How is America going to end? Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" lets you map out the death of the United States. - By Josh Levin - Slate Magazine

How is America going to end? Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse"!

A few of the best ways for it to all come to a screeching halt:

13. Peak Oil: Petroleum production reaches terminal decline. Oil becomes too expensive to extract, and alternative energies can't maintain our fossil-fuel-dependent lifestyle. The developed world goes kaput, with gas-happy America leading the way to the gutter.

14. Peak Water: The overpopulated, overheated Southwest runs out of H20, instigating mass migration to Canada.

19. Geothermal Energy: In the post-petroleum age, we generate electricity by drilling into the Earth's interior to extract stored heat; we drill too deeply, causing massive earthquakes.

20. Nuclear Waste: Yucca Mountain and other nuclear storage facilities begin to leak radioactive waste. Everyone gets cancer.

26. Math and Science: American math and science aptitude deteriorates, killing innovation in the tech sector and pushing America to the back of the line of post-industrial economies.

27. Intelligent Design: Creationists succeed in getting evolution pushed out of textbooks. Scientific illiteracy dooms America to second-class status.

51. Supercollider: Legend has it that Switzerland's Large Hadron Collider could generate "mini black holes" that devour the universe. Turns out that idea was based on faulty science. But maybe the people who discovered the faulty science were themselves using faulty science. Eh, probably not.

104. Megadrought: According to Mark Lynas' Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, if the world gets one degree warmer, the Great Plains are at risk of turning into an expanse of sand dunes. Bad news for American agriculture (and everyone who lives in Nebraska).

105. Climate Migration: Refugees from Mexico, the Southwest, and coastal cities flee the devastation wrought by climate change, overwhelming the American cities that remain healthy.

109. Bottled Water: We continue to drink the stuff in prodigious amounts, and all the phthalates in the bottles cause massive health problems, including infertility.

I vote for the bottled water getting us all in the end.  Oh, the irony.