Tick-tock. Humans love an extinction event. Entire religious mythologies, entire episodes of Star Trek tend to move this way, toward hubris and nemesis, the notion of end times.
The Mayans had the end of the world pegged at 21 December 2012, which might, in retrospect, have been a decent offer we should have accepted. The entire cultural history of the 1980s is basically Midge Ure walking through the Vienna mist in a leather overcoat surrounded by decaying grandeur and laughing Nazi-yuppies, waiting for megadeath to fall from the skies.
