When will the world end?
Short answer: nobody knows, and no serious date exists. Not 2012, not 2026, not 2060. What science can say is how a civilisation could collapse, which risks are real, which are myths, and over what horizon. That is very different from a date — and far more useful.
End-of-the-world dates: a history of failure
Every generation has had one: the year 1000, 1666, 1844 (the Millerites), 1914, 1999, the Y2K bug, 21 December 2012 (a misread Maya calendar), 2017, 2021… All rested on prophecy, numerology or literal readings of religious texts. None on observation. The success rate is zero, and that is the only argument you need for the next one.
What science actually says
Researchers in existential risk (Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Chicago) do not work with dates but with scenarios and probabilities. They separate three things that are often confused:
- The end of the Earth: in roughly 5 billion years, when the Sun becomes a red giant. Irrelevant to us.
- Human extinction: the disappearance of every human. Extremely hard to bring about, even for all-out nuclear war; credible scenarios are few (an engineered pandemic, uncontrolled AI, an asteroid over 10 km — the last such impact was 66 million years ago).
- Civilisational collapse: the lasting loss of our collective capacities (agriculture, industry, knowledge). Far more plausible, and in fact what 'midnight' on the clock stands for. See collapse and extinction.
The scenarios taken seriously
| Scenario | Origin | What we know |
|---|---|---|
| Nuclear war | human | ~12,000 warheads exist. A US–Russia war would cause a nuclear winter lasting years; models estimate up to 5 billion deaths from famine. |
| Climate change | human | Not extinction, but hundreds of millions displaced, famines and conflicts if tipping points are crossed. Unfolds over decades. |
| Pandemic | natural or human | Covid killed ~20 million people. An agent engineered to be both highly contagious and highly lethal is the scenario biosecurity experts fear. |
| Artificial intelligence | human | Discussed seriously since 2023 by researchers themselves; huge uncertainty, from 'negligible' to 'major'. |
| Asteroid | natural | A civilisation-scale impact (>1 km) occurs every ~500,000 years. No known object threatens Earth this century; NASA demonstrated deflection in 2022 (DART mission). |
| Supervolcano | natural | A Toba-scale eruption every ~50,000–100,000 years. Impossible to prevent, but possible to prepare for. |
The key takeaway: human-made risks far outweigh natural ones this century. That is bad (we create them) and good (we can reduce them).
'End of the world 2026'?
No. If you arrived here because the Doomsday Clock stands at 85 seconds to midnight, understand this: it is a danger indicator, not a countdown. It has moved back nine times since 1947. See what the clock really is and our simulator to see what moves it one way or the other.