THE END OF PLANET EARTH AND HUMANITY: Part 1 Supervolcanoes

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.

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  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.

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  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.

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   #10 - Asteroids
• One of the biggest was a 9 mile wide monster that led to the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

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  On 30June1908, mere 200 footer (about the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza) exploded east of Siberia...with a force of 185 Hiroshima A-bombs.

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  A 3200-foot asteroid is estimated to strike Earth every 700,000 years.
• A 3-mile wide asteroid is only expected every 30 million years.

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  In 2022, NASA crashed a spacecraft to a target asteroid Dimorphos, and sufficiently deflected the path to provide confidence that with time and money we should be able to prevent a catastrophic asteroid future.

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  #9 - Supervolcanoes
• Every 100,000 years our planet suffers from a supervolcano eruption,
• How large is this eruption?  1000 times more explosive than the infamous Vesuvius in 79AD, Krakatoa in 1883 and Mount St Helens in 1980.

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  The last supereruption was that of Indonesia's Mount Toba, 74,000 years ago.

Yesterday, Richard Brill reported on on this eruption.  Here is his summary:

• Event known as the Toba catastrophe.

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  Ash layers have been found at archeological sites thousands of miles away.
• The average temperature of Earth dropped by 3-5 degrees C for several years, causing food shortages and killing off much of the human population.  
• What might have been left was a pocket in Africa, from where early human migration expanded into Europe and rest of the world.
• This eruption might have pushed humanity to the brink of extinction.

There are different reasons about how humanity could expire.  Here is one list from ScienceNews, and the most relevant movie.

• #10  Alien invasion (The War of the Worlds, 1953, RT 89/71, 2005, Rotten Tomatoes 76/42).
• #  9  Asteroid impact (Armageddon, 1998, RT 43/73)
• #  8  Bees all die (Bee Movie, 2007, RT 49/53)
• #  7  Artificial intelligence takeover (The Terminator, 1984, RT 100/89 or The Forbin Project, 1969, RT 90/76)
• #  6  Quantum computing (Sneakers, 1992, RT 80/80)
• #  5  Complexity's instability (The Butterfly Effect, 2004, RT 34/81)
• #  4  Social media (Don't Look Up, 2021, RT 55/78)
• #  3  Pandemic  (I am Legend, 2007, RT 68/68)
• #  2  Nuclear war (Dr. Strangelove, 1964, RT 98/94)
• #  1  Climate change  (Princess Monoke, 1997, RT 93/94)

If nothing else, opens up a few films I will need to add to my watch list.  I'll save #'s 8 through #1 from Ough's (that's him to the left) list for future postings.  Just to stir your imagination, however, his #1 is Artificial Intelligence.  He has also written an article on  How to Save Humanity from Extinction, so in some ways, I have given away the ending, so might not return.

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