Archive Gallery: How the World Will End
October 1936 A new ice age, exploding stars, the hypothetical Doomsday Machine, and more scenarios that are almost certain to eradicate life on Earth For all our talk on "the future now," there is one future we'd prefer to delay for the next five billion years, and that's the inevitability of our planet's destruction. Mankind's speculated on the end of the world for thousands of years, but it wasn't until recent centuries that people began attaching scientific possibilities to doomsday scenarios, instead of blaming the gods for our demise. Click to launch the photo gallery. During the first half of the 20th century, we focused our imaginations on cosmological disasters. Billions of years from now, the sun will explode, vaporizing the Earth in a ruthless inferno. Or perhaps a swarm of asteroids would bombard our cities and crash into our oceans, resulting in a series of megatsunamis. Other scenarios included one...