Humans have been predicting the end of the world since the beginning of civilisation.
But in 2019, the end seems closer than ever, with Artificial Intelligence, climate change, and that perennial favourite nuclear war all threatening to wipe us off the surface of the Earth.
You can either lie awake worrying about the apocalypse, or have a bit of a laugh with it.
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That was the choice of Rob Sears, who has written a ‘choose your own adventure; style book called Choose Your Own Apocalypse With Kim Jong-un & Friends.
Choose Your Own Adventure books were wildly popular in the 1980s and Nineties, selling more than 250 million copies between 1979 and 1998. The format invites you to make a choice at the end of each chapter, with each different option leading you down a different path.
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Rob has turned himself into one of the world’s leading experts on end-of-the-world scenarios over the past year, so Daily Star online had a chat with him and asked him how he did his research, and which one of his list of apocalypses kept him awake at night.
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“My main research,” Rob told us, “was reading the news every day.”
“I’m like a hypochondriac for human civilisation,” he continued, “I can’t see a newspaper story without my imagination zooming forward to some global conflagration or other, be it one of Elon Musk’s inventions going haywire or the extinction of the world’s bees.”
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Rob says he also met up with a number of leading scientists to ask them what was the most likely way the world would end: “They were quite reassuring about zombies,” he says, “but there are lots of new technologies out there in the maybe cool, or maybe terrifying category.”
He singled out a DNA editing technology known as CRISPR genetic engineering which he says “could either eliminate disease or chew everyone’s DNA to shreds overnight.”
The book’s cover features illustrations of Kim Jong-Un, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. We asked him which of the big beasts of politics and technology seemed most likely to kill us all. “There’s a whole club of powerful hot-tempered men out there with little red buttons on their desks,” he said.
“Kim Jong-un is perhaps the most unpredictable-seeming. But the most dangerous person of all could well be some unknown programmer working away in an artificial intelligence lab somewhere.
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“Sometimes I think it's hard to say which is more potentially risky: extreme stupidity or extreme intelligence.”
But the five million dollar question to any self-styled prophet of doom has to be ‘which is the ‘End Times' event that you think will spell the end of Civilisation?’
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Rob says that not only does he know how the world ends, but the end has already started: “The sad fact could be that we’re actually living through a slow-motion apocalypse scenario in the form of the climate crisis.
“Another risk that I find horribly likely is that humans become so overwhelmed by misinformation, propaganda and web-borne bias that we lose all ability to cooperate or make decent collective decisions.
“That could lead to the total disintegration of the democratic world – something that happens in exaggerated form if you make the wrong choices in the book!"
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So, faced with certain doom, what should we do about it?
“I thought about digging a garden bunker" says Rob, "but I decided I didn’t want to spend my final days eating baked beans so I wrote this book instead.”
Choose Your Own Apocalypse With Kim Jong-un & Friends is published by Canongate and is in bookshops now.
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