by Regulus » October 23rd, 2013, 12:35 am
^ We're going to have to face a lot of terrible things before the end of our generation, but the end of the world probably won't be one of them. Earth has been here for billions of years; I doubt it's going anywhere anytime soon.
I know what it would take to obliterate a 5.97x10^24 kg mass of rock floating through space, and it's something that's arguably more powerful than even God. It would take over 15 thousand of the most powerful nuclear bombs ever created, just to destroy all the land masses on Earth.
Thinking about it another way, it takes buttloads of fuel just to land a little Apollo module on the moon, so imagine what we would need to send all of Earth crashing into our nearest neighbor. It's so much energy, it's unfathomable.
The end of humanity could be a slightly more accurate term, although, even then, it would take a lot to kill off every human on the planet. Possible, but still unlikely to happen within the foreseeable future.
The economy will probably collapse within the next 50 years, and things will probably get crazy. We'll probably see more of the same: people being greedy, people starting wars, and people doing stupid things, only to hurt themselves in the end.
But that's hardly the end of the world. That's just part of the circle of life.