Started in June 2017, Pictures of the End has become an extremely successful Twitter account, amassing nearly 330k followers who are there to “witness the last era of humans and animals on Earth”. To learn more about how this hilarious and bizarre account came to be, we reached out to its creator on Twitter, who was kind enough to have a chat with Bored Panda. 

First, we wanted to know what inspired the page. “I have always enjoyed more ‘subtle’ memes, when you have to ‘get it’ to appreciate it,” the creator shared. “And I think this is part of what made me start an account, because I felt that was missing on Twitter. There are a lot of accounts posting funny photos, but they’re often mixed with ads and bad text memes. So I wanted to use my small collection and make my own account.” 

We were also curious if the creator of Pictures of the End actually thinks our time on this planet is running out. “I think we’re pretty close [to the end], yeah!” they told Bored Panda. “Relatively speaking. Everything in society and on our planet is fragile. It’s like a house of cards. Climate is at some sort of a tipping point, if we are to believe the scientists at NASA and other high profile institutions.” 

“The whole economy is basically built on three things: Trust, debt and excel sheets. And somehow we’re still letting politicians who often do not know anything except politics dictate our lives,” they explained. “We’ve seen many times over the past centuries that only one bad egg is enough to cause a lot of damage.”

We also wanted to know what qualifies as a “picture of the end”. “It has to be something that doesn’t really fit in,” the creator shared. “Something subtle, someone breaking the rules. Some weird arrangement. Bad design, animals in curious situations, things that don't add up.”

And when it comes to where these strange images come from, the creator noted that they find most of them online themself. They also have a few contributors who understand what exactly a “picture of the end” is, but many of the submissions the page receives don’t quite make the cut.

We also wanted to know if the creator has any favorite photos that they’ve ever featured on the page. “I have plenty!” they told Bored Panda. “One I can think of straight away is one of a woman cleaning the floor by hand in a iRobot store. That one got plenty of likes, if I remember correctly. It was pretty much a perfect picture for this account.”

And as far as the purpose of the account, well, that might be just as mysterious as many of its photos. “The goal of the account, I don’t know…” the creator told Bored Panda. “I was pretty happy the night #RIPTwitter trended, all the meme accounts posted their goodbyes,” they admitted. “It felt like a nice way to end things. Because that’s the goal I guess. The end.”

If you haven’t followed the page already, be sure to visit Pictures of the End on Twitter right here.

Depending on who you ask, the end of the world might seem very near, or eons away. But according to Science.org, there are a few potential threats that could lead to the end of the world, one of which being solar storms. The worst coronal mass ejection (or CME) that has occurred in recent history struck in 1989, knocking out a transformer in New Jersey and leaving 6 million people in Quebec, Canada without power. However, the Carrington Event of 1859, which gets its name from the British astronomer who witnessed the solar flare which accompanied, was up to 10 times more powerful. “It was awesome," Patricia Reiff, a space physicist at Rice University in Houston, Texas, told Science. But she warns that if another storm that size struck today's infrastructure, “There would be tremendous consequences."

Cosmic collisions are also a potential threat to the future of our planet. We’re all familiar with the 10-kilometer-wide asteroid that knocked out the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, but apparently, something much smaller could easily destroy humans. “The impact site would be obliterated, and massive earthquakes and tsunamis could radiate across the planet. But the lingering effects would prove most devastating,” Julia Rosen writes for Science. “Models suggest that, depending on the speed and angle of approach, an object as small as 1 kilometer wide could throw up enough pulverized rock to block out the sun for months. Adding to the pall would be soot from wildfires ignited by debris falling back to Earth.” Thankfully for us, an event such as this isn’t likely to occur for many more millions of years. 

Another possibility that could lead to the destruction of our planet is a super-volcano eruption. “A super-volcano is one that produces an explosive eruption of more than 450 cubic kilometers of magma—roughly 50 times more than the eruption of Indonesia's Mount Tambora in 1815, and 500 times more than the Philippines' Mount Pinatubo in 1991,” Rosen writes. Some locations where super-volcano eruptions could possibly occur are Toba, the Yellowstone hot spot in the United States, the Long Valley Caldera in California, the Taupo Volcanic Zone in New Zealand, and a few spots in the Andes. None of these pose an imminent threat, but if one of these bad boys were to blow, everything within a hundred kilometers or so would be incinerated, and ash would rain over continents.

Are you feeling positive about the end of the world, or has this list made you stressed and anxious about it? I have to admit that I’m feeling oddly at peace about our planet potentially blowing up any day now, because if we all go down, at least we’re all in it together. Keep upvoting the photos that you find particularly bizarre, and feel free to share your thoughts on the end of times in the comments below. Then, if you haven’t already, feel free to check out Bored Panda’s last article featuring Pictures of the End right here! (Hurry, read it soon! You never know how much time we have left!)