Humanity can die due to a collision of the Earth with a particular cosmic body, as a result of natural or man-made disasters. These are not the fantasies of the media and Hollywood scriptwriters, but the predictions of scientists. How much we have left.
2036
In October 2007, villagers in the Penza region hid in a cave, awaiting the end of the world. In their opinion, in May 2008 the Earth should have perished due to a collision with a comet. Since there was no cosmic catastrophe, the Penza hermits gradually left the shelter. The doctrine of the end of the world is found in different religions. In Christianity, Armageddon was predicted in 1000 and 2000. In the Mayan calendar, the end of the world fell on 2012. The threat was expected from the sky. Nowadays, astronomers have discovered more or less large space objects capable of approaching the Earth at a dangerous distance. The accuracy of the trajectory calculation is always limited, so a collision is not ruled out in some cases. Most of all scientists are worried about the asteroid Apophis. It will return in 2029 and on April 13 it will pass only 38 thousand kilometers from the center of the Earth. There is a very small chance that he will end up in a six hundred meter danger zone, where the planet's gravitational field will change its trajectory. Then the next time we return in 2036, Apophis will hit us. As calculated at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics and the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, the Russian Far East, the countries of Central America and West Africa are at risk in a collision with Apophis in 2036.
2026
More than half a century ago, the American mathematician Heinz von Foerster and his colleagues published an article in Science with the exact date of death - November 13, 2026. On this day, the population of the Earth will stop growing exponentially and rush to infinity. Foerster used in his calculations two parameters that determine the fate of any population of living beings - fertility and life expectancy. In 1975, German astrophysicist Sebastian von Horner took into account other parameters related to human activity, and suggested that Doomsday would come sometime between 2020 and 2050. During this period, the Earth's population will increase so much that it will not be able to feed itself; due to industrial emissions into the atmosphere, the planet will heat up to unacceptable values for life. American scientists substituted new meanings in von Horner's formulas,that have changed over three decades. It turned out that if the end of the world does happen, it will be no earlier than 2300-2400, due to global warming and overheating of the planet due to human activity.
XXI Century
In 1972, the Club of Rome - an informal association of intellectuals, scientists, futurists - presented a report on the limits of the development of civilization. The authors analyzed the growth of population, industry, consumption of non-renewable resources, environmental degradation and came to the conclusion that in the 21st century there is a high probability of collapse. However, it can be avoided by changing behavior, politics and technological development.
In the early 1980s, several mathematicians immediately reported that knowing the time of human existence, one can predict its future. This is called the Doomsday argument.
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Mathematicians assume that if we decide to accidentally observe a process, then, most likely, we will do it somewhere in the middle, and not at the beginning or end of this process. It turns out that our civilization is halfway through and there are still several centuries or millennia in reserve. Futurologist Alexey Turchin in his book "The Structure of a Global Catastrophe" gives different approaches to calculating the date of the Day of Judgment, and most indicate that the end of the world with a high probability will come in the 21st century.
Tatiana Pichugina