There’s been an ongoing thing about the end of the world, and how it’s just a bit more likely every day to happen. I’m guilty of this as well. From how I see it, whatever part of themselves the humans don’t destroy will be left to nature to wipe out in some kind of revenge, as if the spirit of the planet was purging some sort of virus. I’m looking at this and thinking, who doesn’t think the end of the world might be sooner than you think? But then again, the end of the world thing is pretty melodramatic. More accurately, it’d be the end of humanity most people are talking about, they’re just so self-centered that they think the world ends because they stop existing. The end of the world would actually be the planet being destroyed. Possibly a version that works is “the end of the world as we know it”, which is also a good REM song.
This whole thing about zombies has been going on for a very long time. It’s been explored so much in fiction that the average person might possibly stand a chance against such a threat should it arise if they’ve looked over a few things and don’t just automatically consider themselves an action hero. Essentially as long as the zombies aren’t fast.
There are more drastic scenarios which become fairly less likely to happen, such as giant monsters coming from the ground or alien invasions and the like. These are likely going to stay fiction. Some more down-to-Earth scenarios are emergences of totalitarian governments, while these aren’t exactly cited as the end of everything, it sure makes everything suck a lot more, and might lead to the end if everything just ends up getting blown up.
Nuclear apocalypses are a pretty common one, as far as fiction. Given how these weapons exist and likely will exist for some time, whether or not they get used in open conflict, essentially a scenario where the entirety of the world somehow gets bombs evenly spread throughout it enough to turn everything into a nuclear desert is still a bit out there. There is also the whole forced winter scenario since so much matter would end up in the air it would block out the sun for some time, cited as part of how the dinosaurs died off alongside meteors and volcanoes.
There’s also the part about natural disasters. As temperatures and climates shift around, it causes a lot of chaos in the weather patterns, and there might be a possibility of storms and events so massive that they need recategorization to account for the destruction caused. I don’t know how well a shark tornado would really work, it might just mainly end up being messy due to the sharks in it. But for all we know wind speeds might increase so drastically that the water contained in there could tear all of the flesh from bone, no need for sharks to do that. Of course it would have to be extremely fast to the point where that’s really only been contained in smaller forms like fire hoses, and even those would have to be turned up significantly.
Sometimes I wonder if the obsession about the end of everything is somehow some sort of collective thought to attempt to deal with the mortality of a whole species or just driven into the mind through attempted media control. It actually doesn’t take much to control someone through media, after all. They just have to believe it enough and not look too much into it.