This Is How Humanity Will End, Scientists Say—And It Isn’t Pretty 74%
By Emma Frederickson69%
7/16/2026, 7:54:53 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Appeal to Emotion, and Pessimism Bias, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 32.5% saturation with 392 hits. Analysis detected 2,553 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,207 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 65.6% and a BS Rank of 74% (5,703 of 21,164 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 73.10% of the article peer group.
Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid 10 to 15 kilometers (6 to 9 miles) wide struck the Earth, ultimately ending the dinosaurs’ reign as the biggest, baddest life-form on the planet.
The mass extinction occurred in a time so far from our own that it practically feels like a separate world, rather than just an earlier chapter.
But in the grand scheme of the cosmos, that incomprehensible stretch is merely a blink.
So, by that standard, could a similar fate await humanity in the not-so-distant future?
Well, as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end—including life on Earth.
And there’s no shortage of grisly theories on what will inevitably erase us, though that doesn’t make it an easier pill to swallow.
The real question is: Which one is most likely to get us first?
We’ll End the Same Way as the Dinos
When the dinosaurs came to their unfortunate end, it wasn’t because of the asteroid impact itself.
Sure, some organisms were likely in the wrong place at the wrong time and died on impact, but scientists believe that the bulk of the mass extinction occurred in the aftermath of the strike, when the collision launched debris into the air, blocking out the sun and creating an unending winter.
Many dinosaurs faced a slow, cold, hungry end.
In May, the newly discovered 2026 JH2 asteroid narrowly avoided Earth by a mere 56,000 miles, or roughly a quarter of the distance to the moon.
And there are easily thousands of even-larger asteroids floating around in space—so should we be worried?
To put it briefly: maybe, but not for a long while.
In one 2019 study, researchers estimate that the frequency of an asteroid larger than 5 kilometers (3 miles, or roughly half the size of the asteroid that caused the dinosaurs’ extinction) striking Earth is one in every six million years.
So chances are, you won’t be around to see it happen.
But even if a football-field-sized space rock is hurtling at the planet during your lifetime, some researchers are developing asteroid-deflection technology.
For instance, in 2022 NASA successfully altered the path of an asteroid with the “kinetic impactor” technique, which is essentially crashing a rocket into a hazard (though this method is far from foolproof).
Likewise, technology has come a long way since the dinosaurs, so we’re more equipped to face the eternal winter an asteroid strike might cause.
We Could Annihilate Ourselves
Perhaps the most chilling theory, some scholars believe that we will be the ones responsible for our ultimate demise.
In the 1990s, an economist named Robin Hanson proposed a theory called the Great Filter, which suggests that every species—human or alien—faces some sort of barrier that prevents “advanced exploding lasting life.”
Humanity has already survived some natural filters, such as mass extinction events, but some scholars point to more anthropogenic events that could eliminate our existence.
For example, in a 2024 paper, Michael Garrett—Sir Bernard Lovell Chair of Astrophysics at the University of Manchester—argued that artificial intelligence may “spell the end of intelligence on Earth” before we become interplanetary.
Some scholars, including Garrett, also cite nuclear war as a barrier that could ultimately filter out terrestrial life.
According to a 2026 report from the Arms Control Association, the United States and Russia possess approximately 5,042 and 5,420 nuclear warheads, respectively.
While the world’s nuclear arsenal isn’t as hefty as it once was, the weapons have gotten significantly more sophisticated.
Even by World War II estimates, a single nuclear weapon could decimate an entire city.
The Sun Might Swallow Us
A dying sun isn’t only an issue for characters in the blockbuster film Project Hail Mary; rather, this could be our ultimate fate, too.
In about five billion years (or 75 times the number of years between us and the dinosaurs), the sun will begin to run out of fuel and collapse into a dense, glowing remnant called a white dwarf.
While our star isn’t by any means big enough to become a black hole or even explode into a supernova, that doesn’t mean its death would be good for Earth’s biosphere.
As the sun collapses, its temperature will increase and its atmosphere will expand to completely engulf Earth.
If any life manages to survive that long into the future, it would—for lack of a better term—get totally fried.
However, new research suggests that we—or at least the planet—might survive this fiery death after all.
Published this May in Astronomy and Astrophysics, the paper suggests that forces drawing Earth toward the sun during its swell are weaker than older models predicted.
The findings don’t prove for certain that our little blue dot will come out unscathed; rather they point to an even more uncertain fate that depends on how much mass the star loses.
Although, volatile conditions from the planet’s evolution might extinguish life on Earth long before the sun begins to sputter out.
The Universe Ends in One Big Rip
While the preceding theories would likely end humanity first, the entire universe dying certainly isn’t the best way to go, should we miraculously survive that long.
Most scientists agree that dark energy is silently accelerating our universe’s expansion, but that characteristic could be the very thing that leads to our inevitable end.
Some experts believe that the universe will eventually expand so rapidly that it essentially tears itself apart—or end in one “Big Rip,” per the theory’s name.
In short, the idea is that objects in the universe, from galaxies all the way down to atoms, would dissolve from each other, inevitably making the cosmos uninhabitable.
Perhaps an even more horrifying thought: This wouldn’t be just the end of us, but the end of everything ever.
And if there is life elsewhere among the cosmos, this would almost definitely be the last of it, too.
Or Will We End in a Big Crunch?
On the other side of the coin, some scientists suggest that the universe will collapse back into itself, rather than expand into oblivion.
“Big Crunch” theory subscribers argue that the rate of the universe’s expansion will eventually slow so drastically that gravity will win and begin pulling the universe back together—essentially undoing the Big Bang.
Though the idea lost popularity in the late 20th century, recent research is revitalizing it.
For instance, in 2025, research from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument—which measures the effect of dark energy on the expansion of the universe—hinted at the fact that dark energy may truly be weakening.
Alternatively, this idea also leads to a controversial offshoot called the “Big Bounce.”
In one version of the theory, the universe as we know it began from a bounce, or a “shrink,” and will continue expanding for the rest of time.
In another version, the universe expands and contracts cyclically, like a lung might—so maybe this wouldn’t be the end of everything after all.
While we have long looked at the sky as some sort of heaven, there are clearly bounds of deadly possibilities waiting beyond the naked eye.
At the very least, we should probably be grateful that it will likely take billions of years to find out which theory is correct.
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