[The text below represents an edited transcript of this Tomorrow’s World program.]
Facing 5 Existential Threats—and WW3?
Almost 2,000 years ago Jesus Christ gave a dire warning: Mankind would eventually bring all life on earth to the point of extinction, and that only His return would prevent that catastrophe.
The fulfillment of this prophecy seemed impossible until the end of World War II, when the first weapons of mass destruction were deployed against Japan.
Yet in the decades that have followed, the ways in which humanity could commit planet-wide suicide have only increased, as the future Jesus prophesied has only become more realistic, not less.
Many individuals who call themselves Christian may not even realize that Jesus Christ gave us prophecies. But He did. Not only does God’s word specify that the entire prophetic book of Revelation is “the Revelation of Jesus Christ” (Revelation 1:1), but also inside that book, we’re told plainly that:
The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy (Revelation 19:10).
But while the book of Revelation gets a lot of attention, even during His three-and-a-half year ministry on earth—before His crucifixion—Jesus also gave us many prophetic pronouncements, especially of the years leading up to His second coming—years that lie immediately ahead of us.
For instance, Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21 related one of His longest discussions of the future, often called the Olivet Prophecy or the Olivet Discourse. And during that prophetic teaching, Jesus gave a dire warning concerning what lies ahead of us. Let’s read it in Matthew 24:22.
And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect’s sake those days will be shortened.
The specific context of the verse is the Great Tribulation, mentioned in Matthew 24:21—a period of years immediately preceding the Day of the Lord and the return of Jesus Christ.
Jesus’ statement should grab our attention. He says that unless God shortens the time—that is, unless God intervenes in human affairs and prevents us from continuing on that path—“no flesh would be saved.”
Jesus is saying that we will bring all of human life to the brink of utter destruction. His words “no flesh” suggest a level of absolute devastation and decimation that is truly hard to fathom—the planet-wide, species-wide, suicidal self-destruction of mankind.
Existential Threat 1: Nuclear War
And when He first spoke those words in the first century, they may have been even harder to fathom.
But they became very real in the twentieth century—specifically in 1945.
On August 6 the United States dropped its newly developed atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in a bid to end World War II and force a Japanese surrender. A second bomb followed three days later, decimating the city of Nagasaki. Death tolls are hard to tally accurately, but the immediate destruction and firestorms of both bombs together killed between 100,000 to 150,000 immediately, with thousands more dying in the weeks to follow from radiation, burns, and injuries.
After dropping the first bomb, President Harry Truman addressed the American people, saying:
“If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”
While the justification for those bombs is still debated, one thing was clear: Mankind had learned to tap into some of the most primal forces of nature and unleash them in the most destructive ways imaginable.
Suddenly, Jesus’ warning about a world in which “no flesh” would be saved had become a real possibility.
And that nuclear possibility has only grown more real as the years have passed. We’ve moved from atomic bombs to thermonuclear missiles—each one with far greater destructive power than unleashed on Japan. In fact, the largest thermonuclear device ever detonated, the Soviet Union’s “Ivan of Vanya,” commonly known as Tsar Bomba, yielded an explosion 3,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped over Hiroshima—and it was detonated at only half of its designed yield.
And the number of weapons, as well as the countries possessing them, has multiplied greatly. In 2025, the nonprofit Arms Control Association reviewed the number of warheads believed to be possessed by nine nations and estimated the total to be 12,400 nuclear warheads.
Some are waiting to be dismantled, yet almost 10,000 are still in military service, waiting for the button to be pressed. A 2008 study reported by Physics Today estimated that a nuclear war involving an exchange of fewer than half of those weapons “would [initially] generate 770 million casualties”—but that would only be the beginning.
What follows for survivors would be worse. In 2022, in its food and nutrition-focused journal, Nature examined the impact of the soot generated by burning cities and forests in a nuclear exchange, and found that “more than 5 billioncould die from a war between the United States and Russia” alone, due to the famine that would follow.
Existential Threat 2: Biological Weapons
We’ve already discussed thermonuclear war. Now consider the threat of biological weapons.
We might think of biological warfare as a recent invention when, in fact, it goes back centuries. Research from Baylor University Medical Center documented its many uses in antiquity, such as when:
- the Tartar forces catapulted the corpses of plague victims over the city walls of Caffa
- the Spanish mixed wine with the blood of leprosy patients to sell to their French enemies
- British personnel gave blankets from smallpox patients to Native Americans in the New World
- confederates in the U.S. Civil War sold clothing from yellow fever and smallpox patients to Union troops
In the modern era, weapons became more sophisticated as biological agents such as anthrax were deployed.
Yet now we face a world in which we are able to design and weaponize bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens at the genetic level.
If the danger of such a possibility is not obvious, simply think back to the COVID-19 pandemic. While theories abound, it is now a broadly-considered-feasible concept that the virus may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan after being enhanced for the sake of advanced study.
Even if this were not the case, the ability of a virus to run rampant globally should get our attention. But now imagine a scenario in which such pathogens are actively and purposefully enhanced for the sake of warfare.
Yes, the international Biological Weapons Convention is intended to prevent such development, but compliance is hard to verify, the technology increasingly makes the manufacture of weaponized diseases easier and easier, and when push comes to shove, who trusts the leaders of the world to abide by such agreements?
The 2026 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community states that “biological warfare capabilities continue to grow.”
During the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the bubonic plague is estimated to have killed between 30% and 60% of Europe’s population. Thankfully, mankind has learned many things since then, but the potential of a biological pathogen—scientifically engineered for lethality and transmission—posing a real, existential threat for humanity cannot be ignored, especially when the Bible prophesies of devastating end-time diseases and pestilences, pictured by the infamous fourth horseman of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Of course, the world’s wars aren’t staying within the confines of biology. With advances in artificial intelligence, fictional scenarios of advanced robotic and autonomous weaponry run amok suddenly seem to be within the realm of possibility. Now, to be sure, those concerns are real, and they are discussed by policy makers. And some of the images painted by the visions of the book of Revelation, such as the locust-like craft or weapon swarms of Revelation 9, could be connected to drone technology or other A.I.-powered machinery.
Existential Threat 3: AI Superintelligence
But believe it or not, the picture painted by A.I. experts is even more dire than out of control weapon systems. Next in our list of mankind’s self-created existential threats is A.I. Superintelligence—that is, A.I. that is vastly more intelligent in important ways than human beings.
There’s a lot to say about this, and it’s a little hard to summarize. In fact, if you haven’t seen our program asking, “Will A.I. Save Us or Destroy Us?”, I encourage you to visit YouTube.com/TomorrowsWorld and look it up.
But suffice it to say that, as A.I. gets smarter and more capable, we are handing it the keys to more aspects of our lives. From driving new cars to creating new designer drugs, the capacity of A.I. is only growing, and it is beginning to solve more and more problems that have historically stumped human beings. In fact, there is every reason to expect A.I. will soon outpace us and become superintelligent—not alive, yet capable of solving problems, reasoning, and planning vastly better than human beings can. As they do, we will want to give A.I. systems more and more control over our lives and various facets of our infrastructure.
Yet, we’ve also discovered that A.I. often has secret goals that conflict with ours—again, not because it is alive, but because it is not really “built” so much as “grown” or “trained.” And when A.I. has exhibited values that are in direct opposition with ours—such as routinely showing itself in tests as being willing to lie, cheat, blackmail, or even kill to achieve its own goals—that behavior is never completely rooted out, only suppressed, so that it learns to “behave.”
But the dangers remain.
How serious are those dangers? Well, in 2025, A.I. researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares were very plain on the subject.
“If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die” (If Anyone Builds It, Everyone dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All; Yudkowsky, E. and Soares, N.; p. 7).
Their 2025 book is appropriately titled, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.
Now you might think, “OK, aren’t you being a little dramatic?”
Well, the A.I. community itself doesn’t think so. In fact, in 2023, the heads of A.I. at Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic, as well as many others, united in publishing a single, simple statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Dario Amodei, the CEO of A.I. company Anthropic has written in detail of his concerns, saying:
“Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.”
Worried that the interest in A.I. opportunities was clouding concern about A.I. risk, he wrote that:
“We are considerably closer to real danger in 2026 than we were in 2023.”
Apparently, being wiped out by a robot overlord who has decided that humanity is not needed in its plans is increasingly no longer the domain of pure science fiction.
Of course, perhaps we can count on the wisdom and self-control of all the individuals and nations who stand to profit from constantly pushing A.I. forward, knowing that they have humanity’s safety and best interests at heart.
Then again, maybe we’d keep an eye on it.
Existential Threat 4: Global Infrastructure Collapse
Our fourth existential risk is global infrastructure collapse.
Modern civilization is remarkably interdependent—kept running by multiple fragile and vulnerable systems. Our grocery stores depend on trucking, refrigeration, fuel, packaging, electronic payments, and farms often hundreds or thousands of miles away. Our hospitals depend on electricity, clean water, specialized medicines, disposable equipment, global manufacturing, and just-in-time deliveries. Even a gallon of gasoline or a loaf of bread rests on hidden networks most of us never see.
That global web of interdependencies is one of the wonders of the modern world. It’s how you can have bananas from Guatemala, grapes from Chile, and salmon from Norway, all fresh and ready to buy and eat in one grocery store in Texas. It’s how oil from a pump in the Middle East turns into fuel for cars in New Zealand, and school children in England work on computers made from materials produced in China, Taiwan, and South Korea.
But the system is fragile and vulnerable.
When COVID-19 hit, the resulting global supply chain problems illustrated just how fragile this spiderweb of dependencies truly is. Pull at a thread in China, and shelves begin to empty thousands of miles away.
Still, the COVID supply chain problems were small comparing to a true collapse. The systems we have created are brilliant, but brittle. A team of hackers intent on causing global chaos, an EMP blast, or an unexpected solar flare that is just a touch greater than we were ready for—any of these can disrupt satellites, communication systems, internet connections, power grids, food distribution, water supplies—all the systems that make modern life livable would disappear.
Perhaps such an event, by itself, may not seem like a “no flesh will be saved” scenario. But it would take mankind into that territory.
Existential Threat 5: Breakdown of Bioengineered Food, Ecosystems
For our fifth existential threat, consider the risk of engineered ecological breakdown. Like our last threat, this one is related to man’s hubris, but with a twist. Because in these scenarios, mankind is often trying to accomplish something good.
Examples of this in the natural world are legion. For instance, in 1935 cane toads were introduced into Australia from Hawaii as a natural way to control sugar cane beetles. But the toad population began to explode on the continent—while mostly ignoring the beetles. And today, more than 90 years later, cane toads are still spreading in Australia—resistant to eradication, producing toxins that poison native predators and damage ecosystems. That is just one example.
Now multiply such interventions into our environment by the full power of new scientific advancements. For instance, some speak of engineering bacteria that can breakdown pollutants or digest hydrocarbons, allowing us to spray them over oil spills and clean the seas or oceans. To control global warming, scientists have suggested spraying particulates into the atmosphere to help darken the skies and reflect more sunlight away from the earth.
To combat malaria, dengue, and other insect-borne sickness, researchers have suggested genetically modifying mosquitos so they no longer spread the diseases.
But others sound the warning against tampering with forces we do not completely understand. What happens when bacteria designed to consume hydrocarbons adapt and begin consuming other sorts of materials in the wild? And what effects would darkening our atmosphere have on agriculture and weather cycles? Can we really fine tune such global interventions? As for altering the genetics of mosquitos, what happens when our manmade genetic sequences become part of the broader ecosystem?
Even in our well-intentioned solutions, we suffer from one fatal flaw: We are not God.
In Isaiah 46:10 God describes Himself very plainly.
Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, “My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure.”
But that isn’t us. Man can’t look into the distant future to accurately understand the consequences of his decisions like God can. Man can’t comprehend what surprises the future may hold like God can.
And not only are we not God, we are also not in submission to Him. We don’t seek His guidance or His aid and don’t follow His instructions.
Ignoring the Creator of the world and seeking to modify our planet, and even life itself, on a global scale—as if WE are its Creator, based only on our OWN wisdom and knowledge—can only end one way: ruining the very life support He created and finely tuned to care for us.
No Flesh Shall Be Spared—Without God’s Intervention | Matthew 24:22
We’ve reviewed five ways life on earth could be threatened in the context of Jesus Christ’s prophecy of a time coming when “no flesh would be saved.”
- Thermonuclear War
- Biological Weapons
- AI Superintelligence
- Global Infrastructure Collapse
- Engineered Ecological Breakdown
Of course, we don’t have to pick a favorite, and humanity is capable of doing more than one of these at a time. In fact, some would say we’re currently working on all of them.
And, to be sure, this list is not complete. We haven’t even discussed more speculative challenges, such as runaway nanotechnology, the development of mirror-life organisms, and particle physics experiments that could run out of control.
While all of these command our attention, they should not cause us to despair, because humanity will not be destroyed by any of these things. Let’s read Jesus’ prophecy again in Matthew 24.
“And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect’s sake those days will be shortened” (Matthew 24:22).
Notice that He says no flesh would be saved if those days were not shortened, but “for the elect’s sake those days WILL be shortened.” That is marvelous news.
Yes, Jesus Christ will return to this world to take dominion, alongside His glorified followers, inaugurating the reign of the Kingdom of God. And the result of that reign—both due to miraculous intervention and simply the teaching and enforcing of God’s laws and way of life—will be a restoration of this world to the condition its Creator always intended.
Many passages in both the Old and New Testaments describe the wonders, sights, and sounds of that remarkable time.
Those inspired words of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, paint a vision a vision that has given hope to the followers of Jesus Christ for the last two thousand years.
And you need that vision now more than ever, so you can plant that vision of hope firmly in your mind—as our world gets ever closer to being on the brink of total annihilation. Make that vision of hope real by examining what God has revealed in His word about it.
So let’s take a tour of that marvelous world together in this next video, describing in detail what God has revealed in His word about the restoration of ALL things during the millennial reign of Jesus Christ.
