End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World

TLDR: “Entertaining, not particularly deep”

Book review by Deane Barker • • tags: science, climate-change, nuclear-war, disaster • 1 min read •
An image of the cover of the book "End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World"

I enjoyed this book, for what it was. I’m trying to get better about predicting the content and tone of a book before reading it, so I can better absorb it. I correctly predicted this one as a fun trip into some morbid scenarios, and that’s what it was.

The author covers all sorts of ways the world might end, how it might happen, and what we’re doing about it. They are:

  1. Asteroid impact
  2. Volcanic eruption
  3. Nuclear war
  4. Climate change
  5. Disease epidemic
  6. Bioltechnology (so, an artificial disease)
  7. AI run wild
  8. Alien invasion

Notably, the book was written in 2019, which means it was written without knowledge of (1) COVID-19, and (2) the huge advances in AI in the last five years. The author had no idea what was coming.

Also, the threats fit along some different axes:

  1. Instant (asteroid, volcano) and incremental (climate change)
  2. External (asteroid, aliens) and internal (and perhaps self-inflected; nuclear war, AI)

Of all the things he wrotes about, climate change is the one clearly happening right now, so we’re in the middle of something that could effectively end the world.

I was interested to note that volcanic eruption is one of the most devastating to happen in our history. The book refers to the Toba eruption in particular. Some scientists believe it created a 10-year “volcanic winter” in which volcanic ash obscured the sun, and it cooled the planet for up to 1,000 years afterwards.

The author describes volcanic eruptions as “the Earth turning itself inside out,” which I thought was a creative way of putting it, and it’s genuinely pretty accurate. We don’t often think of the fact that the Earth is basically a hard shell around a seething ball of lava. Volcanos are holes in that shell. Imagine nuclear waste in a sealed container. Then punch a hole in it, and that’s about the truth of the situation.

This was a fun book. I enjoyed it.

Book Info

Author
Bryan Walsh
Year
Pages
416
Acquired