After I posted my blog yesterday, I thought I'd watch that classic 1964 anti-nuclear war black comedy,  Dr. Strangelove , which got 98/94 ratings from  Rotten Tomatoes .  Conveniently, I had recorded it some time ago off TCM.  Of course I had seen it a long time ago, but forgot all the details.  A timetable of what was happening during that period: There was a half-hearted  Bay of Pigs invasion  in April of 1961.  Incredibly, there is a true story of how five of us as Stanford juniors actually had planned to swing through the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for the spring break, then join this attack.  Good thing we chickened out. The  Berlin Crisis  came in August of 1961 when the wall was built between East and West Berlin. I graduated and in June of 1962 moved to the Hutchinson Sugar Company in Naalehu on the Big Island of Hawaii, a location where I could not receive radio or television. Came the  Cuban Missile Crisis  from 1...

Yesterday I featured Part 1 of this posting.  I left at #9, Supervolcanoes.  Here are the remaining eight ways Humanity could go extinct.  I will today particularly focus on what I've all my adult life feared most, nuclear war. #8  Solar Storms The most intense storm peaked in the September 1-2 period of 1859, and is known as the  Carrington Event .  Carrington was a British astronomer. The aurora borealis over the Rocky Mountains was so bright, that gold miners thought it was morning. Even Hawaii saw this phenomenon . Telegraphs gave operators shocks.  However, there is a much-publicized conversation between two operators in Boston and Portland ( Maine ) who were able to communicate without using batteries to power the line. If this were to happen today, the USA alone stands to lose $3.35 trillion to our general economy. Researchers examining carbon-14 tree rings and beryllium-10 in ice cores found two other major solar storms:  in the years 774-...

Extinction means the end.   The  ultimate fate of our universe  depends on your scientific beliefs. If the universe goes through a repeated series of Big Bangs and Crunches by expanding and contracting, there might be no end. However, the prevailing sense today is that the universe will continue to expand and reach the Big Chill where everything approaches absolute zero, oh, maybe  100 trillion years from now . However, there are too many unknowns, like the effect of dark energy/matter, etc., to know for sure. A more sensible, but equally futile, analysis has to do with the 10 most likely ways for humanity to disappear.  Every few years, some one or organization makes such a prediction.  Here is new effort, a book published on 17July2025,  The Anti-Catastrophe League , by  Tom Ough .  #10 - Asteroids One of the biggest was a 9 mile wide monster that led to the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago. On 30June1908, mere 200 footer (...