Perhaps the world will end with neither a bang nor a whimper but a sigh of relief: Thank God that's all over. Only the fungi can be proud of their contribution to life on Earth. The rest of us should be ashamed.
Frankly, I doubt the people of the End Times will even know the consolation of living in proverbially double-edged "interesting times." In fact, so tedious will Doomsday brinkmanship be that even endless global conflict will be called The Lukewarm War. I imagine it will be fought by international robots while humans are busy binge watching so-called Reality TV, until they and their screens are finally vaporized by smart bombs dispatched from rent-by the-hour missile silos somewhere in Asia.
Such a bleak vision of the future. Alas, even the briefest perusal of current events makes it impossible to predict any other outcome. It's as if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had taken up equestrian show-jumping, enjoying a spot of fancy dressage before their last gallop across the world's paddock. Look closely and you can see Trump and Biden et al queuing up to feed apples to the ponies.
But if we're lucky, this will turn out to be just a computer simulation, a holographic game in which we only manage to achieve Level Two of Ten before losing the plot, and maybe our player-God can insert another quarter to start over again.
