What if?

What if the end of the world happened in my lifetime?  What does that even mean?
I live where every other person eagerly awaits the apocalypse.  The day when a giant man descends from the clouds and scoops up the 144,000 then leaves the rest to there own devices as pawns of the ultimate evil.  When I'm feeling mean, I mention that it is possible that happened years ago, but nobody noticed, since 144,000 people going missing off the face of the planet would not make a blip on the radar.  Especially if it happened before electronics.

Here are some facts from the U.S. released in October 2002. (about missing people)

800,00 under 18 a years of age
2,000 a day
58,000 abducted by non family members
115 victims to stereotypical kidnappings that result in ransom demands and death or the kidnapper indents to keep the child.

Do you know any of these people?  I don't.  So what makes any of us think we would know 1 of the 144,000 prophecied to be raptured.
I have been told that number doesn't really mean that.  Something about a literal Jesus floating down out of the sky but a specific number is only a metaphor seems odd to me.  Talk about straining at gnats.
But I wasn't referring to the biblical apocalypse.  I was referring to A massive decrease of life as we know it.  What if a virus, a poison, an asteroid, a plate tectonic event, a human-created thing such as a weapon of mass destruction or just plain hard-headed polluting for the greed of the masses caused the planet to not be able to sustain but 1/10th the life that we presently have---or 1/100th?  What if it killed all the plants or all the one celled organisms of the ocean...or just the mammals.   What if it just made life very hard for 5 years---not depression-hard, breathing-hard, eating-hard. keeping our offspring alive more than a year-hard.  And it affected all species-plant, animal, insect, bacterial---what would that do to Wallstreet.  How would that affect the internet, and the Mall and prime-time TV.
Could humans adapt to that?  Could we keep us all alive?  Would we?
Politicians make statements that clearly indicate that keeping everyone alive is not the goal.  I'm not talking about in the event of a massive extinction-level disaster--I'm talking in regular day-to-day life.  The social darwinism mode is strong in certain parties.  "let the inferior of our species die off and it will improve all our lives"  The problem with that is the false theory that having a hard time with life is genetic.  For all we know, the impoverished illiterate mother of 5 is raising the next great medical research scientist---and because of his/her roots, she is motivated by the right things, not just money.
Humans have always assumed that the end of the world is the end of everything.  The idea that everything but humans continue on has never been considered in any end of the world movie.  I realize that there would be no actors and so no plot, not very interesting to watch.  But I'm betting the dinosaurs weren't setting around imagining a world without them either.
I am not eagerly awaiting the end.  I don't even wish for a depopulating event that puts us back to an earlier time and human saturation level.  I would like to think that we--humans--could quit being so egocentric as to think that we could not disappear from the planet without it being the end of the world.  We weren't here for most of the world's history.  The possibility that our own hubris will end us is not at all hard to imagine.  Most of the people I know couldn't feed themselves without a grocery store, couldn't keep warm without central heat and air and have no idea what to do with themselves without their electronics.  There are children that don't know where babies come from,  that have never seen a vegetable growing in a garden,  that don't know the difference between a polkberry and a blueberry.  We are so dependent upon the society we have created that most of us have no survival skills.
Add to that the strange human predator tendency--for the worst to rise to leadership positions and then tell others to do things that are only good for the ruling group, and we just get more of the same.  Are we humans doomed?  Is there something wrong with our species that makes them incapable of goodness, lovingness, peacefulness?  Maybe.
But we are now, not just warlike to our own species, we have the ability to take the planet back to a much earlier point in evolution, to take it back to insects or bacteria, or all the way back to the cosmic stew that started it all in the first place.  I hope we don't, I want to see my great-grandkids thrive and feel hopeful about their future.  But in the event we humans, with our big brains and creative urges and need to improve our own lives don't find a way to live together with all the other species including our own, then I hope the next round does a better job, maybe smarter but no thumbs or wiser and more loving, or just plain less self-centered.
Here's to hoping we can do better.