> Seems to be some renewed interest in this recently :
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> The first twenty as published :
>
http://www.discover.com/issues/oct-00/features/featworld/
>
> 20 Ways the World Could End
>
> Swept away.
> By Corey S. Powell
> DISCOVER Vol. 21 No. 10 | October 2000
>
>
> We've had a good run of it. In the 500,000 years Homo sapiens has roamed the land we've built cities, created complex languages, and
> sent robotic scouts to other planets. It's difficult to imagine it all coming to an end. Yet 99 percent of all species that ever
> lived have gone extinct, including every one of our hominid ancestors. In 1983, British cosmologist Brandon Carter framed the
> "Doomsday argument," a statistical way to judge when we might join them. If humans were to survive a long time and spread through
> the galaxy, then the total number of people who will ever live might number in the trillions. By pure odds, it's unlikely that we
> would be among the very first hundredth of a percent of all those people. Or turn the argument around: How likely is it that this ...
