The world isn’t necessarily going to end because Donald Trump was elected president. It’s going to end because we’ve squeezed the natural gasses out of it like a dirty sponge; it’s going to end because the singularity has already arrived; it’s going to end because we are massively overdue for an extinction-level event.
Still, in the face of it all, we’ve managed to show impressive mental fortitude (or at least, most of us have), and continue to find meaning and substance in our lives. For instance, I felt real joy because of this tweet:
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But, as we know, that joy is tenuous. Death and destruction lurk underneath every benign interaction—the end of the world around every corner; powering every Dunkin’ Donuts; causing every subway delay.
So, I’ve compiled 100 ways the world could end in 2017. Why? Not because I want to, but because this is the only blog I’m able to write. And because I want to be able to point to this next October and be like, “What’d I say?”
- Asteroid
- Gamma-ray burst
- Black hole swallows us up like an Advil
- Massive global inflation
- Ice caps melt and flood the cities, causing the economy to collapse and everyone to starve
- Trump triggers World War III with a tweet
- Trump triggers World War III because he has low blood sugar
- Trump triggers World War III because he is bored
- Methane gas from sheep farts overheats the globe
- The whole population decides, “Nah,” and spontaneously drops dead
- A giant burp
- Death Star shoots us with lasers
- Death Star shoots us with gas that makes us very lazy and we starve
- The oceans evaporate
- Insects turn on us
- Solar flares
- Magnetic poles switch, making all our magnets break—even the important ones
- Chemtrails suddenly real
- God
- Insanity
- One person starts screaming, then another, then we all are
- The dead rise up and challenge the living to a war, which we lose
- Big hack
- Apes gain the ability to organize and rise up against us
- Fish gain the ability to organize and rise up against us
- People forget penmanship and no one can sign credit card receipts anymore, causing us to starve
- Bees all die
- We all become gluten intolerant
- A bunch of sinkholes at once
- Galaxy-sized man slides into our area and punts us like a soccer ball
- Ebola 2: More Ebola Than Ever
- Apple products become sentient and go on a labor strike
- CERN messes up a particle accelerator experiment and creates dark matter which eats us all up
- Dog whistle, but for humans; drives us crazy
- Jesus comes back and we are startled and nuke it all
- Viola Davis gives us one of her searing looks
- Aliens visit and kill us with space warfare
- Aliens visit and it’s “Arrival” but the alternate ending where the Chinese got their way
- Aliens visit and seduce us into being their slaves and then we are just shells of who we used to be (the world continues to exist but for what?)
- Sex starts to feel weird and it never stops feeling like that
- Melancholia bumps into us
- Cicadas come back like usual but they don’t die... think about it
- Nano-machines begin rapidly reproducing and turn the world to dust
- Lack of content
- Rise of the Whos
- Weak ankles (even the animals)
- First-borns die of feeling superior
- Poison in drinking water
- Poison in rain (acid rain, maybe)
- Poison in rice
- Poison in our hearts—the poison of corruption
- Microscopic algae alters atmosphere so we can’t breathe
- Dig up Three Mile Island and everyone gets cancer (even the plants)
- Dig up Chernobyl and we all turn blue
- Dig up Titanic (from the water) and we all die at once from being so moved
- The internet gains sentience and teaches us a lesson for using it wrong
- Computer that’s controlling our Matrix-like simulation crashes and we all wake up and then instantly die of shock
- All the glasses stores close and everyone is blind (who will drive the ships)
- Fatal fungus
- Elon Musk makes several big mistakes
- It’s actually a novel and someone turns a page and then its just the end of it
- Leonardo DiCaprio has been storing up methane from the sheep and then one day he farts and the Earth instantly warms to 1000 degrees
- Malevolent company takes control of all the televisions and forces us to watch nothing but The Big Bang Theory
- Jupiter changes orbit and knocks into us
- All the locks on all the zoo cages spontaneously break at once
- Java stops working
- Pestilence
- Super-volcano eruption
- Men become so woke they die; world nice for one last generation
- Gravity reverses and we start floating
- Emily Ratajkowski wins an Oscar
- Lightning storm sets every meadow including Meadow Soprano on fire, and then there are no meadows; grazing animals die
- Earth is actually a marble and it gets lost
- Earth is a marble and it falls down a drain pipe
- Earth is a marble and a child swallows it
- The worst tweetstorm
- Someone creates a child-kitten hybrid and we die of love
- We all become hooked on a diet pill that is actually cyanide
- Jonestown massacre, but bigger
- Someone starts chemical warfare and then misplaces the antidote
- Children all decide not to get older
- A man snatches a lollipop from a baby and then: Butterfly effect
- Everyone is depressed and misses one day of work, but it’s the same day
- Comet collision
- Dinosaurs come back
- Star explodes nearby
- Sun gets hotter
- We are all Westworld hosts and the programmers die or quit
- Get addicted to rollercoasters but supply can’t keep up with demand
- Pave paradise and put up parking lot
- Stop being able to tell facts from lies, all communication collapses
- Someone snips all the underwater internet cables
- God dutch-ovens us (global warming)
- Sea level rises too much and we aren’t strong swimmers
- Earth swings off axis and sends us into space
- Everyone gets a bad haircut and then no one wants to do it anymore
- Too much body odor
- Too little body odor
- Everyone simultaneously forgets their social security numbers (and international equivalents), bureaucratic gridlock
- Bird revolution