All hail the beginning of the end.

Fire and ice are both quite nice, but they're definitely not the only ways to go -- especially if you consider all the recent popular "artistic" interpretations of our entire civilization's untimely, if not entirely undeserved, demise. The following is by no means a complete list:

All the movies involving comets, asteroids, or meteors crashing into the Earth and blowing everything up: Armageddon is the go-to one, but I could also list an entire slew of other, equally bad, over-CGIed movies about things exploding near or inside the earth such as Deep Impact, Asteroid, or Judgement Day. I suppose I would also have to mention Sunshine in this category, although I think this movie shows a little more class and restraint than your usual run-of-the-mill, everyone-is-going-to-die action/slasher flick.

All the movies featuring civilization getting wiped out by some other semi-natural or atomic disaster: Noteworthy mentions include the universally reviled The Postman, The Sum of All Fears, Waterworld, The Core (which laughably depicts a scenario in which the Earth's core has to be restarted....), and, of course, The Day After Tomorrow, the pinnacle of all disaster films, which simply features every single natural disaster happening at the same time. Brilliant! Children of Men is the standout in this category.

All the movies featuring civilization getting wiped out because of a zombie infestation. Or possible a vampire infestation. Or both. It seems like the zombie movies are coming out of the woodwork, no pun intended...28 days Later, Dawn of the Dead, Resident Evil, all the remakes and parodies and sequels thereof...and I am Legend, the new Will Smith movie, which is actually based on a decently good book and is therefore even more tragic because of it.

Jared Diamond's Collapse, which is a systematic analysis of the end of times of some of the world's greatest civilizations.

Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, a book about what would happen to the earth once all humans are gone.

The Wikipedia has a very exhaustive list of all disaster films.

Do we simply have an unhealthy obsession with our own inevitable demise? Maybe perhaps, because we feel like we deserve such a fate? Although, who knows, this might be nothing new. Maybe this has all been done before. I mean, the Apocalypse as a Biblical term used to just refer to a "revelation," and somehow during the Medieval period, it became synonymous with "the end of times" and the development of Satan as a foil for God -- so, maybe, the Catholic Church actually invented the genre. Who knew that such a power mechanism could go on to produce such universally despicable and tasteless drivel for the entertainment of the masses?

Actually, that's pretty much a given, isn't it...