,000,000 refugees displaced and species going extinct. But this may be more than 100 years off, and there is a chance the scientists made a mistake in their modelling. So I give this one three stars out of five. (Five being worst, one star being almost exactly the same as what we have today.)

Muslims take over *1/2: Muslims have a higher birth rate than western white people, so they will take over in fifty years. What I like about this is that road traffic will thin out considerably, as families with 10+ kids won't be able to afford a car. Also a very good chance that we will be able to ride motorcycles without helmets. On the down side, I don't like Arabic music, and we will not be allowed to fly kites, draw cartoon of Mohammed, or have girls in high school. Fifty years is coming up pretty soon, although I hope to be dead by then, but I will award more stars than global warming, based on the immediacy of the threat. But unfortunately it turns out almost all the stats produced to support the Muslim Takeover Theory come from people who have difficulties with math. So the final tally is one and a half stars on the "end of the world as we know it" scale.

Large Comet Strike: * This is pretty simple: All life wiped out, including plants in the space of ten minutes. It will take about a million years for intelligent life to regenerate from rock-dwelling viruses. And then the likelihood of it being remotely human is slim to none. Against this is the unlikeliness of this happening in the next 10,000 years - probably a million to one against. I'm giving it one star - life goes on pretty much as normal, if not, then nobody is going to be checking up on my blog to see what I said about it.

The Rapture. * Jesus comes back and takes all the Born Again Christians up to heaven. Everybody else off to Hell. Should happen within the next fifty years. This one is obviously pretty serious if it happens, so it all comes down to likelihood, which I will put at around one in one hundred billion against. Result: only one star for this scenario, which otherwise has quite a strong fan base in the USA.

The Mother of All Deadly Pandemic Diseases **** We don't know much about this, but think of the devastation of the Bubonic Plague, and all the various scares we keep getting. Although I trust modern medicine to come up with a vaccine, I'm still worried about this one, hence the four stars.

Global Thermonuclear War *** We have been living with this since the fifties, and I think we're getting a bit complacent. A lot of countries have nuclear weapons, and international diplomacy is getting stupider by the decade. The Bush administration made everything worse by threatening to use nuclear weapons on countries that did not yet possess them, and so unleashed a race among some unarmed countries to develop them. (Iran and North Korea come to mind.) Three stars, because I think atomic radiation is overrated as a toxic element, and the destruction will be limited to urban areas over a million and I live in a smaller city.

Feel free to add any that I may have overlooked in the comments below, but remember currently pending armageddons only - e.g. no Y2K's please.