It seems the human race just can't catch a break. When we're not navigating earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, there are threats of World War III, potential AI uprisings, and meteors poised to wipe us out.
If all of that wasn't enough to deal with, supposed mystics like Baba Vanga and Nostradamus have a variety of other predictions to keep us up at night.
As the world still reels from the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists have warned that a much worse one could be just around the corner.
The World Health Organization reports that there have been 7,098,440 deaths since the start of COVID-19, and while you think it might be completely gone, that includes another 183 deaths around the globe in the past seven days.
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Scientists are always warning about a new virus that threatens to throw us back into those long lockdown summers, but now, the health world's ears have pricked up again.
After already covering the bat-born Nipah virus that could apparently wipe out all of mankind, the next big concern comes from the stars.
As reported by The Express, Barry DiGregorio, an honorary research fellow at Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology, warns that our upcoming missions to Mars could be deadly.
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Elon Musk is planning to colonize Mars, but according to DiGregorio, we could see astronauts die 'live on air' due to deadly pathogens we can't yet predict.
The official NASA site reiterates how it wants to send humans to Mars in the 2030s, but ahead of this, its canceled Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission was supposed to give us insight before then. After President Trump canceled the mission, it's hoped that lower-cost alternatives can soon replace MSR.
DiGregorio fears what we'll bring back to Earth, feeling like the plot of 2017's sci-fi horror movie called Life.
Referring to 1976's Viking Mars lander mission, he explained: "I believe samples from Mars could lead to a pandemic because Gilbert Levin discovered life on Mars during the Viking missions.
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"The environmental conditions of Mars are so vastly different than here on Earth that any life that adapted to those conditions could be completely different to anything that we understand."
DiGregori says that Levin was always opposed to bringing back samples, and looking further ahead, warned: "Lately they've been finding examples of extremophiles in areas where they put spacecraft before they're sent to the planets, and they've discovered a whole new line of extremophiles here on Earth that they never knew existed before.
“Therefore we have been sending all our rovers and landers to Mars without a complete sterilisation.
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"We were sending to Mars from Earth the type of extremophiles that can survive in very hardy places."
Just like we're in danger of 'contaminating' Mars, DiGregori foreshadows us contaminating Earth in the same way.
Saying that we could inadvertently trigger a pandemic "worse than Covid” within the next decade is a truly frightening notion.
In terms of how to combat this, DiGregori says we need to send up more life detection rovers, concluding: "You don't want to send them to become human petri dishes."
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With the human race seemingly determine to head to the Red Planet, expect this to be just the start of the problems.