7 Ways Scientists Plan To Avert The Apocalypse

4. Population Boom

People often talk about "needing a new plague/war/apocalypse" to sort out the sticky problem of the booming human population, but it turns out that not even this would solve our problems.

Using a computer model based on real population and demographic data, researchers found that under current conditional, the global population is likely to grow to 10.4 billion by 2100. When they factored in a World War III scenario, with the same proportion of people killed in both the first and second world wars combined, it barely even registered as a blip on the graph.

Even with policies to restrict childbirth, it is thought that the pace of population growth is now too far gone to control in this way and, unless we find a way to offload a few billion people to another planet, our resources are going to be dwindling pretty sharpish.

In the meantime, experts are proposing techniques to reduce our impact as opposed to our numbers such as reduced reliance on fossil fuels and alternative food sources that don't require vast swathes of land to grow crops and cows.

Ultimately, however, if the population reaches an unsustainable level, then people are going to die. So, in a broadly utilitarian way, overpopulation is one of the few apocalypse scenarios that actually sorts itself out in the end.