So when is the world going to end

The drop in sequencing costs is shifting DNA testing out of the research lab and into mainstream medical practice. Population-based sequencing projects in more than a dozen countries, including the US , are expected to produce 60 million genomes by By , China hopes to add another million from its own precision medicine initiative.

The impact is hard to even imagine. To date, only about a million people have had their whole genomes sequenced. More data from all over the globe will allow for more powerful, fine-grained analyses of how genes shape health and behavior.

Very large genetic data sets are ideal for a new technique called Mendelian randomization , which mimics clinical trials, allowing researchers to tease apart causes and correlations. Bigger samples will also make it possible to forecast even complex traits—like height or susceptibility to heart disease—from DNA. A world so saturated with genetic data will come with its own risks.

The emergence of genetic surveillance states and the end of genetic privacy loom. Technical advances in encrypting genomes may help ameliorate some of those threats. But new laws will need to keep the risks and benefits of so much genetic knowledge in balance. By , the Vogtle power plant in Georgia, the only nuclear power station currently under construction in the US, will have been running for a few years.

Instead, expect to see small nuclear reactors start popping up. Just a fraction of the size of a typical nuclear reactor, these advanced ones can be mass-produced and easily shipped anywhere in the country, no matter how remote. The first small reactors, developed by a company called NuScale Power, should start splitting atoms at Idaho National Laboratories in The Department of Energy is also working to get even smaller reactors, known as microreactors, churning out electrons at a federal facility by In addition to his claims about the end of the world, he also predicted that on May 21, , at precisely p.

Those who were not raptured, he said, would have to remain on Earth to wait for their doom five months later. According to media reports, some of his followers quit their jobs, sold their homes, and invested large amounts of money in publicizing Camping's predictions.

When the Rapture did not occur, Camping re-evaluated his predictions saying that the event would take place simultaneously with the end of the world.

See how much time has passed since Camping's apocalypse. The experiments have caused some to believe that the energies set free by the collisions will form a black hole powerful enough to consume Earth and all life on it. No such black hole has been sighted yet, and several high-profile studies have concluded that there are no such dangers associated with the experiments conducted at the LHC.

Towards the end of the second millennium, people around the world feared that the world would end simultaneously with the beginning of the year , or Y2K. This prediction was based on the practice followed by computer programmers of abbreviating year numbers with two digits when developing software.

However, at midnight on January 1, , the world celebrated the new year, and no planes dropped out of the sky. Did the third millennium begin in or ? See how much time has passed since Y2K. Austrian geologist and Nostradamus buff Alexander Tollmann decided to play it safe by sitting it out in a self-built bunker in Austria. Holz also contrasted the threat of nuclear annihilation, which could be diminished with rhetoric and treaties, with that of climate change, for which the impact of our actions is often delayed.

Climate change and nuclear Armageddon aren't the only threats that the Bulletin considers. In fact, when considering the utter destruction of humanity, its members have no shortage of ideas: bioweapons, nanobots, artificial intelligence—you name it.

But one danger has risen above others in recent years, no doubt intensified by the recent pandemic and the political tensions leading up to the election. This, of course, is the spread of false information. Rosner concurred. Regarding the purpose of the Doomsday Clock, Holz emphasized the role of scientists such as those on the Bulletin in saving the world from cataclysm.

If science offers the tools to prevent apocalypse, then the humanities offer the ability to make sense of it. Apocalypse has long been a fertile theme for works of literature, art, and philosophy. The theme of individual preparedness is also present in the zombie- apocalypse novel World War Z by Max Brooks. Miller said that it depends on who you ask. Another lesson about doomsday situations that Miller put forward was an idea from acclaimed science fiction author N. It happened to people living in Afghanistan and Iraq; it happened to U.

Like Miller, Schweiker is a scholar of apocalyptic thinking, analyzing it from a historical and spiritual angle rather than a literary one. And where Miller sees fantasy in apocalypse, Schweiker sees something else: hungers of the human spirit.