Whats really going to cause the end of the world

The entire world's credit rating will drop to zero upon the revelation that the machines now control our entire economy and, in response, everyone will launch their nuclear missiles to the obvious threat posed by the new skynet AI.

 

Have you ever read the short story "The Machine Stops". I read it in the 1960s for an English exam.
Today it seems far less far-fetched than it did 55 years ago.

 

Anti-biotic resistant germs taking over the planet are impossible. In recent years biologists have discovered countless varieties of antibiotics and figured out a lot more about how they work in general. What they are slowly converging on is that every single cell organism uses pattern matching, allowing even extremely distantly related bacteria to create "translators" and talk to each other. They are uncovering the dance and song of mother nature which is based on quorum sensing. Merely by gathering together in greater numbers, their behavior changes in a consistent way that reflects the physics and energy demands of their collective existence.

 

Existentialist horror. People will become so bored and love so passe. They'll kill each other left and right. Objectification will literally turn people into zombies without need of some super virus. They'll just be walking dead anyway, berzerk and will eat people alive.

 

Spontaneous zombies caused by a mental virus unknown to modern science. Sounds plausible to me as an explanation for why the world already is what it is.

 

The Borg.

 

I've been on psychiatric wards a good few times.

I used to walk up and down telling everyone 'It's the end of the Ward...'

 

Socialism

 

I have harnessed the stars, now unleashed upon the earth. Irm hath, becoming death the destroyer of worlds!

 

did anyone say trump yet?

we were supposed to be swimming in broken pipeline oil and/or living underground due to nuclear winter as soon as he was elected

 

Don't let the fact that North Korea stopped their nuclear testing while Trump is in power.