Original subtitles

While the American government strives to protect the nation from obvious

threats, it must also plan for unforeseen disasters.

There are immediate threats facing humanity on the planet Earth.

If an asteroid were to hit Earth, it would kill millions instantly.

Events that could threaten not only America, if you're looking at a new dark

age, but every nation.

Across the globe. That is the most dangerous moment humanity has ever

Although complete agreement on anything is hard to come by today, experts around

the world believe more than ever that it is not a question of if humanity will

one day face a cataclysmic event that may cause our extinction, but when.

In fact, a number of doomsday scenarios are being predicted.

Do these threats really exist?

If so, then what is being done to prevent them?

Perhaps the answers can be found in America's book of secrets.

January 23rd, 2020.

An international group of global security experts known as the Bulletin

Atomic Scientists advances the hands of its symbolic doomsday clock from two

minutes down to 100 seconds before midnight.

The clock has been moved forward. Tell me, how else can we tell people where

we're at? The moment is serious.

This yearly announcement is their assessment of the chances that a global

catastrophe will take place in the near future.

The doomsday clock started in 1947, and according to the experts, humanity has

never been closer to the apocalypse.

The Earth has experienced five major extinction waves, and these are periods

time where more than three -quarters of the animal species on the planet went

extinct.

So when we actually look in the fossil record, we can see that this happened

before, and that'll tell us it's going to happen again.

Is there an existential threat looming that could wipe out the human race?

And if so, will this threat be man -made?

Or could it come from nature?

Yellowstone National Park.

Each year, more than 4 million people travel from all over the world to

experience its canyons, hot springs, and other natural wonders.

But beneath the surface of this picturesque landscape lies a deadly

just waiting to erupt.

When we think of Yellowstone National Park, we think of Yogi Bear.

We think of Old Faithful, but underneath that park, there is a ticking time

bomb.

There's a super volcano underneath the Yellowstone, the size of Rhode Island.

A volcano that has had an eruption of a magnitude 8, which is the highest

category on the Volcanic Explosivity Index.

It's classified as a supervolcano.

This type of eruption can eject more than 1 ,000 cubic kilometers of magma

ash, not only obliterating everything in its path, but also rendering the

surrounding environment unlivable.

When it goes off one day, and it will, it will rip the guts out of the United

States of America.

It would blanket much of North America actually with volcanic ash.

It will destroy industry, it will bring down power lines, it will contaminate

soil, not just North America but much of the world.

The world really only has about two months of food reserves.

So if you suddenly shut that off, that doesn't leave a lot of time.

We may prefer to think that the idea of a supervolcano causing worldwide

destruction is an exaggerated one.

But the truth is that not only is this doomsday scenario possible, it's

happened before.

Sumatra, Indonesia.

More than 70 ,000 years ago, the enormous supervolcano Mount Toba

violently erupts.

Volcanic ash and debris shoot into the atmosphere.

Toxic clouds black out to the sky, covering the entire planet in darkness.

Toba was a supervolcanic eruption doing more than 10 ,000 square meters of rock

debris, volcanic ash, into the atmosphere.

Using genetics, we know that only a handful of us survived that cataclysm 70

,000 years ago.

Maybe a thousand of us.

escaped the devastation of the eruption, escaped into the Middle East, and then

repopulated the planet Earth as a consequence.

So in other words, it was luck.

Luck that humanity was not wiped out by a supervolcano about 70 ,000 years ago.

The devastating power of a supervolcano like Mount Toba is terrifying to think

of, as is the fact.

that 18 such volcanoes exist on the planet at this very moment, including

one that sits beneath Yellowstone National Park.

The last eruption underneath Yellowstone was perhaps 600 ,000 years ago, but

we don't know for sure.

We're monitoring it because we know that it will erupt. We just don't know when.

There is one department of the United States government that is well aware of

the danger posed by the Yellowstone supervolcano and is taking steps to try

prevent it from erupting.

However, the agency best equipped to find a solution is neither an

nor a geological department, but actually one that most might not expect,

NASA.

NASA has an experiment in mind to drill into the heart of where the

supervolcano at Yellowstone is because we really need to have a mitigation

strategy in place.

It's called geoengineering.

You would have to dig into the ground 10 miles to inject enough water to begin

the process of cooling down that pool of magma.

The downside of it is that it could be unstable and it could set off the

eruption.

Even as NASA hopes to stop the catastrophe currently brewing deep below

are also struggling to combat another that is equally chilling.

One high above us and getting closer by the second.

Chelyabinsk, Russia.

February 15th, 2013.

In this remote town, about 950 miles east of Moscow, a meteor

streaks across the sky and explodes in the air.

Suddenly, fireballs rain down over vast area, causing a shockwave that smashes

windows, damages buildings, and injures more than 1 ,200 people.

And what's worse is that we had no idea it was coming.

There are three kinds of asteroids.

The first is the city buster.

Two of them struck Russia. One in 1908 and one recently outside Chelyabinsk.

Then we have the nation buster. It is over 1 ,000 feet across, capable

of wiping out one of our nations of the planet Earth.

And then there is the planet buster. That is an object 10 miles across which

would take out life on the Earth itself.

We think that 65 million years ago, an asteroid about that size struck the

Yucatan of Mexico, wiping out the dinosaurs.

In 2018,

NASA committed $150 million to help fund the detection of asteroids hurtling

towards the planet.

But just how common are such truly dangerous asteroids?

There are in the order of 10 to 20 ,000 extinction -level event asteroids.

The asteroid Apophis, for example, is an asteroid about 1 ,000 feet across.

It'll skim by the planet Earth in the year 2029.

And in the second round, 2036, it may actually hit the Earth.

The danger posed by a giant asteroid seems insurmountable. But actually,

there may be a possible solution.

In October of 2022, NASA is scheduled to launch a mission known as the

Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

The idea is to bump an asteroid and see if they can alter its trajectory.

It's like playing billiards.

You use a cue ball to move the other balls around the table.

All you have to do, especially if you have a lot of advance notice, is move it

slightly, it'll just miss the Earth. The very fact that we can do this is kind

of amazing. I mean, it could be that down the line, humanity will be able to

survive what would otherwise have been an extinction -level event because...

It's one thing when scientists identify massive and potentially devastating

objects hurtling towards the Earth.

But what about other lethal threats?

Threats that are invisible to the naked eye.

June 10th, 2020.

The U .S. Department of Homeland Security releases a report warning.

that the People's Republic of China possesses powerful new weapons that can

generate an electromagnetic pulse, commonly referred to as an EMP.

An electromagnetic pulse is a super energetic radio wave that's got so much

energy in it that it can destroy electronics.

It can collapse electric grids and basically wipe out electronic

all over the world.

China is an enormous EMP threat, as is Russia and North Korea. All three of

have super EMP weapons.

According to military experts, EMPs can be unleashed in a variety of ways,

including by a nuclear missile detonated high up in the atmosphere, by

satellite, or even from a concealed device the size of a suitcase.

Then there are non -nuclear EMP weapons.

They don't have fields as large or as powerful as the nuclear weapons, but

a handful of them, you could achieve the same thing that you do with a nuclear

EMP attack and basically black out the grid for a protracted time, enough to

destroy our electronic civilization.

What would a huge EMP do?

When you drive down the road and you look at the power lines and you see

big metal cans that are on top of the poles, those are transformers.

There are millions of them in North America. The power lines would act like

antennas and absorb this energy and blow out millions of these transformers.

A big transformer is custom made.

And there are only two places in the world where they're made.

South Korea and Germany. You're talking about years to get it back up.

You take power away, you're not going to have electricity.

You're not going to have water.

You're not going to be able to get food or anything like that.

And that causes society to break down very quickly.

Cars wouldn't start.

Airplanes would fall out of the sky.

We wouldn't have enough food in the country to feed 330 million people for a

month. And it would immediately begin to spoil when the electric grid goes down

and the refrigeration systems. You wouldn't be able to transport it to

Another effect is it could wipe out most of our communication satellites that's

in orbit around the Earth.

And what a lot of people don't realize is that the global stock exchanges and

all the banking networks work through these satellites.

So almost instantly, we would have an economic collapse of all of the markets

the planet. That could be chaos like we've never seen before.

The looming threats of sophisticated EMT weapons.

has led many to wonder, is there anything that can be done to defend

against this kind of attack?

We need to protect the grid as soon as possible, as well as other like

-sustaining critical infrastructures, communications, transportation,

the food and water supply.

EMP attacks are largely ignored because of the enormous cost it would be to

harden the grid.

It's estimated that it would cost between $10 to $20 billion, and it would

over three to five years.

Hardening the grid means installing technical devices that would protect

transformers and control systems from EMP effects.

So not only are these things a tremendous threat to our civilian

infrastructures, but theoretically an electromagnetic pulse can be caused by

sun, like a rare solar superstorm like the 1859 Carrington event.

Red Hill, England, September 1st, 1859.

While working in his observatory, amateur astronomer Richard Carrington

a burst of intense white light erupt from the surface of the sun.

Minutes later, the energy from this flash of light, known as a solar flare,

blankets the Earth with the energy of over 100 nuclear bombs.

It's called the Carrington Event, and when that happened, people saw a bright

light in the middle of the night. They thought it was morning. They would get

and start to make breakfast.

Telegraph operators were shocked, literally shocked.

Certain telegraph stations burst into flames.

The transatlantic cable that had just been laid in 1859 connecting North

to Europe, the pulse was so powerful it reached down miles deep into the

Atlantic Ocean and burned it out.

Now, in 1859, we were still a horse and buggy civilization. We weren't dependent

upon electricity for survival. And so civilization continued.

If it happened today, communications would go down. The Internet would go

Cell phone activity will go down.

Even the astronauts in the space station would have to be on alert because of a

gigantic solar flare.

We would be thrown back.

A hundred years into the past, to the very dawn of the electric age,

the threat of a naturally occurring electromagnetic pulse has to be taken

seriously. Because as scientists recently discovered, sudden and massive

flares happen with frightening regularity.

On July 23, 2012, a rare solar superstorm like the 1859 Carrington

hit. And NASA estimates that the likelihood of a catastrophic natural EMP

about 12 % per decade.

And so we're basically in a game of Russian roulette with the sun.

That virtually guarantees that within our lifetimes, or at the latest, that of

our grandchildren, we're going to experience this thing.

The clock starts ticking toward doomsday, basically, once that EMP hits.

You're looking at a Mad Max kind of thing.

You're looking at a new dark age.

Even though the dangers of super EMP weapons keep many in the U .S.

up at night, those threats pale in comparison to another potential doomsday

scenario, one that could instantaneously destroy not only our infrastructure,

but humanity itself.

Pyongyang, North Korea, October 10, 2020.

During a rare nighttime military parade, North Korea unveils the world's largest

mobile nuclear missile.

The 85 -foot -long weapon can reportedly reach any point in the continental

United States, the country that North Korean dictator Kim Jong -un claims is

country's main enemy.

It's a chilling reminder of mankind's capacity to unleash a true nuclear

doomsday. And some experts say it's only a matter of time.

Before that happens.

We need to remember that these weapons are still there. There are still, I

think, close to 14 ,000 nuclear weapons throughout the world.

There are the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea,

Israel, France, and England. All have nuclear weapons.

So there is still a threat to the world's peace and to the consequences of

nuclear fallout.

Times have changed.

Now the bomb has proliferated, proliferated into some of the most

areas of the world.

Areas like the Korean Peninsula could be the match, match that sets off a

nuclear war.

We have to worry about an accidental hotspot blowing up and then escalating

to the great powers.

For those who find the idea of a catastrophic nuclear exchange

History provides a sobering rebuttal.

October 14, 1962.

United States surveillance aircraft capture photographic proof that the

Union has placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of

Florida. It marks the beginning of what would come to be known as the Cuban

Missile Crisis.

The Cuban Missile Crisis is probably the most dangerous moment humanity has

possibly ever faced, actually.

You have the United States and Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

Hundreds, thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at each other.

You have this face -off over Soviet missiles in Cuba that was too close to

.S., the fear that those could be launched quite quickly, the U .S. would

have time to retaliate. The U .S. responds by putting a naval blockade

Cuba. The Russians are sending ships there. There's a face -off.

There were far more Soviet military personnel in Cuba than the Americans

There were Soviet submarines off of Cuba that had nuclear capabilities and

nuclear torpedoes. There was actually one Russian nuclear sub that was being

depth -charged by U .S. Naval Forces.

And a few officers on that sub thought they should fire off their nuclear

torpedoes with the idea of defending themselves. They figured the war had

already started. We should just go ahead and do this. We can't check back with

Moscow. There were three commanders on that submarine. Two of the commanders

voted to launch the nuclear weapon that they had on the sub.

The third commander, Vasily Arkhipov, dissented. He said that they did not

what was going on on the surface, and he refused to authorize the launch.

Vasily Arkhipov actually saved us from being in the middle of a nuclear war. If

he had not dissented and they had launched that weapon, undoubtedly we

have ended up in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.

and the consequences would have been absolutely catastrophic.

The Cuban missile crisis ended when President Kennedy secretly agreed to the

removal of U .S. nuclear weapons in Turkey in exchange for Soviet First

Secretary Nikita Khrushchev having his country's missiles removed from Cuba.

While nuclear war was averted at a pivotal moment of the Cold War, the

terrifying truth is...

Some experts believe that the threat of such a doomsday is even greater today.

Washington, D .C., October 1, 2020.

President Donald J. Trump is diagnosed with COVID -19, raising questions about

his ability to perform his presidential duties.

Soon after Trump's diagnosis,

the U .S. Air Force scrambles several E6B Mercury planes into the air.

The function of these planes is to communicate with America's nuclear

in the event of a surprise nuclear attack against the United States.

According to some experts, the planes were put on alert because the military

concerned that such an attack was imminent.

With the diagnosis of President Trump with COVID, There was some speculation

that foreign adversaries might take advantage of that.

When President Trump was diagnosed as having COVID -19, it's interesting that

the days that followed, both China and North Korea flexed their military

muscles. There were shows of new hardware, displays of force.

Almost as if they were demonstrating that they had a capability or an

to do something, or even gearing themselves up to take action.

The President's health scare is an example of how a single event can still

unexpectedly stir up nuclear tensions at a moment's notice.

Just days later, Russia and China unveiled new nuclear missiles.

However... Unlike their ballistic predecessors, these weapons of mass

destruction are hypersonic.

When a ballistic missile is launched, usually it's picked up by a satellite,

that information is passed back to commands in the United States. The

is made to employ a kill weapon, which is basically another missile, and that

ordered to be launched, and hopefully it intercepts the intercontinental

ballistic missile in space and destroys it.

Well, guess what? Now we have hypersonic missiles that can travel much faster.

And that means you have that much less time to figure out what's going on,

minutes really, to decide whether to shoot back.

Recently, it was revealed that the U .S. military was developing and deploying

an artificial intelligence -driven computer program to try to give

early warning of any imminent nuclear attack.

You can use artificial intelligence to try to detect patterns in that behavior

of your adversaries that would indicate, say, that they're preparing a missile

for launch.

In the case of North Korea, we can sort of see from the sky when they're

preparing missiles, and even in underground bunkers when they're moving

of materials to those places that would allow that.

This super smart AI computer program would be able to react.

faster and with more accuracy than any human and it would enable an attack

to be deterred or certainly if an attack was launched to be countered and

defended against.

Is it possible that with artificial intelligence mankind has really created

safeguard against deadly international conflicts?

There are experts who fear.

that it may not ultimately prove to be our savior, but rather the architect of

our demise.

Boston, Massachusetts, June 2016.

Robotics company Boston Dynamics reveals a four -legged canine -inspired robot

known as Spot.

This artificially intelligent machine

funded in part by the U .S. government, is capable of manipulating objects,

navigating varied terrain, and even performing complex acrobatics.

But many experts warn that such huge advances in both artificial intelligence

and robotics are a double -edged sword.

AI offers tremendous advances.

But are we comfortable with giving total power to something that's not

answerable to humans? That's concerning. That's something that's going to have

to be addressed.

Humanity is at the top of the food chain around the world because we're the

smartest species.

So what happens if we create something else, something artificial, that is

smarter than us?

AI is the ultimate extent of risk.

While robots like Spock can someday surpass our ability to control them.

There is a type of artificially intelligent robot being developed that

also be over our heads.

And in more ways than one.

We have drones from the sky that shoot at enemy combatants on the ground.

And what happens if one of them gets out of control?

The military is interested in using artificial intelligence.

There's efforts to build drones that would be much more autonomous than they

now. If you kind of eliminate the human from the loop, these systems can make

much faster decisions and operate much more quickly.

Imagine something like a predator drone, only instead of having a human being at

the controls, we just hand it over to the robot.

I could see a lot of strategic reasons for why you might want to do that. You

speed the process up. But once you go down this road, it gets very scary.

Really quickly.

November 12, 2017.

The Future of Life Institute releases Slaughterfuck, an eight -minute film

offers a grim warning about a potential doomsday scenario in the form of

artificial intelligent drone assassins.

Although a work of fiction, its realistic presentation and plausible

only triggers it to go viral, but also attracts the attention of the United

Nations.

Flutterbots was created to be kind of a newscast from the near future, where you

actually see tiny little drone swarms going after people.

And in the Flutterbots scenario, they capture an image from your laptop or

your smartphone.

And then they use face recognition to track you down and execute you.

The different individual flying robots can act together as a network.

They can work together to, say, fly through small areas at high speeds.

They can share the information that they're collecting. So if you're

whole city for a particular individual, as soon as one drone finds it, all the

other drones will know exactly where that person is and can go to that area.

Actually, the technologies employed are all available today. Most PhD students

in robotics and drones

could write the software to do something very similar. The question is the

willingness to attach lethal weapons to it.

In October of 2020, the Chinese military released video of swarms

of similarly designed attack drones deployed from both the ground and air.

While China's swarm technology is not as advanced as the fictional slaughter

box,

Its very existence represents a significant escalation in autonomous

lot of countries are afraid that if they don't invest in these technologies,

then their adversaries will.

So you have this competition between the great states, primarily China, U .S.,

Russia, who all want to develop these weapons first.

Of course, once you get ahead, then everybody else is trying to get ahead,

it's an endless kind of race.

Recently, the British chief of the defense staff, General Nick Carter, made

speech where he said that a quarter of the basically UK armed forces could

be replaced by autonomous robots.

If you're simply pressing a switch and ordering robots into battle, there's no

real downside for you in terms of casualties.

I think there's a moral and ethical issue, whether we want to allow machines

that are not being actively supervised and controlled by humans to make life

death decisions, whether any particular human lives or dies.

For instance, we saw in Tahrir Square in Egypt, where Mubarak tried to order the

military to attack the million people occupying the square, and the military

stood down and refused to do that.

Robot soldiers aren't going to refuse their orders.

The speed at which an AI could learn, the speed at which it could grow, if it

actually passed it as humans, there's no telling where it could go.

And if that happens, we've just given the keys to the Earth to something else.

If governments around the world fail to prevent the ultimate doomsday scenario

from occurring, what then?

Do we have a plan that offers a chance for survival?

Many experts say the answer is yes.

However, they believe the solution lies not with the government, but by taking

matters into our own hands.

Today, in the plains of western South Dakota, a series of curious embankments

dot the countryside.

These 575 mounds are entrances to underground bunkers made

of concrete.

The total area within the bunkers is three -quarters the size of Manhattan.

And in recent years, these former military structures have become home to

largest private citizen survivalist community on Earth.

It's called the X -Point. And this was a World War II munitions storage depot,

and this facility fell into disrepair.

575 semi -subterranean concrete bunkers that were built to protect weapons.

Recently, it was purchased by a California real estate developer who

that this would be the perfect doomsday community.

And what he's been doing is selling 99 -year leases on these bunkers.

It's what they claim is going to be the center from which humanity reemerges

after a great calamity.

There's about 40 families who are living in there now, so they're only

inhabiting a very small percentage of the place.

But it's a fascinating transformation. These bunkers that were built to protect

weapons are now protecting families.

And it's beginning to look like a typical American cul -de -sac. People

putting up white picket fences and American flags over their blast doors

building quite intricate structures inside the bunkers.

We have this idea of a prepper being this lone wolf figure who

is going to single -handedly save the world through his knowledge of survival

skills, bushcraft.

But the reality is very different from how we imagine preppers to be.

Preppers are everywhere.

They're your next -door neighbor.

is a modern take on a concept that's been developing for a long time.

Giant bunkers built underground as humanity's last resort for survival.

As in fact, the U .S. government has been constructing such facilities for

decades. The Department of Defense estimated that there were 20 ,000

facilities around the world.

Many of those bunkers aren't in the United States as the remnants from the

War.

These are continuity of government facilities. The idea is that in the

nuclear war, you could move large amounts of military personnel, parts of

civilian government, and ensure that the government and military command is not

totally wiped out.

In the 1980s and during the Cold War, a number of top -secret underground

facilities were constructed as part of a massive continuity of government

initiative. It came to be known as...

The Doomsday Project was started by President Reagan.

The idea was that Russia and the whole world already knew where the existing

bunkers were, so we needed to build new bunkers.

Each bunker needed to have its own technological convoy. They

needed to have space satellite connections.

They needed to have lead -lined tractor trailers so the government could be

mobile and move from place to place.

The June's Day Project ended, I believe, in the year 1994.

We think, but we're not really sure.

Authorities are secretive about the location and size of the government's

-day underground structures.

But if history is any guide, they are most likely.

We do know about a couple of prime examples from the Cold War.

One of those is the Raven Rock Complex, which is incredibly vast.

They've excavated the inside of this mountain, and they've essentially

multi -level building inside there which sits on shock absorbers.

So if the bunker were to be hit with a direct nuclear weapon, the whole

can actually flex with the blast.

And there's a million square feet of office space inside there.

There's a vast reservoir, essentially an underground lake that they can pull

fresh drinking water from. There's roads, obviously.

It's essentially an underground city.

And in Virginia, there's a bunker called Mount Weather.

And it's a multi -level bunker that thousands of people could live inside.

It's also the place where the government would take precious artifacts,

paintings, things like this that are important to the cultural history of the

United States.

This is essentially a giant safe where they can take these things and store

during an attack.

While the U .S. government has invested heavily in underground structures,

critics have questioned the wisdom of building so -called doomsday bunkers.

that would preserve and support civilized society.

It's impossible to be able to provide shelter for everyone in the country.

The disparity between providing protection for government elites versus

ordinary citizens is a very complex issue.

If you can survive in one for an extended period of time is another

What would the quality of life be like? Would you want to survive?

If you could never go outside again, if you could never feel the sun on your

face, a nice cool rain on a hot day, what kind of life would that be?

There's also a lot of research into the psychological effects of what it would

be like to be in those places.

I'm not sure how effective it would be over the long term.

So there are insurance plans, but one that hopefully we'll never actually have

to cash.

If things really do go south on the surface of planet Earth, can humanity

sanctuary deep underground?

Perhaps there is another solution, one that the American government is

developing right now, that is simply out of this world.

Boca Chica, Texas, January 2021.

American Aerospace Company, SpaceX.

performs three successful static fire tests of its colossal SN9 rocket.

The SN9 is a prototype of what SpaceX calls the Starship, which

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk claims will be the largest and most advanced spacecraft

ever made.

And there are those who believe that in the event of a global catastrophe,

Rockets like the Starship could become lifeboats to new frontiers for human

civilization. If a supervolcano erupts, if there's a pandemic that engulfs the

world, maybe we have to leave the Earth as a consequence.

One of the best ways for humanity to ensure its survival is to spread out

the stars, to the moon, to the asteroid belt, to Mars.

to maybe the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

If we spread out, it's going to be harder to kill us with one big shot.

And that way, humanity might survive.

If we can establish ourselves off the Earth, so we're a multi -planetary

species, if something happens to wipe out the Earth, you know, it could be a

nuclear war, it could be an asteroid strike, it could be a very angry AI, we

have a backup plan. We have somewhere else we can live. And that's part of why

Elon Musk is so interested in colonizing Mars.

His goal is by 2050, there would be a million colonists on Mars. Each rocket

ship would carry 100 passengers. It would take several years to build up

colony, but it is well within the laws of physics.

To reach these ambitious goals, SpaceX plans to build more than 1 ,000

and eventually launch three of them to Mars every single day.

Sound impossible?

For many, this elaborate project is not only a viable option to save the human

race, but also a natural next step to help it evolve.

Humans are built to survive. Our species exists and continues to exist because

we refuse to surrender to fate.

We are hardwired by evolution.

To be concerned about doomsday and the ultimate catastrophe of our species,

a look at the mythologies of every civilization on the planet Earth.

You will always find some reference to a doomsday, because in the back of our

minds, there's always the possibility that all this, all this civilization

come to naught, that it will be gone in the flick of an eye.

What matters in terms of averting these disasters is not just us.

Because, yes, it would be very sad, obviously, if something were to happen

have all of us go extinct tomorrow.

But the real loss would be no more future, no more future generations, no

future accomplishments, no more future humans.

And we here at a moment where there's a lot of risks out there, both natural and

increasingly man -made, we have a responsibility to ensure that the future

going. And the best way to do that is to tackle these risks head on.

Could an exodus to another planet really be mankind's solution to an earthly

apocalypse? Or would the same devastating natural and man -made

await us there?

Ultimately, it is up to us and our leaders to ensure a safe and hopefully

tomorrow.

Can we do it?

Perhaps for now, the answer lies hidden in America's Book of Secrets.