What type of apocalypse is the hardest to survive?

Life is terminal...we are born to die....,however, back to the thread topic, I think that making scenarios based on movies is not too realistic. We have enough problems, economic, polluted waters, possible pandemics, natural disasters, that are more probable. Surviving these types of things (personal apocalypse) is something that would be more worthwhile to prepare for. Then the other things could be addressed after these more likely things have been adequately addressed.

 

There are several sorts of survival. You have individual, tribal, racial and species. The big rock that ended the era of the dinosaurs is a species level extinction event. It really doesn't matter what you did if you were on this planet your chances of surviving, if you were much bigger than the mouse and generally lived on dry land, was nearly ZERO.

I suspect that some form of Homo-sapiens would survive as a species if we had a full-on nuclear war. Individual survival and even tribal survival would be mostly a matter of luck. If you are too close to ground zero you die then. As you move away from ground zero your chances of short term survival increase. As the radiation is spread you are going to get dosed. Some people seem to die at low doses and others live on. This is true all the way up to the point where everybody dies. Some people seem to live long after they are exposed as if they have some sort of immunity or at least partial resistance. Unless you can go DEEP underground and stay there for a long long time you will just have to take your chances. Over time this may make a change in what exactly is a human. Long term exposure to high radiation counts is going to have an effect.

Global warming has happened many times. In general, it causes large death rates and in species that have become too specialized, it may end that species. In general, in the past, that type of global warming was not a worldwide species extinction event.

There have been ice ages where the polar ice came down and met the Antarctic ice. Basically, all land-based life above bacterial was wiped out. These snowball planet periods were usually ended by a period of extreme vulcanization. The weight of the ice evidently will eventually reach the point where it cracks the crust and magma comes gushing out along with a lot of gases and that ends that for a while.

Germs and viruses whether man-made or naturally occurring are another sort of individual species event. Generally speaking, no disease has a true 100% kill rate. There is some speculation that the Black Plagues stopped simply because over time it killed everyone that wasn't either immune to it or at least resistant to it. Even a 99% death rate would leave 50 million people alive. Through my Mother's side of the family, we are basically immune or highly resistant to smallpox. The entire family had it back in the 30s and none were really sick. They were quarantined for 6 weeks but none of them died or were all that sick.

There are actually several astronomical events that could wipe all life off the surface of the Earth. Our sun could change its output and either up or down could do the deed. A nearby star going supernova could fry us all. This list is massive and honestly not worth worrying about. If it happens it is over and there isn't anything much that we can do about most of it.

When it comes to wars, cultural collapse or any sort of thing that is basically people going crazy and killing anyone that isn't their little group has been sadly common throughout history. All over the world, there are ruins and cities that seem to have thrived and then poof abandoned those places. Why would a people that lived in a land of endless wealth decide that they needed to load up and go several thousand miles to invade and kill a bunch of people that they didn't know and had done nothing to them? I think that periodically people just go CRAZY!!!

Survival is 50% preparation before something happens, 15% reacting first and fast to a situation, 10% just stubborn hardheaded meanes and refusal to surrender to the problem and 25% just baldfaced LUCK.

 

Whatever kind of apocalypse happens there will be a very large element of chance involved in surviving it.
A massive asteroid/meteorite impact would be a good bet for suddenly wiping out all life on Earth, if something like the Gulf of Mexico strike happened now there is not really much you can do to mitigate the effects.