End of the WORLD

Once upon a time, I used to immerse myself in science fiction and envision both wondrous and horrifying futures. It's only natural, isn't it? When you clandestinely read H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds under the covers with a flashlight while your parents believed you were fast asleep. That novel, of course, presented a fantastical vision of the future, with Martians descending upon London to annihilate humanity. Now, some sixty years later, it appears that I am, in a sense, living in that very future, albeit without any Martians. Nevertheless, in case you haven't noticed, our current moment could easily be likened to a scene straight out of a science fiction novel, one that, even at my age, I would prefer not to read in the darkness of night.

I mean, I was barely a year old when Hiroshima was decimated by a single atomic bomb. In an instant, the world witnessed the splintering of time and the birth of a mushroom cloud, as a power that was once reserved for gods (and perhaps science fiction writers) became a chilling reality in our all-too-human world. From that moment onward, it became conceivable that we, not the Martians or the gods, held the power to bring about our own demise. We became the architects of our own apocalypse. And credit must be given where it's due. While we may not have accomplished it just yet, we have certainly made significant progress in paving the way for such a cataclysmic end to human history.Perspective is key here. Despite the devastating effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 76 years ago, the world's nuclear powers increased their spending on nuclear weapons by $1.4 billion in 2020 alone. This increase is just a small fraction of the ongoing investment in nuclear arsenals by the nine countries that possess them. Shockingly, the United States accounted for over half of the total investment in world-ending weaponry in 2020, with $37.4 billion spent on such weapons. Even more concerning, Northrop Grumman received $13.3 billion to develop a new intercontinental ballistic missile, a weapon that our already troubled world certainly does not need. In total, the nine nuclear powers spent an estimated $137,000 per minute in 2020 to "improve" their arsenals, which have the potential to end history as we know it.

We've had a good run of it. In the 500,000 years Homo sapiens has roamed the land we've built cities, created complex languages, and sent robotic scouts to other planets. It's difficult to imagine it all coming to an end. Yet 99 percent of all species that ever lived have gone extinct, including every one of our hominid ancestors.

In 1983, British cosmologist Brandon Carter framed the "Doomsday argument," a statistical way to judge when we might join them. If humans were to survive a long time and spread through the galaxy, then the total number of people who will ever live might number in the trillions. By pure odds, it's unlikely that we would be among the very first hundredth of a percent of all those people.

Or turn the argument around: How likely is it that this generation will be the one unlucky one? Something like one fifth of all the people who have ever lived are alive today. The odds of being one of the people to witness doomsday are highest when there is the largest number of witnesses around — so now is not such an improbable time.

So far all of this may not make any sense oww wait it makes complete sense right 👍... So far world will end today or tomorrow. There's no stopping that...