4 Ways The World Could End In Your Lifetime (And 3 Ways We Can Stop It)

2. Getting Off World

Look, if this whole saving-the-planet thing doesn't work out, we might need a Plan B ... and that Plan B might be to get the hell out Dodge.

Although the apocalypse probably isn't looming right around the corner, it's almost certainly in the post. Even if climate change doesn't get us, the longer we go without an asteroid impact, gamma ray burst or supervolcanic eruption, the more likely they are to happen. If nothing else, the sun will become hot enough to boil away our oceans in the next billion years, so if we've clung on that long and still not made it to the stars then we will be, in technical terms, royally f*cked.

As Stephen Hawking puts it:

"I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load."

As of now, our current technology is nowhere near where it would need to be to get us off-world for any significant period of time, but that's not to say that we couldn't ever get there if we put our minds to it. Whether the future of humanity is aboard some kind of artificial space habitat, on another Earth-like planet or even a lunar doomsday ark, the reality is that we can't stay here forever.