Space

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Meteor Crater, Arizona, created when a meteor just 30 meters wide and rich in iron struck the Earth at an estimated 20 kilometers per second. The resulting explosion exceeded the combined force of today's nuclear arsenals and created a 1.1-kilometer-wide, 200-meter-deep crater.

These are just here on earth, but what about something coming from the vastness of this space that we're floating like a speck of dust in? The potential for sudden death is always just around the corner from a variety of subjects that sound like the basis for a Bruce Willis sci-fi movie. Getting fried by a gamma ray burst would sure suck, and it's really only a matter of time before one of the gazillions of rocks hurtling through space scores a bigger hit — smaller ones happen all the time. Of course, there's always the possibility of getting swallowed by a black hole, too.
Martin: Asteroids. They land every year. I'm talking about asteroids that would take out a city. If an asteroid hit around Pennsylvania, it would wipe out the entire east coast, and that would have political and social repercussions around the world. You'd have to deal with an electromagnetic pulse, it would shut down all electricity across the whole western side of the United States, and an EMP doesn't just shut it off, it destroys it. It melts anything in it, any copper, anything that's conductive, it just melts it. You'd need a whole new infrastructure, new electrical lines, all the stuff in warehouses to roll out would be ruined, and you'd have to manufacture new stuff, but all the equipment would be ruined, so you'd have to manufacture new equipment, it just would set us back so far.

Read more: Apocalypse Scenarios - Likelihood of Apocalypse - Esquire
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