The end of summer is a little depressing, even for 9 to 5ers who have spent much of it inside. There’s a sense that something slipped away--a leisurely sojourn by the beach that never really happened, an outdoors adventure that was postponed indefinitely, or a connection missed.

So I suppose the impending doom of much colder weather--in most of the U.S. anyway--and school-related responsibilities has us feeling a little skeptical about the future. And all this talk of double-dip recessions doesn’t help either.

But there’s definitely something dark in the water, and it’s not oil. On Scientific American’s website, there’s a thoroughly depressing interactive feature packaged as part of their “The End” issue that attempts to catalogue some things that seem likely to disappear in the next 10 or 200 years. Things like copper, water, and most mammals. Almost 18% of mammals look likely to disappear at some point in the near future, for example, which has prompted a comparison between present day species loss and truly catastrophic extinctions like the Permian-Triassic event that obliterated an approximate 90% of species on Earth. Our own species elimination is predicted to be up to 20% by century’s end. Hardly meteoric but deadly nonetheless. Then there’s the limits to our own population. We’re not likely to go away, but the water and food we consume will dip down steadily as resources fade, particularly fresh water.

Then there’s the question of time. An article by George Musser in the same issue of Scientific American discusses a more fundamental eschaton. Einstein, of course, left us with a conundrum. Time draws to a stop at the center of a black hole, or during the collapse of the universe. Yet, according to his theory of general relatively, such singularities cannot occur. As a result, time can’t actually stop, it can only suffer a gradual decay. But this knowledge won’t stop us from speculating on what might happen in the event of an event to end all events.

Scientific American isn’t alone in its doomsday musings. Just last week, Wired Magazine predicted the end of the Internet. The end of oil is a topic touched upon by just about every news major news outlet. 2012 pushed the "doom movie" notch a little higher despite lacking most of the qualities that determine good cinema. Discovery Channel has done its own dramatic analysis of end times by predicting what portions of the planet would perish first once the sun spends all of its fuel and begins expanding. Apparently, we’ll enter the deep freeze shortly before the atmosphere is cooked away, leaving a barren, cold world.

Don’t dwell on it too much, but there’s probably a good reason for this preoccupation. Never mind peak oil: the Earth is already on the downward slide. In 2003, University of Washington researchers noted that the planet is already devolving into a “burned-out cinder” that will be swallowed by the sun. In other words, we’re past middle age, and since we have less than the 4.5 billion years it took use to get this far remaining, it’s best to make good use of our time.

Chances are, however, none of us will see this come to pass as we will have long since used up our natural resources and moved on to greener pastures. And as Thomas Kirkwood points out in yet another feature for “the end” issue at Scientific American, we can’t live forever. So be sure to check your death clock.