Mike Pearl is a journalist, author and screenwriter based in Los Angeles. He's been published in The Hollywood Reporter, The Awl, Grist, Death and Taxes, VICE's website and magazine, and VICE Motherboard's science fiction outlet known as Terraform.

Pearl has found a niche as an investigator of the seemingly absurd. His column "How Scared Should I Be?" attempted to quantify the scariness of the world's anxiety-inducing topics, like North Korea, gun ownership, the zika virus, and getting punched in the face. His second column, "Hours and Minutes" delved into the immediate implications of geopolitical meltdowns and war scenarios. Entires in both columns frequently attracted millions of readers.

The Day It Finally Happens is Pearl's first book.

If you live on planet Earth, you're probably scared about the future. Terrorism, complicated international relations, global warming, and a raft of other issues make it hard not to be.

But how close are we to the end? And what can we expect when we finally reach it?

In this hilarious, enlightening and often terrifying book, Pearl gives us a glimpse of the potential end of the world scenarios that could happen sooner than we think - from nuclear war to the end of antibiotics, discovering distant life to the realisation that all cemeteries are full. Weaving together his own research, alongside interviews with scientists and political thinkers, and visiting 'preppers', Pearl investigates how close we really are to the end of the world - and what we can expect when it finally happens. . .