Humanity as we know it is doomed. You already knew that. After a lifetime of disaster movies, you're at least mentally prepared for nuclear war, asteroid strikes, raging pandemics, or the very real possibility that all of the planet's cockroaches will combine into a single Voltron-esque mega-roach. And that's why you'll be totally blindsided when the real disasters hit. Like ...

5 A Single Red Fungus Could Starve A Third Of The World

Via Rusttracker.org

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Wheat accounts for a full third of our global caloric intake. It comes in second only to rice on the Most Important Crops list (which we as a site are like two bad ideas away from writing). So you can imagine the panic that ensued when a little red fungus known as stem rust showed up back in the 1950s and devastated 40 percent of the North American crop. Luckily, science stepped in and developed rust-resistant varieties of wheat, thereby ensuring that the primary vehicle for peanut butter delivery kept on chugging.

The problem? The same way that bacteria are learning new ways to overcome antibiotics, thereby threatening to send medicine back to the leech 'n chop days, wheat rust too is learning to overcome.

U.S. Dept. of Agriculture

Really good for wheat rust's character arc; less good for sandwich enthusiasts.

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Back in 1999, Uganda experienced the first outbreak of a new strain of stem rust. Designated Ug99 for the year it was discovered, this harmless-looking red fuzz can decimate a crop in short order. And researchers have determined that nearly all wheat strains in the world are susceptible to it.

If you're thinking that this is happening way over in Uganda and therefore you needn't be the least concerned about it, then first of all: Hello, fellow American! And second of all, since its discovery, Ug99 has spread to almost a dozen countries and shows no signs of slowing. A single hectare of Ug99-infected wheat can release more than 10 billion spores, and it would take only a single spore hitching a ride on a single human to spread this to the United States and transform our amber waves of grain into red wastelands. And that's when you'll discover that when a loaf of bread is worth its weight in gold, everybody is gluten-free.