You are one of the most important humans who have ever lived
It isn't the end of the world. But give it a minute.
—from the podcast The End of the World with Josh Clark
I thought about the end of the world a lot as a child. Not the shroomy visions of John of Patmos, but nuclear annihilation. I ducked-and-covered twice a year in school under my (presumably six-inch-thick lead) desk. At recess, I would stare at the eastern sky, the direction from which I'd heard the missiles would come, just standing there, picturing them.
I shouldn't have worried. That's not even the most likely way the world will end.
Before we begin, it has to be said that the world — i.e., the quite stable and resilient rocky ball on which we find ourselves — isn't going anywhere. It has already survived its last likely period of great risk before the sun explodes, the Late Heavy Bombardment four billion years ago.
Even life itself, in some form, is very likely to survive what for us would be the end of the world.
When I say "the end of the world," I mean the end of us.
The bugs
Consider a global pandemic that's both highly contagious and very deadly. Most viruses are either highly transmissible or highly lethal, or neither, but rarely both. The swine flu of 2009 (H1N1) was extremely transmissible but not very deadly. The bird flu of 2025 (H5N1) is very deadly (around 50%) but not easily transmitted between humans — yet. Oh, but it's trying.
Also incredibly concerning is the accidental or intentional leak of one of the deadly pathogens now "secured" in high-containment biological labs around the world.
Why the scare quotes on "secured"?
In 2014, a National Institutes of Health lab in Bethesda, Maryland discovered six vials of live variola, the smallpox virus, in an unsecured freezer. The vials were labeled "variola" and had been stored in the 1950s in a lab that had gone unused since the 1970s. The FDA, which had taken custody of the lab from the NIH way back in 1972, had lost track of the stocks with smallpox and failed to destroy the variola or submitted to the CDC as part of that 1980 eradication campaign. It had just sat forgotten in the freezer.
Also in 2014, a CDC worker shipped live strains of the bacteria that causes typhoid fever to another lab in a reused box that wasn't marked for hazardous material. The box was broken open in the corner, and it was sent using regular UPS delivery. Some specimens broke during shipping, although the typhus vial remained intact and sealed.
—The End of the World with Josh Clark
The rocks
A few million of the asteroids in our solar system are big enough that if one of them hits us, you’ll wish it hadn’t. You won’t have to wish it for very long.
Most of those asteroids can’t hit the Earth even if they try. But as many as 2,300 asteroids big enough to end most or all life on Earth cross our orbit regularly and repeatedly. Several have already hit Earth. Nearly all of them will eventually hit Earth. It's just math plus time. The last one of that size, 65 million years ago, wiped out 75 percent of all life on the planet.
This is not a good place to stand.
Newly discovered asteroid 2024 YR4, which triggered the first automatic global alert by (slightly) exceeding a 1% chance of impact in 2032 (recently increased to 2%) is not of that size. Large enough to end a city, but not a threat to planetary life much beyond the suburbs.
At any rate, this is one we've spotted. As I've said before, most incoming asteroids go undetected until they slam into New Jersey at 30,000 mph.
The rest
A high-energy physics experiment could (hypothetically) end the planet and possibly the universe. Probably not. More likely ends include a gamma ray burst, a runaway greenhouse effect, the Yellowstone supervolcano, or AI misalignment. Some of those are extremely unlikely. Some are eventual near certainties.
The end of the world is my Roman Empire.
So it is perhaps unsurprising that I've just finished my fourth listen to a 10-episode podcast called The End of the World with Josh Clark. It's more than just a topical obsession for me. For reasons Clark makes clear, it's a topic we should all be talking about a lot more.
Some of the ways the world may end are entirely out of our control. But some of the scenarios, including some of the most likely, are very much in our hands.
The stakes could not be higher. And it's down to us, the most important people who have ever lived:
It's an extremely odd thing to say, but together, you, me, and everyone we know appear to be the most vitally important humans who have ever lived. And as much as is riding on us, we have a lot going against us.
We are our own worst enemies when it comes to existential risks. We come preloaded with a lot of biases that keep us from thinking rationally. We prefer not to think about unpleasant things like the sudden extinction of our species.
Our brains aren't wired to think ahead to the degree that existential risks require us to. And really, very little of our 100,000 years or so of accumulated human experience has prepared us to take on the challenge that we are coming to face — and a lot of the experience that we do have can actually steer us wrong. It's almost like we were dropped into a point in history we hadn't yet become equipped to deal with.
We are in grave danger of wiping ourselves out. There doesn't appear to be anyone coming to guide us through the treacherous times ahead. Whether we're alone in the universe or not, we appear to be on our own in facing our existential risks, all of our shortcomings and flaws.
Josh thinks we can do it.
If we can manage to join that creature habit to the intelligence we've evolved that really does make us different from other animals, then we have a chance of making it through the existential risks that lie waiting ahead. If we can do that, we will deliver the entire human race to a safe place where it can thrive and flourish for billions of years. It's in our ability to do this. We can do this. Some of us are already trying, and we've already shown that we can face down existential risks. We've done it before.
—The End of the World with Josh Clark
This casts a different light on the memes rooting for a giant asteroid to end our immediate difficulties. A hundred million unborn generations might see it differently, a permanent solution to a temporary problem and an insanely selfish thing to root for. It may come, but wishing for it is bad form.
Instead, we should be developing the collective will to regulate the development of AI, to bring the climate to heel, to (actually) secure or destroy the species-ending pathogens in our cupboards, and to mount a much better collective response to the next pandemic. And so on.
But we just keep at our daily tasks because we have no grasp of the danger we're in, or the real stakes of failure. We live in denial of the tiny bubble of illusory stability in which we currently find ourselves, between asteroids, between pandemics, between extinctions. There is an argument to be made that our primary job — no, our only job — is to get our species through this existential bottleneck by meeting the threats that are within our power with intelligence and will. Our only job. Talking more about the end of the world is a start.
So listen to this 10-episode podcast, then chat about it. Then get busy saving humanity, which may be more worth saving down the road than we are at the moment.
