Yeah, the folks at Slate don't know what "apocalypse" means, but you know what they're getting at. It's not dumb like Mel Gibson not knowing what it means.
You guys did this today? I just get the "Loading" message that never goes away. I always seem to have trouble with these dumb things.
I looked at the page of possible Bad Things. Eh. It's a big job to try to make a complete list, and all, so I'm sympathetic to the stuff that's kind of dumb or poorly described. To me, nuked is nuked, for instance, and you ought to make it a main category with situational subcategories rather than have a bunch of separate entries that are just different ways that the nukes could go off.
Kind of a big issue, here, is (A) how likely is it that this Bad Thing could happen? and (B) how likely is it that this Bad Thing could end the US, as a nation? A lot of these things are much more likely in (A) than (B), frankly. In fact, a lot of them are things that could happen but which I would simply not credit as nation-ending, even if they occurred coincidentally at about the same time that the nation ended. And a bunch are kind of retarded.
You get to pick the top five . . . it would take too long to go through all 144 and choose, though. But I'd buy these:
- Nukes ==> Nuked sufficiently is nuked, regardless of how the nuking occurs.
- Peak Water ==> chaos (Migrating to Canada is not very 'apocalyptic', except possibly for Canada.)
- Plague plus Invasion ==> Weakened by pandemic flu or whatever, we get invaded.
- Aliens ==> They wouldn't need to invade to destroy our culture, but invading or exterminating us would do it, too.
- Neo-Humans ==> The rich techno-haves soon might not need the have-nots for anything and might simply wipe them out.
Runners-up:
- Supervolcano
- Climate change (drought, mostly)
- Gray Goo
