LA Times editorial nails it on right wing extremism

[AverageJoe90]

57. No, I'm not, but.....

A full-scale nuclear war certainly could have come close enough, though: not just the hundreds of millions vaporized or blown to pieces by blast waves, but from the fallout, wildfires, etc.(and the anarchy, starvation, etc.); IMHO, it wouldn't have been too hard to imagine that perhaps only maybe about something on the order of half a billion people would survive, many of them probably in the Third World.

And, also, it is indeed true, that yes, nothing is really guaranteed: a gamma ray burst could zap us. Aliens could invade and decide to assimilate us. Hell, another K/T level asteroid might smack right into us......and if we hadn't tried to deflect it, that might very well just be the thing that did us all in, even with our knowledge and our capability, etc., just as a gamma ray burst or an invasion by particularly predatory aliens could(or rather, would, at least in the case of the former).