Fictionlet

The meteor hit.

Suzanne was thrown from her chair, the quiet din of the TV overshadowed by the explosion ( Read more... )

Armageddon

OK, my story had me thinking.

There are so many wonderful and lovely ways to end the world... to kill off as many people and destroy as much property as you can.

But, in all reality, if I had the job of being Mother Nature and killing off all of humanity, I would not resort to expending the energy to melt the ice caps or cause major earthquakes or meteors falling from the sky or even a helluva hurricane/twister/blizzard.
Frankly it's a huge waste of energy. You might kill off a few thousand people and do some lovely property damage.. but property damage is meaningless... so you lost the Sears Tower. Big deal? So the Statue of Liberty is under water? We'll build another!
As for a few thousand people? Drop in the bucket. It's far too difficult to coordinate an attack that would kill a large enough amount of humans.
Well. maybe the Ice Caps melting.. that'd "sink" DC, New York, LA, San Fran.. not to mention turning The Great Lakes into The Great Lake (or possibly part of the Atlantic itself)... a few trillion people dead across the shores of the world... hmmm...
Maybe.. but this WAS NOT MY POINT

No, if I were to kill humanity, I would use LIFE ITSELf against us...

My idea would be to take a few diseases and let them spread for fun.. nothing as flashy as AIDS or Ebola.. well, OK, maybe a really virulent strain of the Flesh Eating disease, but only for the flashy special effects of watching someone realize that the FLESH EATING VIRUS IS IN THEIR BODIES AND THEY CAN'T STOP IT AND THEIR FACES (and the rest of their body) IS GONNA FALL OFF!!!
...
ahem.

But what I WOULD do is create a virulent strain of virus that causes reproduction to cease working (It seems, already, that reproduction is a fairly fragile process... so many people already have problems with it..) ... perhaps something along the lines of cancer, but affecting semen and/or the egg instead.

I mean, yes.. there'll be survivors.. eventually EVENTUALLY there might exist a handful of humans whose genes have mutated to not be affected by the virus..
THEN the tidal wave/blizzard/tornado is worth throwing at them >:D