How the World Could End

There are basically 2 great ways for the world to roll toward a crashing halt, only to be pulled back from the crack of doom at the eleventh hour. Every other near apocalypse is melodrama in comparison.

Number one is what I call "The Terminator Problem."


So, we all know that Skynet will go online and then evil cyborgs with eyes like laser pointers will march to the tune of 80s industrial techno.

The joke, if you never gave pause to think about it, is that the robots represent ‘technology’ which can be shortened to,

plain old 'Techno'

and then there’s the pun when you seperate out tech / no.

Anyway, right as the T-2000’s are about to shoot their metal claws right through the heart of civilization, John Conner or his dad roll back in from the future and fix everything by shoving a molotov cocktail right into the terminator's yin-yang.

The downside to terminator problems is that they will indeed be back, and each time you can bet your bottom dollar they will have cornier lines to say.

The second and final way for the world to almost end is "The Alien Invasion Problem."

Rule number one of alien contact: Aliens are always bad.
Rule number two: Don’t get sidetracked by the pretty lights or the eerie music.
And rule number three: If the aliens are beautiful, don’t sleep with them, rather blast their spaceships to pieces.

Usually their spaceships will have super shields, so to blast them properly, you’ll have to steal one of their ships like Will Smith did in Independence Day.

That’s basically all you have to know about aliens. To review, don’t stand idly around or underneath their spaceships, and don’t trust them, even if they are beautiful.

Oh yeah, and try water if nothing else seems to work too well.

So, honestly. I think the terminator problem is decidedly worse than the Alien Invasion problem, and I think that if we all turned into penguins that would be a far worse fate than any other conceivable thing, so I'm striking everything I said before and retitling this piece to:

And then the Penguins Man Became

As an addenum, originally this list was called:

The 4 Greatest Ways for the World to Almost End, but I couldn’t think of a fourth thing so I reduced it quickly to 3. And then I spent a long time writing and researching the third thing, which is "The Revolt of Nature," but it was very melodramatic, and there was nothing funny about it. The writing of The Revolt of Nature was very forced and resulted in stilted, uneven prose. The greatest part of it was the following:

"The Revolt of Nature is usually combated through frenetic travelling. The more dramatic the
better; Run don’t walk, fly don’t drive, and board the next available shuttle by
whatever cut-throat means necessary."

I cut it out entirely, leaving the 2 greatest ways for the world to almost end. And boy are they great ways!