That scholarly attention in both Europe and America turned to something that was labeled "collapsology" in 2015, and an academic volume of Futures in January 2023 listed the existing literature on "societal collapse" as 361 peer-reviewed articles and 73 books since 2010? That the Wikipedia entry on "Existential Risk Studies" has 670,000 links?  And that JSTOR, the basic digital library of academic journals worldwide, in 2020 listed 66,809 results for articles on "human extinction"–and in 2025 listed 153,885.

I don't know about you, but to me it suggests that a lot of smart folks are worrying about something the majority of people sense is in the deep background of life but most don't want even to think about,  much less confront:  Western civilization, and perhaps the whole of the world, faces an imminent end, with one possibility being a tragedy so vast—nuclear warfare, global overheating, overwhelming disease pandemics—that it ends human life on earth.  And only scholars care.