Apocalypse How

This is a Discovery Channel production that spends a couple of hours exploring various ways that the human race could (or in some cases eventually will) wipe the human race off the face of the planet.  If you have an Amazon Prime account, you can watch here rental free, or add it to a Blu Ray Watchlist.

Scenario 1:  Yellowstone.  It is a fact (an one I grew up with, given my father's position of the Director of Florida's state forest system) that the park is actually the largest volcano in the world.  It is what is known as a "super volcano," and one that is so large that it actually fits into the category "Mega Volcano."  It roughly erupts every 600,000 years....and it was 640,000 years since the last eruption!  One website puts it deftly "We are 40,000 years over due for extinction!"  Go check out the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.

Scenario 2:  Nuclear Weapon Check out the NTI Nuclear Threat Initiative.

Scenario 3:  Microscopic virus.  This includes naturally occurring Pandemics and the very real possibility of Bioterrorism, you can check out the CDC's list of bioterror agents that have already been used in terror acts.

Scenario 4:  Aliens.  Go check the website of the SETI Institute.

Scenario 5:  Asteroid.  2029 is the year that an asteroid named Apophis could cross the earth's orbit, it would cause a great deal a damage if it hit the earth, but there are even bigger near earth objects and just a couple days ago an asteroid 1/2 mile wide was discovered, and a 1/2 mile wide asteroid could very potentially wipe out life!  You can read about it here.  Go check out the B612 Foundation, these are the people trying to come up with asteroid solutions.

Scenario 6:  Climate Change AKA Global Warming.  You can check out some fact over at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Scenario 7:  Artificial Intelligence.  Here is a website from Wired that is fun to read on the subject, this one from Mashable not so much.  For something scary on Nanotechnology click here.

Scenario 8:  The Large Hedran Collider, CERN.  Well this documentary was produced before CERN came online.  Now that it has, we see this isn't what the collider produces, and we now know a whole more about the so called "God particle."

Scenario 9:  An actual Black Hole.  It is now known that black holes can and do roam!  

Scenario 10:  Snow Ball Earth, or a large Ice Age.

Scenario 11:    Solar Flares.  This is the one that scares me the most.  Check This Article Out.  We should be stockpiling transformers, because it actually takes power to make them.  If our grid is down completely, we would be hard pressed to get it back up!  This is where the Mayan connection comes in.  The Maya actually have several long count calendars, and one the stretches millions of years into the future says that the world will be burned to dust, and, in fact, that is exactly what will happen when the sun turns into a Red Giant.

And speaking of Apocalypses.  Columbus' accidentally discovery of the New World unleashed a barrage of diseases on the native population, chief among being smallpox, which is some location, especially in the Northwest, smallpox blankets were deliberately handed out to native!  Below is a illustration from Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, showing the terrible effects on the population there.  It is actually thought that smallpox and not the Spanish is what defeated the mighty Aztec empire.