8 Theories About Reality That Make You Question Everything

7. Impending Mass Extinction

Bringing things back down to Earth with a bump for the moment, biologists reckon that we could be about to got the way of the dinosaurs.

It is thought that we might be living through the sixth mass extinction on planet Earth and, unfortunately, instead of a dirty great asteroid hurtling out of the sky, it would appear that we're the asteroid this time.

The human population has seen a colossal boom in the past 200 years or so. In 1800, there were 1 billion people on Earth and, by our best calculations, this took us nearly 200,000 years to achieve. Since then, 0.1% of that time has passed again, but the human population has increased by 700%. The impact that this boom has on the rest of the planet is comparable to to damage caused by an asteroid impact.

The tiny flash of time in which this change is occurring is, in the grand scheme of things, one of the fleeting episodes in Earth's history in which the very structure of life itself is dismantled.This isn't just about saving the pandas either, as the major casualty from this extinction is going to be us, the human race.

It's not as noticeable to us at the moment, because we're in it, but perhaps a new intelligent race in the distant future will look back on it as a distinct and deadly cataclysm. After all, it took the dinosaurs 33,000 years to completely die out after the asteroid impact. The extinction wasn't cause by a simultaneous knock on the head by a space rock, but the inexorable change to the global ecosystem that followed.

In fact, it turns out that we're wiping out life on Earthmuch more efficiently that some piddly asteroid.