This Is How The World Will End - According To Scientists

‘Doomsday preppers’ dig bunkers and buy tinned food in the hope that they can survive the Apocalypse - but they may be wasting their time.

Tins of beans and gas masks won’t be of much use if the entire world is consumed in fire - or out-of-control drones slaughter us all.

Sometimes, the predictions of science can be just as scary as the wild prophecies that tend to crop up on websites.

There’s one reassuring thing, though: the date of our impending demise tends to be a little further off when you ask scientists, rather than conspiracy theorists on YouTube…

1) The sun expands, boiling the oceans and killing everyone on Earth

In about five billion years time, our sun will expand, engulfing our planet in fire - and killing anything that might live on the surface.

But long before that, all life on the surface will be cooked into extinction, according to a 2013 study by University of East Anglia scientists.

Andrew Rushby of the University of East Anglia says, ‘ We estimate that Earth will cease to be habitable somewhere between 1.75 and 3.25 billion years from now.

‘After this point, Earth will be in the ‘hot zone’ of the sun, with temperatures so high that the seas would evaporate. We would see a catastrophic and terminal extinction event for all life.

‘Of course conditions for humans and other complex life will become impossible much sooner - and this is being accelerated by anthropogenic climate change.’

2) Out-of-control drones kill us all

Many serious scientists are worried that robotic weapons systems - the descendants of today’s drones, could go out of control.

A UN report this year suggested that terrorists could unleash such weapons - and that there would be little we could do to stop them.

The report said, ‘Swarms of such systems with complementary capabilities may carry out attacks.’

'In these scenarios where swarms of lethal autonomous weapons act as force multipliers, it would be unclear how meaningful human control could be maintained over the use of force, especially as the available time frame for human intervention is likely to be restricted.’

Last year, Stephen Hawking joined other technology experts such as PayPal’s Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in calling for a ban on ‘offensive autonomous weapons’ - robot killing machines.

Professor Hawking and 1,000 other colleagues signed a letter presented at the opening of the 2015 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The letter suggested that robotic killing machines similar to the drones used today could drive a ‘third revolution in warfare’.

3) Climate change leads to war

Climate change is now taking scientists by surprise - as June marks the 14th straight month of record heat, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said last week.

Climate change body the IPCC has previously warned that as Earth heats up, groups may end up fighting over land and water.

The IPCC said, ‘Climate change can indirectly increase risks of violent conflicts in the form of civil war and inter-group violence by amplifying well-documented drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks. Multiple lines of evidence relate climate variability to these forms of conflict.

A 2016 Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found that climate change - or environmental disaster - is statistically linked to war.

An analysis of conflicts between 1980 and 2010 showed that one in four was linked to some form of environmental disaster.

4) A super solar storm ‘turns off’ civilisation

A ‘super solar storm’ could lead to anarchy, as it burned out power supplies and cut communications networks - leaving governments powerless.

In 2012, solar scientist Pete Riley, said that the probability of a ‘super solar storm’ hitting Earth in the next ten years was ‘around 12%’.

Experts fear that a storm could burn out electrical grids around the world.

Thomas Overbye, an electrical engineer at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign said, ‘We don’t have a lot of data associated with large storms because they are very rare. We’ve done a marvelous job creating a great vulnerability to this threat.

Everything from fuel pipelines to ATM machines would be vulnerable.

5) Bio-terror - or bio-error

Astronomer Royal Martin Rees made a gloomy bet in 2003 that by 2020, one million people would have died in a single instance of 'bio-terror - or bio-error’.

He still believes the risk of both ‘bio-terror’ and ‘bio-error’ is real - and says that it may be impossible to stop small groups developing devastating bio-weapons.

Rees said, ‘It’s not like developing a hydrogen bomb, which can’t be done clandestinely by a small group. Much of biotech can be done on a fairly small scale. It’s almost a hobby among students. There have been discussions about regulating these kind of technologies. But that gets harder all of the time.’