Reply #14: I posted this on another thread but it seems apropos

[Generic Other]

I really believe that the end of the world will come by accident. This piece by Douglas Coupland is prophetic. While he imagines a rapture with no people, the opposite of what we are seeing, he too agrees with T's theory that a screw-up caused everything go down domino style.

The End of the World"(or The Seven Days of UNcreation)©AdBusters 39 (Jan/Feb 2002)
Douglas Coupland
1

It's noon, Thursday, Eastern Daylight Time, and every human being on Earth has just vanished in one huge and completely unselective rapture. Had there been any warning, people might have parked their cars on the roadside or landed their planes, but no, so immediately the world's roads become flaming wreckage-strewn ribbons, while crashed jets punctuate the landscape with fireballs.To witness the scene around, say, a freeway circling Dallas, Texas, one would have the impression of a landscape on which 10,000 black tethers have been lashed to the sky.And then things go quiet, at least for a few minutes -- the quietest few minutes the planet has known for centuries, but this doesn't last long, as everything has been left running. Dams continue to generate electric current, and gas pipes continue to deliver gas and fuel rods remain inserted in their cores. Gas stoves, heating systems, security lasers and Bunsen burners cause houses, businesses, prisons and hotel rooms the world over to burst into flames, followed by oil wells and forests and, most critically, nuclear power stations, beginning with less sophisticated and undermaintatined models in the former Soviet Union, as well as those on the Asian subcontinent. The smoke they produce is certainly thick, but the isotopes they release into the jet stream and air sheds is in levels inconceivable to even the most nuclear-paranoid.By midnight, most of the Northern Hemisphere fares slightly better in an On the Beach sort of way, but the mist of angry isotopes from the north begins arriving around the 24-hour mark.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/s/a/saw23/STS100/EotW.html