Everybody loves a good apocalypse; even as the world gets better and better, people continue to stubbornly believe the end is nigh.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Columns - Survey

A MAJORITY OF people--54 percent--surveyed in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom believe there's a risk of 50 percent or more that our way of life will end within the next 100 years. Even more ominously, some 25 percent of respondents in the same poll believe it likely that we'll go extinct in the next century. Americans were the most pessimistic, giving those answers 57 percent and 30 percent of the time, respectively. And younger respondents tend to be more gloomy about the future than older ones.

These results were recently reported by the Australian futurists Melanie Randle and Richard Eckersley in the journal Futures. The authors also document that cultural pessimism is increasing. Polls taken in 2005 and 1995 asked young Australians to choose between two statements: "By continuing on its current path of economic and technological development, humanity will overcome the obstacles it faces and enter a new age of peace and prosperity" vs. "More people, environmental destruction, new diseases and ethnic and regional conflicts mean the world is heading for a bad time of crisis and trouble." In 2005, only 16 percent of respondents thought it was likely to be "a new age of peace and prosperity," down from 41 percent in 1995. Sixty-five percent opted for "a bad time of crisis and trouble," up from 55 percent in 1995.

Earlier surveys similarly found large segments of the world's population believing that the end is nigh. In a 2012 Reuters poll covering more than 20 countries, 15 percent of the respondents said the world will end during their lives. This February a YouGov poll of Americans asked, "How likely do you think it is that an apocalyptic disaster will strike in your lifetime?" Nearly one-third answered that it was very to somewhat likely.

The Australian researchers themselves apparently think the world as we know it is at significant risk of coming to an end. "Scientific evidence and concern are mounting that humanity faces a defining moment in history," they assert, "a time when we must address growing adversities, or suffer grave consequences." What growing adversities? They uncritically recite the conventional litany of global doom: "climate change and its many, potentially catastrophic, impacts; other threats include depletion and degradation of natural resources and ecosystems; continuing world population growth; disease pandemics; global economic collapse; nuclear and biological war and terrorism; and...