Alternative Fun Facts: The End of Humanity (No Regrets)

Spoiler Alert: This time, the column that invents facts to spice up your day tells you how it all ends | Fiction | Fresh Soup

Illustration By Anilyanik

There are moments in history when a technological invention bursts into the world and all of humanity watches with a mixture of appreciation and fear: appreciation of its huge potential, and fear of the equally huge danger that lurks within it.

Atomic energy, artificial intelligence, and human cloning are just a few examples of promising inventions that can give humanity so much—but can also take everything away. And so imagine the surprise when it turned out that the human race was not destroyed by a groundbreaking innovation that made headline news, but because of a lousy feature meant to improve user experience. The reason you’ll have to imagine the surprise, or invent it, is that less than a minute after this calamitous feature was launched, there was no longer anyone left to be surprised.