Five Ways to End the World

Sure-fire methods to shut it all down

Browse Slideshows

Previous Next

An artist's impression of the asteroid impact that hit lower Chesapeake Bay 35 million years ago.

National Science Foundation
An artist's view of a large asteroid hitting the Earth.

NASA
Barringer Crater, otherwise known as Meteor Crater, in Arizona, formed about 50,000 years ago.

AP
An artist's take on the Chicxulub asteroid impact 65 million years ago, which may have killed the dinosaurs.

NASA
The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, which noticeably cooled the world for the next two years.

U.S. Geological Survey
Lava from the Kilauea volcano on the island of Hawaii flows into the Pacific.

AP
A fissure eruption on the slopes of Mauna Loa on the island of Hawaii. Similar, but much larger, eruptions may have killed the dinosaurs.

U.S. Geological Survey
The Western Ghats range in India, part of the Deccan Traps created by thousands of years of continuous lava flows 65 million years ago.

Wikimedia
Nuclear test 'Badger' at the Nevada Test Site, April 18, 1953.

AP/DOE
The 'Castle Bravo' hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll, March 1, 1954 -- at 15 megatons, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated by the United States.

U.S. Air Force
An artist's impression of three stages of a star like our sun being devoured by a black hole. The star gets too close, left; is stretched apart, middle; and finally swirls into the hole, right.

NASA/JPL-Caltech
An artist's view of a supermassive hole at the center of an old, dying galaxy.

NASA/JPL-Caltech
An artist's impression of planet HD 189733b, which orbits very close to its sun. This is how the Earth will look as the sun is about to gobble it up in about 5 billion years.

ESA/NASA/C. Carreau
An artist's impression of a star boiling the water off a planet, as will happen to the Earth in about 2 billion years as the sun expands.

ESA/Alfred Vidal-Madjar, CNRS/NASA