“We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when,” Vera Lynn sang, incongruously, at the end of Dr. Strangelove, the Earth settling in for a nuclear winter, with no future meetings between humans on the schedule. We probably have the world end in art so much because it’s going to in reality. Probably not soon, though the water from those melting icebergs could thin the herd considerably. But someday our planet will be a melting, uninhabitable rock and even the whole universe will eventually cease to be (though there is a chance we could survive the end of that as well). One entry from Sarah Gray’s “Pick Your Doomsday,” a Salon article outlining scenarios the could wipe out humanity:

“Solar Flares:

It was recently revealed that in 2012, humanity may have had a close brush with doom, all due to solar flares. On July 23, 2012, the sun belched one of the most massive plasma clouds ever detected with a speed of 3,000 km per second, according to the Guardian. That is four times as fast as a typical solar flare. The flare could have caused a massive blackout of satellite communications, power grids and electronic devices. And if the solar storm had occurred a week earlier it would have.

‘If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,’ University of Colorado’s Daniel Baker told the Guardian. Baker is part of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. ‘I have come away from our recent studies more convinced than ever that Earth and its inhabitants were incredibly fortunate that the 2012 eruption happened when it did,’ he continued. ‘If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire.'”