Experts reveal bleak reality of how humanity will really end

If you were a betting man and someone were to ask you to guess how the world would end, what would you say?

For some morbid reason, us humans seem rather obsessed with speculating and worrying about how the world will end. From the ancient religious scholars preaching about armageddon to conspiracy theorists on fringe internet forums, the end is certainly always nigh.

So how do the world's experts think the world going to come to an end? Climate change? Catastrophic natural disaster? Alien invasion?

Well, it turns out humanity's extinction could some from something a little closer to home.

That's right folks, our demise is said to be more likely to come as a result of our own actions than a super-volcano or little green men in flying saucers.

Humans never cease to wonder about how the world may end (Getty Stock Images)

Nuclear war

Ever since J. Robert Oppenheimer uttered the words 'I am become death, the shatterer of worlds' back in 1945, notions about the destructive capacity of nuclear weapons have been a constant fear for humanity.

Excluding the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, none of the world's nuclear powers have ever crossed the line and dropped an atomic bomb – however, it only takes one misunderstanding or mistake to cause mutually assured destruction.

"Nuclear war could end civilisation in the space of a few hours," Dr Rhys Crilley, an expert on international relations from the University of Glasgow, told MailOnline.

"Climate change is a slow-burning crisis that's already reshaping our world but will get worse in the future, whilst nuclear weapons pose the possibility of instant, total devastation for the planet."

As it stands, there are nine countries which are confirmed to posses nuclear weapons, these are: the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.

There doesn't even need to be a declaration of war for a nuclear disaster either, as proven by Vasili Arkhipov, the Soviet naval officer who prevented all out war during 1962's Cuban Missile Crisis.

The end of the world may very well be man made (Getty Stock Images)

Artificial intelligence

Bombs raining radiation down on our cities isn't the only man-made danger to our lives, as it's possible the boom in artificial intelligence could one day come back to bite us.

According to Geoffrey Hinton, AKA the 'godfather of AI', said there was a '10 percent to 20 percent' chance of artificial intelligence causing the apocalypse during an interview on BBC Radio 4.

"We’ve never had to deal with things more intelligent than ourselves before," he said.

"The situation we’re in now is that most of the experts in the field think that sometime, within probably the next 20 years, we’re going to develop AIs that are smarter than people. And that’s a very scary thought."

Or artificially generated (Getty Stock Images)

Meanwhile, the Centre for AI Safety previously released a warning urging people to consider AI as big of a threat to humanity as pandemics and nuclear war.

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war," read the statement shared by Hinton and several other leading AI experts, researchers and engineers.