You know what the end of civilization is going to be? It won't be nuclear war. It's not going to be the rapture or the events according to the book of Revelations. Mayan's 2012 predictions? Large Hadron Collider? Nope. None of the above.

It's going to be spam. Not the processed and packaged meat product that's become a staple in the diet of many Pacific Island Nations, that's had songs (well, one song) sung about it.

I mean the unsolicited mail, email, blog postings, thread comments, anything that clutters up and gets in the way. Eventually, it's going to grow and grow and grow, taking up too much space, to much bandwidth, too much of our natural resources, to the extent that everything will end.

Your email inbox will end up being nothing more than promises of financial reward and larger, better erections. You'll miss real emails from friends, co-workers, that actually matter. Bandwidth will be too busy pleading for your assistance for wealthy but beleaguered Nigerian Princes, that even Larry Flynt will ask the government for help-- and when the porn industry begs help from the Government, you know things are bad. You'll miss a work call that got changed and sent via email, so you'll lose your job.

But why will you lose your job? Surely they could have rung you, let you know that work was changed? Well, unfortunately spam began showing up on cell phones around 2009, to the extent that you stopped answering calls from numbers that were unavailable, or you didn't recognize. What should be a useful little device to keep you in touch with aforementioned friends and co-workers became nothing more than a useful little device for playing Bejewelled and Angry Birds on. When work tries to call you, because it comes from a larger corporation, the number that comes up doesn't show as your boss' number, so you don't answer it.

They can't even mail you, what with all the sale offers and coupon offers that come through the mailbox every day. While those things are keeping the post office in operation, what's the point when they're only keeping the post office in operation to send more of the things you don't read or want?

Eventually, it's going to get critical. Bloggers won't be able to blog any more because blogging is pretty narcissistic. And it's pretty hard to be narcissistic when you have to wade through hundreds of spam comments, again promising money and. . .other stuff. People will stop posting on YouTube because the spam, crappy comments will take up too much space on their servers. Facebook will crash, what with farmville and spartacus and pirate games clogging the service. Once Facebook's gone, we won't have any way of communicating, and the end will rapidly approach.

It might be another ten years off, or it might be six months from now, but spam will be the end of us all.

Mostly, I'd just like people to stop calling me with an 'unavailable' number popping up. And it would be nice if the spam blog comments would go, too.