Yes, this is true. Scientists now agree: In 1.3 billion years when the Sun begins to expand into a red giant, it will become too hot for any life to survive on this wonderful, blue planet. Plants may start disappearing as soon as 600 million years from now. And in about seven billion years the entire planet will cease to exist along with the Sun and the entire solar system.

Are you worried?

Well, I am. Not so much for my own sake since it is unlikely that I will still be around 1.3 billion years from now. (Hey, like many octogenarians, I am thankful for every day that I wake up and discover that I am still here.) It is because that at this moment it seems that forces that could destroy life on our planet are lining up against us and that in the long run, the future could be bleak. Let’s examine the two scariest threats: climate change and nuclear war. (There is not enough known about AI at this point to fully understand its impact though it seems likely that it too could become a major existential threat.)

Climate Change 

Despite objections by many elected Republicans and other climate change deniers, climate change is real and will eventually destroy life on the planet as we know it if we do not meet the challenges of global warming. We are trying hard and making some progress, but still there is so much farther to go, and winning this battle will require the cooperation of Russia, India and China along with Europe, South America, and most other countries. We humans may have the technical ability to tackle this but do not appear to have the will or ability to do what scientists tell us we must do to reduce carbon emissions and win this battle.

And if temperatures continue to rise, the Greenland Icecap will eventually melt. The oceans will rise some 30 feet. Game over. Of course, that is still aways off, but if we are not able to reduce carbon emissions, we will continue along a projectory for it to happen.

And here is the thing. While doing research on another recent obsession of mine (on “the evolution of the universe”), I learned that the planet Earth since its beginning some four billion years ago has experienced five mass extinctions, which wiped out between 85 percent and 95 percent of all plant and animal life on the planet at that time. These extinctions have happened routinely on average every 60-100 million years and were caused mainly by climate change. The last mass extinction happened 66 million years ago when a giant asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula causing most of the giant dinosaurs to die within hours. Smaller ones may have survived months or even years longer, but the debris in the air reduced sunlight destroying the habitat which supported these creatures.

The timing is about right for another mass extinction and do-over for the planet Earth.

The good news about the Fifth Mass Extinction is that this gave an opening for us mammals to evolve and thrive. The bad news is that the king of the mammal world, we Homo sapiens, for the last century and a half have been trashing this delicate planet at an alarming rate. Because of our actions many scientists believe the planet has already entered its Sixth Mass Extinction. This is because we humans are destroying the habitats of other animals. Scientists and those who keep track of such things estimate that during the last 500 years almost 900 species have ceased to exist. One in four mammals and one in eight birds face a high risk of extinction in the next few decades. In just the last 50 years the human population on the planet has doubled. The population of all other animals has declined by 70 percent. The existential question is this: If the planet is now already in a Sixth Mass Extinction, will we humans be part of it?

This question leads to the other big existential threat.

Nuclear War

Why have we heard so little about this threat in recent times? I have just finished reading two very good but very disturbing books—Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The first book is a fictional account about a theoretical nuclear war, which happens so fast that it is impossible to avert total disaster–sort of like what happened to the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. The book presents a compelling story of how a full scale nuclear war could happen at any time, either by a miscalculation or accident or if a bad actor uses this weapon. The second book is about a deserted world where a father and son hunt for canned food left over following an unnamed–but most likely a nuclear disaster–while trying to escape bands of roaming human cannibals. These books will scare the bejesus out of you.

Jacobsen is a reporter for The New York Times who has specialized in writing about national security issues for many years. For this book she interviewed scores of experts and former officials in the government and the private sector involved in national security and nuclear weapon development. While fiction, the book provides extensive footnotes and documentation that what Jacobson is writing about could happen. Of course, it is unthinkable and beyond our comprehension. Yet she makes a compelling case that the threat of nuclear holocaust is real and more of a threat now than at any other time since we dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Lord have mercy!

Following the explosions of the two atomic bombs, in the late 1940s and early 1950s there was a huge uproar led by Bertrand Russell and other intellectuals warning the world of dire consequences. “Ban the bomb” was a common mantra around the world. Then there was pushback and a counter argument that we really need not worry so much about a nuclear war because of a theory called MAD or “Mutually Assured Destruction.” In other words, the consequences of a nuclear war are so dire and extreme, no leader would initiate an action which could ultimately result in the destruction of one’s own country. Well, since we are still here and except for Hiroshima and Nagasaki no nuclear war has happened, maybe the theory is correct.

But what if it isn’t?

There are now nine nations that have “strategic nuclear arsenals”—the United States, Russia, China, France, the U.K., Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea— and the number continues to grow. Iran is likely to be next. And one nation—North Korea—is a rogue nation with an unpredictable leader, who many label as a nutcase. In Jacobsen’s book, North Korea is the bad actor that starts the war which leads to the massive annihilation of human life on Earth.

The total number of warheads that these nine nations have is a tad over 12,000. One average size nuclear weapon exploded in New York City would cause about 600,000 deaths, wounding many others. Do the arithmetic. Humans currently have the capacity to kill 7.2 billion people, which is 80 percent of all humans on the planet. And as Jacobsen’s book describes, this could happen very quickly.

As scary as this is, actually we have made progress because of the numerous nuclear treaties between the US and the Soviet Union beginning in the 1960s with the latest with Russia in 2010 (“START”). At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had 40,000 nukes and we had 30,000, enough to destroy all life on the planet many times over.

Note that the reduction in the number of nuclear warheads applies to strategic nuclear weapons and not to the so called “tactical nuclear weapons,” which Putin has already threatened to use in his war on Ukraine. Some of these less powerful weapons, however, have twenty times the power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yes, progress has been made. But friends, this is madness!

What the Jacobsen book convincingly portrays is that just because a full scale nuclear war has not happened yet does not mean it will never happen. And if it does, it will mean that we humans will be part of the Sixth Mass Extinction, that the next do-over will begin, and that the Earth will continue to experience extinctions until our Sun becomes a red giant a little over a billion years from now. If the past is any indication of the future, before life on Earth perishes, we can expect more mass extinctions. If one happens, say, every 70 million years on average, there would be 14 more of these “wipe the slate clean” do-overs.

These questions lead us from the world of science to the world of spirituality and religion. Where does God fit in to all this? And what is the meaning and purpose of life in our fragile world as we humans stagger through our lives trying to play the cards we have been dealt as best as we can?

Read these two books. Then mix yourself a stiff drink and pray that nothing like this will ever happen—even though the odds are that unless we rid the planet of these horrific weapons—along with other weapons of mass destruction– it will happen, probably not soon but sometime. And according to Jacobson the timing could well be sooner rather than later. The fuel is in place waiting for a rogue nation or bad actor to strike a match which starts the fire that completes the Sixth Mass Extinction on the planet Earth. God help us.