The end of the world is a superb source of exciting fiction in books and films, but what is the reality of it? Is there any genuine scientific fact lingering beneath the surface of films like Roland Emmerich’s 2012, but more to point, what are the real, genuine potential threats to life as we know it? Recent musings from Internet nerds have focussed on the rather exciting prospect of the world being sucked into some sort of space-time swamp, as we all descend into a black hole on the Franco-Swiss border, created by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Sadly, the boffins at CERN have largely dismissed the possibility that such an event might occur, so yes you probably should complete your tax return. There go those pesky science folk spoiling everyone’s fun yet again with their boring old facts and figures. But wait a minute, can we really rest as easy as we think?

In the 2009 television series Flashforward, a group of scientists created a global disaster by causing everyone on the planet to black-out for a period of exactly 2 minutes and 17 seconds. In this fictional universe, the scientists were experimenting at the very cutting edge of their field in particle physics, which led to a series of events that they said could never have been predicted. While this obviously makes for great television, and a nice premise for a sci-fi story, there are some genuine real-world issues raised by the show. For example, the real scientists at CERN are indeed working at the very cutting edge of their field, and so although they can make predictions based on a combination of empirical evidence and theoretical physics, some of it will always be exactly that… theoretical!

While it’s all well and good to trust that these people know what they are doing, the fact is that, despite having brains the size of watermelons, scientists are still human, and humans make mistakes. Not that ought to expect them to get a decimal point in the wrong place like you might have done in a completely honest mistake on your tax return, but while they are absorbed with the science of tiny particles, perhaps they are missing the bigger picture. It certainly wasn’t newspaper reporters or worried local residents that started questioning the safety and validity of the LHC experiments, it was other highly regarded scientists. Scientists that included a Nobel Prize winning nuclear physicist from the University of Rome, and Dr. Adrian Kent of Cambridge University who in a 2003 paper raised concerns that even basic questions such as, “How improbable does a catastrophe have to be to justify proceeding with an experiment?”, are never seriously examined.

It wasn’t just black holes that the melon-brains were worried about either. Some mysterious particles called stranglets were also on the agenda. Assuming this was not some sort of massive particle physicist in-joke at the expense of us mere mortals, one report said that the chances of a disaster caused by strangelet particles was less than one in 50 million. While you may feel reassured that the odds of such an incident are less likely than winning most lottery jackpots, people DO win lottery jackpots. It happens all the time! So if you start to feel yourself inexplicably drawn toward Switzerland don’t worry about turning off the TV and grabbing your tooth brush, you’re not coming back!

Obviously there is a much more well-documented threat to our current way of life that has become so in-grained in our everyday language that the mere mention of it is now worn as a badge of social conscience, as well as being hurled as a political bargaining chip, studied as a scientific discipline and dismissed as a complete fallacy. It is joked about and ignored by some, studied, predicted and worried about by others. It is of course, global warming. But why does the topic of global warming have such as polarising effect? Perhaps it is nature of the apparent threat we face that makes it seem like less of a danger to the world, because we will only see its effects over the course of several decades. If we were hit in the face by a massive ball of ice or burnt on the arm by an intense blast of the sun’s radiation each time we gorged on an over-packaged Happy Meal and threw the box on the street, then maybe we’d be less inclined to eat them. It would also go a long way to tackling the obesity problem.

One of the reasons that global warming seems less like an end of the world threat is that it’s very difficult to pinpoint the cause. Even assuming the sceptics have got it wrong, and we are facing rising temperatures over the next 50 -100 years, who or what do we point the finger at? Who is responsible and what can we do about it? Ultimately, the answer is – us! All of us in fact and that is the crux of the problem. People don’t really like taking responsibility when it interferes with their everyday life, the things that are happening right now, so even though we’re told that our actions are contributing to a problem that could cause the end of the world as we know it, most people don’t give a damn. Even with the predictions that some places will face floods and torrential rains, while others will face dangerously high temperatures causing droughts, famines, wars and untold damage to our fragile ecosystem, still most people carry on regardless.

This raises a very important point about the human race that is central to our greatest successes as well as our our biggest failures. We are basically fight or flight creatures, so unless the danger is at our door, right now, today, we probably won’t do much about it. Although we have created some marvellous things that make our lives more pleasant to live, and even make them last longer, we have also become experts at killing one another in wars, killing ourselves with cigarettes, alcohol and drugs, and wrecking the very planet that sustains our existence. So if you do want to know the most likely cause of the end of the world, just take a look in the mirror, and remember there is another six billion just like it.