Doomsday Book: The Science Behind Humanity’s Greatest Threats

Marshall Brain’s The Doomsday Book sets out to answer some of these questions and does so brilliantly. The book is divided into a series of short chapters, each of which tackles a possible doomsday scenario, a term here used to mean any event with the potential to cause widespread catastrophe in the form of death, destruction and/or economic effects. For each chapter, Brain theorises how likely each scenario is and how it might occur, the science at work behind it and what we can do to help prevent it. The sheer wealth of possibilities Brain presents in this book is a testament to how much research has gone into it, and every one of the 25 scenarios feels fleshed out and well presented.