I have been thinking a lot lately about the end of the world—as we know it. Musing about how and when it might happen. About what it might be like to be alive when some apocalyptic event destroys everything. Sometimes even hoping for it. Yes, actually looking forward to it. I suppose that I am indulging my sociopathic fantasies. Because I think that it’s high time for the world to get a complete reboot.

Of course, this would be nothing new. Our world–our planet Earth–has “ended,” as creatures at various times knew it, several times before. Mass extinction events. And each time, Earth has pulled its shit back together and started over to rebuild a new version of itself. Out with the old, and in with the new! New opportunities for interesting new things to happen. Earth is not a “fragile” planet, as we often hear it is from well-meaning but ill-informed environmentalists. Rather, Earth is actually pretty damn tough and resilient! It can take a lot of hard punches straight into the face, but it won’t be knocked out!

The most famous end-of-the-world mass extinction event happened about 66 million years ago, when a six-mile-wide asteroid crashed into our planet and wiped out the dinosaurs, which had dominated the planet for more than 150 million years. Within probably hundreds of years after the asteroid impact, which totally devastated ecosystems all around the world, all dinosaurs were extinct—except for birds. Modern-day paleontologists and evolutionary biologists consider birds to be living dinosaurs.

Wow! I can’t help but wonder what that cataclysmic event was really like. It’s so fascinating to ponder! What was it like to witness—to personally experience—this “end of the world”? I have recently come across the best description I have ever read about the dinosaur-killing asteroid impact and what this worst-ever event was like. The description is dramatic, with a little author-admitted artistic license, but it is still scientifically accurate. I am providing a lengthy excerpt from it below, because I believe that it is well worth reading and considering. Plus, the author is a great writer, and he makes the apocalypse sound really cool!

Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

This excerpt comes from The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, published in 2018 by HarperCollins. The book is written in a very personal and engaging style by Steve Brusatte, an American paleontologist who teaches at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He is originally from a Chicago suburb not far from where I live.

In his description, Brusatte focuses on what it was like on the day of the Yucatan Peninsula asteroid impact for dinosaurs who were living in the Hell Creek area of Montana, where he has done much of his fossil findings:

It was the worst day in the history of our planet. A few hours of unimaginable violence that undid more than 150 million years of evolution and set life on a new course.

T. rex was there to witness it.

When a pack of Rexes woke up that morning 66 million years ago on what would go down as the final day of the Cretaceous Period, all seemed normal in their Hell Creek kingdom, the same as it had for generations, for millions of years.

Forests of conifers and ginkgos stretch to the horizon, interspersed with the bright flowers of palms and magnolias. The distant churn of a river, rushing eastward to empty into the great seaway that lapped against western North America, was drowned out by the low bellow of a herd of Triceratops several thousand strong.

As the pack of T. rex readied themselves for the hunt, sunlight began to trickle through the forest canopy. It highlighted the outlines of various small critters darting through the sky, some flapping their feathered wings and others gliding on currents of hot air rising from the humidity of the young day. Their chirps and tweets were beautiful, a dawn symphony that could be heard by all the other creatures of the forest and floodplains: armored ankylosaurs and dome-headed pachycephalosaurs hiding in the trees, legions of duckbills just beginning their breakfast of flowers and leaves, raptors chasing mouse-size mammals and lizards through the brush.

Then things started to get weird, truly outside all norms of Earth history.

For the last several weeks, the more perceptive of the Rexes may have noticed a glowing orb in the sky, far off in the distance—a hazy ball with a fiery rim, like a duller and smaller version of the sun. The orb seemed to be getting larger, but then it would disappear from view for large portions of the day. The Rexes wouldn’t have known what to make of it; it was far beyond their brainpower to contemplate the motions of the heavens.

But this morning, as the pack broke through the trees and emerged onto the riverbank, all of them could see that something was different. The orb was black, and it was gigantic, its shine illuminating much of the sky to the southeast in a cloudy psychedelic mist.

Then, a flash. No noise, only a split-second flare of yellow that lit up the whole sky, disorienting the Rexes for a moment. As they blinked their eyes back to focus, they noticed that the orb was now gone, the sky a dull blue. The alpha male turned to check on the rest of his pack….

And then they were blindsided. Another flash, but this one far more vengeful. The rays lit the morning air in a fireworks display and burned into their retinas. One of the juvenile males fell over, cracking his ribs. The rest of them stood frozen, blinking manically, trying to rid themselves of the sparks and speckles that flooded their vision. Still no sound to go with the visual fury. In fact, no noise at all. By now, the birds and flying raptors had stopped chirping, and silence hung over Hell Creek.

The calm lasted for only a few seconds. Next, the ground beneath their feet started to rumble, then to shake, and then to flow. Like waves. Pulses of energy were shooting through the rocks and soil, the ground rising and falling, as if a giant snake were slithering underneath. Everything not rooted into the dirt was thrown upward; then it crashed down, and then up and down again, the Earth’s surface having turned into a trampoline. Small dinosaurs and the little mammals and lizards catapulted upward, then splattered onto trees and rocks when they landed. The victims danced across the sky like shooting stars.

Even the largest, heaviest, forty-foot-long Rexes in the pack were launched several feet off the ground. For a few minutes, they bounced around helplessly, flailing about as they rode the trampoline. Moments earlier they had been the undisputed despots of the entire continent; now they were little more than seven-ton pinballs, their limp bodies careening and colliding through the air. The forces were more than enough to crush skulls, snap necks, and break legs. When the shaking finally stopped and the ground was no longer elastic, most of the Rexes were littered along the riverbank, casualties on a battlefield.

Very few of the Rexes—or the other dinosaurs of Hell Creek—were able to walk away from the bloodbath. But some did. As the lucky survivors staggered out, sidestepping the corpses of their compatriots, the sky began to change color above them. Blue turned to orange, then to pale red. The red got sharper and darker. Brighter, brighter, brighter. As if the headlights of a giant oncoming car were coming closer and closer. Soon everything was bathed in an incandescent glory.

Then the rains came. But what fell from the sky was not water. It was beads of glass and chunks of rock, each one scalding hot. The pea-size morsels pelted the surviving dinosaurs, gouging deep burns into their flesh. Many of them were gunned down, and their shredded corpses joined the earthquake victims on the battlefield. Meanwhile, as the bullets of glassy rock whizzed down from above, they were transferring heat to the air. The atmosphere grew hotter, until the surface of the Earth became an oven. Forests spontaneously ignited and wildfires swept across the land. The surviving animals were now roasting, their skin and bones cooking at temperatures that instantaneously produce third degree burns.

It was no more than fifteen minutes since the T. rex pack was startled by that first jolt of light, but by now they were all dead, as were most of the dinosaurs they had lived with. The once-lush woodlands and river valleys were aflame. Still, animals had survived—some of the mammals and lizards were underground, some of the crocodiles and turtles were underwater, and some of the birds had been able to fly to safer refuges.

Over the next hour or so, the reign of bullets ceased, and the air cooled. A breath of calm once again settled over Hell Creek. It seemed that the danger was over, and many of the survivors came out of their hiding places to survey the scene. Carnage everywhere, and although the sky was no longer radioactive red, it was getting blacker as it choked up with soot from the forest fires, which were still raging. As a couple of raptors sniffed the charred bodies of the T. rex pack, they must have thought that they had survived the apocalypse.

But they were wrong. Some two and a half hours after the first light flash, the clouds began to howl. The soot in the atmosphere began to swirl into tornadoes. And then—woosh—the wind charged across the plains and through the river valleys, blowing at a hurricane force, hard enough to make many of the rivers and lakes burst their banks. Along with the wind was a deafening noise, louder than anything these dinosaurs had ever heard. Then another. Sound travels much slower than light, and these were the sonic booms that occurred at the same time as the two light flashes, caused by the distant horror that had started the chain reaction of brimstone hours earlier. The raptors shrieked in pain as their ears ruptured, and many of the smaller critters hurried back into the safety of their burrows.

While all this was happening in western North America, other parts of the world were going through their own upheavals. The earthquakes, glassy-rock rain, and hurricane winds were less severe in South America, where carcharodontosaurs and giant sauropods roamed. The same was true of the European islands that the weird Romanian dwarf dinosaurs called home. Still, these dinosaurs also had to deal with quaking ground, wildfires, and intense heat, and many of them died during those same chaotic two hours that wiped out most of the Hell Creek community. Other places, though, had it much worse. Much of the mid-Atlantic coast was sliced apart by tsunamis twice as tall as the Empire State Building, which flushed the carcasses of plesiosaurs and other sea-dwelling giant reptiles far inland. Volcanoes started to spew out rivers of lava in India. And a zone of Central America and southern North America—everything within a radius of about six hundred miles (one thousand kilometers) of the Yucatan Peninsula of modern-day Mexico—was annihilated. Vaporized.

As the morning gave way to afternoon and then evening, the winds died down. The atmosphere continued to cool, and although there were a few aftershocks, the ground was stable and solid. The wildfires seared away in the background. When night finally came and this most horrible of days finally was over, many—maybe even most—of the dinosaurs were dead, all over the world.

Some did stagger on, however, into the next day, the next week, the next month, the next year, and the next decades. It was not an easy time. For several years after that terrible day, the Earth turned cold and dark because soot and rock dust lingered in the atmosphere and blocked out the sun. The darkness brought cold—a nuclear winter that only the hardiest of animals could survive. The darkness also made it very difficult for plants to subsist, as they need sunlight to power photosynthesis to make their food. As plants died, food chains collapsed like a house of cards, killing off many of the animals that had been able to endure the cold. Something similar happened in the oceans, where the death of photosynthesizing plankton took out the larger plankton and fish that fed on them and in turn the giant reptiles at the top of the food pyramid.

The sun did eventually break through the darkness, as the soot and other gunk was leached out of the atmosphere by rainwater. These rains, however, were highly acidic and would have scalded much of the Earth’s surface. And the rain was not able to remove some 10 trillion tons of carbon dioxide that had been blown up into the sky with the soot. CO2 is a nasty greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere, and soon nuclear winter gave way to global warming. All of these things conspired in a war of attrition to knock off whatever dinosaurs were not felled by the initial cocktail of earthquakes, brimstone, and fires.

A few hundred years after that dreadful day—a few thousand years at the absolute most—western North America was a scarred, post-apocalyptic landscape. What was once a diverse ecosystem of sweeping forests, alive with the hoofbeats of Triceratops and ruled by T. rex, was now quiet and mostly empty. Here and there, the odd lizards scurried through the bushes, some crocodiles and turtles paddled in the rivers, and rat-size mammals periodically peeked out of their burrows. A few birds were still around, picking at seeds still buried in the soil, but all the other dinosaurs were gone.

Hell Creek had turned to Hell. So had much of the rest of the world. It was the end of the Age of Dinosaurs.

Last Night on Earth

Brusatte’s wonderful colorful text provides an excellent feel for what those unfortunate doomed dinosaurs must have experienced. But what would human beings feel in such a hellish scenario? I have also recently come across a great movie on YouTube that tries to depict this—pretty successfully I think.

It is a 2024 movie called Last Night on Earth, from the impressive creativity of the Argentina-born director and screenwriter Marcos Efron. The basic plotline is: Faced with impending doom from a gigantic asteroid said to be four times larger than the one that killed off the dinosaurs, a young couple flees to the wilderness of Tennessee to spend their last days together in peace and love as they await the inevitable end of the world. However, another couple—a crazy guy who thinks he is god and his equally nutty girlfriend—disrupt the peaceful plans of the nice couple. There is also a group of religious zealots who have their own way of counting down the hours.

The movie does a superb job of suggesting how different people might react differently to a sudden, unexpected, end-of-the-world event. It also does a pretty good job of depicting what a giant asteroid impact might look like—similar to Brusatte’s description of what the dinosaurs witnessed.

I enjoyed this thought-provoking movie very much, and I strongly urge you to watch it. It’s a unique, original, intelligent, well-produced, well-acted, and very entertaining sci-fi thriller, if nothing else. It will definitely hold your interest throughout its roughly one-and-a-half-hour length.

Global nuclear war

Perhaps humans will one day experience the extinction-level event of the impact of a humongous asteroid or comet. It is certainly possible. It happened before, it can happen again. However, it is probably more likely that the end-of-the-world event that human societies will eventually experience will be of their own making—in the form of a global nuclear war.

When I scan the online news headlines every morning, I honestly sometimes wish for a global nuclear war, just to get all the bullshit over with already—once and for all! Things seem so hopelessly goddamned fucked up everywhere, that I am convinced it is time for a complete planetary reboot, as I noted earlier.

Wars. Injustice. Corruption. Lies. Greed. Misery. Evil forces rewarded. Good forces punished. And this shit is common to all countries, regardless of whether they label themselves as capitalism, socialism, communism, democracy, autocracy, theocracy, whatever. I am 100-percent sick and tired of the endless bullshit coming from my native country, the United States, but I’m also very weary of the similar BS coming from Europe, Russia, China, Iran, India, the Arab states, Israel, Australia…from pretty much every government everywhere. All different customized versions of the same BS that the U.S. sells.

Power corrupts. And every government is corrupted. The U.S. may be the biggest and most frequent transgressor, but all big governments around the world profit from war and chaos from time to time. And the powerful forces in all countries—whether they are called corporate CEOs, oligarchs, or mass media moguls—profit from screwing the regular people. And the regular people enable it all to happen, because they allow themselves to be bribed and bought off with various little trinkets. Thus, people ultimately demean and enslave themselves. Yes, they do.

Something very basic has always been upside down, backwards, and terribly wrong with all human societies—causing the unhappiness, misery, and conflict that has always plagued civilizations for thousands of years. The self-caused troubles of the human species have always happened, and they will never end. They will never end as long as lessons are never learned.

I have existed on this planet for 65 years, witnessing chronic pathologic human stupidities, immoralities, irrationality, and shortsightedness—my own included. But these bad things have been going on for thousands of years, basically the same shit over and over and over. Countries and leaders and wars keep getting different names. But the bad shit remains basically the same year after year, century after century, millennium after millennium. Despite all the horrendous mistakes that human societies make—and despite the unmatched intelligence of the human species—we never seem to learn our lessons. We just keep repeating the same mistakes—the same bad behaviors. War and injustice are always the core characteristic elements of every society.

Is there any way this might change? I think there might be a chance. Maybe we need a good solid nuclear war for those lessons to finally sink in. A good big ol’ global WWIII nuclear war might finally be The Real War to End All Wars! But we’ll never know until we try.

What would it be like to experience a nuclear war? There have been plenty of movies about this. We all know about the societal collapse and the zombie-like hordes. And about the nuclear winter—the same type of nuclear winter that was experienced by the doomed dinosaurs. Generally speaking, the end result of a massive nuclear war might be somewhat similar to a big asteroid impact.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of physics Max Tegmark wrote an article for TIME in 2023 in which he described the likely results of a nuclear war:

Unfortunately, peer-reviewed research suggests that explosions, the electromagnetic pulse, and the radioactivity aren’t the worst part: a nuclear winter is caused by the black carbon smoke from the nuclear firestorms. The Hiroshima atomic bomb caused such a firestorm, but today’s hydrogen bombs are much more powerful. A large city like Moscow, with almost 50 times more people than Hiroshima, can create much more smoke, and a firestorm that sends plumes of black smoke up into the stratosphere, far above any rain clouds that would otherwise wash out the smoke. This black smoke gets heated by sunlight, lofting it like a hot air balloon for up to a decade. High-altitude jet streams are so fast that it takes only a few days for the smoke to spread across much of the northern hemisphere.

This makes Earth freezing cold even during the summer, with farmland in Kansas cooling by about 20 degrees centigrade (about 40 degrees Fahrenheit), and other regions cooling almost twice as much. A recent scientific paper estimates that over 5 billion people could starve to death, including around 99% of those in the US, Europe, Russia, and China—because most black carbon smoke stays in the Northern hemisphere where it’s produced, and because temperature drops harm agriculture more at high latitudes.

It’s important to note that huge uncertainties remain, so the actual humanitarian impact could be either better or worse—a reason to proceed with caution.

“A reason to proceed with caution.” Ha! Now how’s that for an academic understatement?

Considering all the terrible results of any nuclear war, I would feel very bad about the animal deaths and extinctions. And I wish there was some way to make only the human species go extinct, while leaving animals alive so that they could continue along their natural evolutionary paths.

However, the big fat truth is that humans—unlike the non-bird dinosaurs 66 million years ago and any vulnerable wildlife species today—will NEVER go extinct, regardless of whatever self-inflicted or natural disasters happens. People are just too damn ingenious and inventive. Humans are the most evil species—actually the only truly evil species—but also the most intelligent species. Homo sapiens will always find a way to survive—no matter what. You can count on that.

Truth about the real end of the world

“End of the world” is a phrase that is carelessly and thoughtlessly flung around by everyone these days, whether they are selling a climate change apocalypse or a biblical apocalypse. But another big fat truth is that the world—the planet Earth—is not going to end for a very very very VERY long time! In fact, Earth is going to be around for more than 7 billion more years— no matter what. And some forms of life will surely be clinging to the planetary surface for most or all of that time—no matter what.

Here is the real end of our planet (and of our planet’s life) that will eventually happen: In 7.6 billion years, our little yellow sun will expand into a red giant star and totally engulf Earth. Frictional forces will then drag Earth inward, toward the core of the sun, where it will evaporate and disperse into hot gas at temperatures of millions of degrees.

Yes, that will be the very dramatic—but very distant in time—actual end of our world. Because there is no recovering from evaporation!

R.E.M. got it right

So, that’s what science says. But what does music say? My favorite musical imagining of the end of the world comes from R.E.M. in 1987. And you know, it’s quite fascinating! Their song from that year “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” even prophetically mentions Trump! (sort of, anyway)

Video Link

That’s great, it starts with an earthquake
Birds and snakes, and aeroplanes
And Lenny Bruce is not afraid

Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn
World serves its own needs
Don’t mis-serve your own needs
Speed it up a notch, speed, grunt, no strength
The ladder starts to clatter
With a fear of height, down height
Wire in a fire, represent the seven games
And a government for hire and a combat site
Left her, wasn’t coming in a hurry
With the furies breathing down your neck

Team by team, reporters baffled, trumped, tethered, cropped
Look at that low plane, fine then
Uh oh, overflow, population, common group
But it’ll do, save yourself, serve yourself
World serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed
Tell me with the Rapture and the reverend in the right, right
You vitriolic, patriotic, slam fight, bright light
Feeling pretty psyched

It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine

Six o’clock, TV hour, don’t get caught in foreign tower
Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself churn
Lock him in uniform, book burning, bloodletting
Every motive escalate, automotive incinerate
Light a candle, light a votive, step down, step down
Watch your heel crush, crush, uh oh
This means no fear, cavalier, renegade and steering clear
A tournament, a tournament, a tournament of lies
Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and I decline

It’s the end of the world as we know it (it’s time I had some time alone)
It’s the end of the world as we know it (it’s time I had some time alone)
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine (it’s time I had some time alone)
I feel fine (I feel fine)

The other night I drifted, nice continental drift divide
Mountains sit in a line, Leonard Bernstein
Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs
Birthday party, cheesecake, jellybeans, boom
You symbiotic, patriotic, slam but neck, right, right

It’s the end of the world as we know it (it’s time I had some time alone)
It’s the end of the world as we know it (it’s time I had some time alone)
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine (it’s time I had some time alone)

Well now, those old drugged-out rock’n’roll lyrics make at least as much sense as anything we hear from the delusional Trump Administration these days, don’t they?

What happens after?

Imagining what it would be like to experience a massive asteroid impact or a global nuclear war is an interesting mental exercise. But the more meaningful matter to consider is: what would happen next, after all the dust clears? That issue is more relevant to my desire for a rebooted world.

I will never know the answer to my “what would happen next” wondering. I will never live to see a rebooted world. However, other humans surely will see such a world, eventually, in some future time. I sincerely hope that those future post-apocalyptic people will have the wisdom that our species overall lacks today. Wisdom is not the same thing as intelligence. It will require a near-extinction event for human intelligence to evolve into human wisdom.

It is the only way. It needs to happen—sooner or later.