The End Is Nigh

by Zoe Pollock

Scientific American devotes its entire next special issue to "the end." They explain some of our eternal fascination with it:

The desire to treat terrible
as the harbinger of the end of civilization itself ... has roots in
another human trait: vanity.

We all believe we live in an exceptional time, perhaps even a critical moment in the history of the species. Technology appears to have given us power over the atom, our genomes, the planet—with potentially dire...