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Countdown: End of the World? Top Doomsday Fears

Charles Q. Choi
LiveScience Contributor


Credit: © Dgrilla | Dreamstime.com

Doomsday fears

With more and more technologies able to wreak mass destruction, a greater knowledge of what cosmic threats our planet faces, and more forms of media capable of trumpeting Armageddon, it seems as if there is more hype than ever about one supposedly impending apocalypse or another in 2012, despite all the failed doomsday predictions over the years.

Here are 10 apocalyptic scenarios that have raised fears about the end of civilization, in alphabetical order.

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Credit: P. Marenfeld, NOAO.

Black Holes

There is widespread paranoia that the world's largest particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, will generate planet-gobbling black holes.  Still, even if it can generate black holes, and even if these don't evaporate immediately as theory says they would, and even if these don't immediately go zipping away from Earth given the speed they would be traveling, they would be so tiny that it would take one of them about 100 hours to gobble up one proton.  At that rate, the life sucker would take more than the age of the universe to consume even a milligram of matter.

There are much larger "rogue black holes," hundreds of which are suspected to roam near invisibly around the galaxy.  Still, the closest rogue black hole should reside thousands of light-years away — where one light-year is the distance light travels in a year — about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).

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Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler.

Gamma-Ray Burst

Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions known in the universe, capable of releasing as much energy as our sun would during its entire 10 billion-year lifetime in anywhere from milliseconds to a minute or more.  A fiery pinwheel in space named WR 104 about 8,000 light-years away could fire one in our direction, potentially causing mass extinctions on Earth.

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katulog na.  kun magdamgo kag alien, panahon na ug combatrin.  mora bitaw ug bitok ang alien...  

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Credit: Nevada Division of Environmental Protection

Nuclear War

Nuclear bombs ushered in decades of fear of Armageddon, and while leaders of countries with nuclear weapons are cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals, nuclear terrorism still remains an urgent concern, and even a relatively limited nuclear conflict could alter climate and affect the entire globe.

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Credit: NASA/SDO/GSFC

The Sun

The sun is vital to our lives, but it could cause extreme damage to the high technology that humanity is more dependent on than ever.  Solar eruptions in the modern era have disrupted radio communications and power grids, but past events may have been even more powerful, with a storm in 1859 shorting out telegraph wires, causing fires in North America and Europe, and triggering extraordinary auroras — the light shows visible near Earth's poles — bright enough to read by.

A storm that powerful nowadays would likely have devastating impacts, since our electrical and communications infrastructures are so much more developed, with a recent report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences finding that one could cause up to $2 trillion in initial damages by paralyzing communications on Earth and fueling chaos around the world.

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Credit: David P Hughes

Zombies

There are brain-controlling parasites effectively capable of turning ants into zombies, but no known germs can turn people into the walking dead.  Still, researchers do use the zombie scenario to study how epidemics spread.

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Hmm, ang alien nga akong gikahadlokan, morag nawog kigwa...

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Oh, no! Dason hang asasin may-ong gid sang di tridir?

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