Ka-Boom. That's how many people view the end of the world: one very swift kick in the pants. Other people assume that this will not happen to them because they are better than all the other people on the planet and God loves them best and so they will not die. Still, others believe that certain people in far-off places will fight and kill each other while the rest of us stay home and watch reruns on cable. And there are people who think that if they wear a specially blessed red string around their wrist that nothing bad will happen to them.
Some people think that their wealth will save them. And then there are people who believe that the rich will all be the first to die. Some people think that a little Armageddon would be a good thing because then their extraterrestrial savior will swoop down in a space ship and take them to another galaxy where they will live in a beautiful new Eden and maybe even be able to fly.
There are also people who believe that if they just make lots of babies that their children will clean up all the messes that came before and they will be saved. Then there are those who think that if the human population is curbed that there wouldn't be so many problems. This sort of makes sense; less people=fewer problems.
But the chances of humans surviving the next hundred years or so probably has a lot less to do with mysticism, moral fitness or deitic (Yes, I just made that word up in this context so, don't use it in conversation with a college professor) favoritism and a lot more to do with dumb luck.
For example, it might be lucky if there were a plague. Oh, not a bad plague where people suffer painful, bloody deaths but, a nice, easy, democratic plague where a proportionally equal amount of people in each country just slip into a state of immense bliss and drift peacefully off to sleep. And then die. If such a plague wiped out about half of the world's population then we all might be stunned just long enough to forget about drilling in the arctic or blowing each other up with nuclear weapons or even just saying mean stuff about one another. But, the odds of this happening are almost nil.
Plus, it wouldn't be lucky for the people who had to deal with disposing of all the rotting corpses with smiley faces.
Putting the whole idea of luck aside, it would be a lot better if intelligence and mindfulness ruled the way humans do things on Earth.
The problem is, we haven't elected particularly mindful people to public office. And most people don't really care about the world's problems; they care about their own problems: their job, their fat, their children, their money. That's why there won't be apocalypse now. There will be apocalypse whenever; a little at a time in dribs and drabs. Kind of like middle-age spread. Until the end comes we'll muddle on, drinking too much caffeine and worrying about the little picture.
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