Throughout the majority of my life I have dreaded and rationalised the viabilities of five key perceived threats to the survival of our species: global pandemics, nuclear war, meteor impacts, mega-thrust earthquakes, and super volcanoes. A global pandemic always seemed the most likely of the bunch to happen in my lifetime (which is funny because Covid-19 still caught me totally off guard). I’ve always thought of a nuclear holocaust as a world-destroying Sword of Damocles that hangs over our heads at all times; we’ve just somehow trained our psyches to pretend it’s not really there. Meteor impacts and mega-thrust quakes are similar to one another in that we know they’ve happened before and that they’ll happen again, only we don’t know where and we don’t know when. It’s kind of the same deal with the Yellowstone super volcano, only we totally know where it will blow. I’ve driven across the vast caldera, hiked around it, even slept on it many, many times — it feels very much alive and potentially lethal. This explainer video from Real Life Lore explores what would happen if it erupted tomorrow.