Noah's Ark

Ahh, Noah’s Ark, a story so heavily ground into my head from nine years of Catholic School that I have no need to look it up prior to posting this. Unsatisfied with the results of his work, God throws a fit and decides to flood the world, but he lets the teacher’s pet (Noah) in on it, telling him to build an ark and gather two of every animal in the world as well as his family into said vessel. I cannot help but wonder if he managed to forget a few creatures or how he managed to gather organisms from areas like Antarctica, but I’ll let that slide for now. Anyway, people call Noah insane, but he continues building the boat. As told, he gathers his family and the animals into the boat, and God floods Earth. Forty or so days pass, and then Noah releases a bird to find land. It fails, so he sends a dove instead, which does in fact come back with a branch, thus signifying that the flood is ending. As they walk out of the boat, God creates a rainbow, promising never to flood the earth again. The most interesting part of this story, in my opinion, is its actual historical significance. Many religions do in fact have stories about the world flooding. Hindu, Greek, and Chinese mythology all include similar tellings of great floods. As a result, the great flood myth has actually become one of the more accredited myths to have come about, and it has become a source of debate over historical scholars as to whether such an event could possibly have taken place. I personally believe that this world will end in fire, more specifically, war (although, being consumed by the sun is another possibility). Throughout all of history, humans have constantly tried to outdo humans of other groups by creating larger, more powerful weapons so as to prove a supposed superiority. For the majority of our existence, this arms race was limited solely to picking off individual humans, but in the past 200 years, that has changed drastically. It began with the invention of explosives, weapons that could take out hundreds of people at a time, and it only grew worse from there. Explosives, while extraordinarily powerful, had their limits, and when the U.S. grew tired of such limits, they developed something that would forever change the face of warfare and political: the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb was capable of leveling entire cities in an instant, and with it, the U.S. believed it was truly invincible. That is, until Russians managed to replicate this feat, and suddenly, the U.S., and the rest of the world, felt quite a bit less secure. Fast forward to half-a-century later, and now nearly every first-world country barring Japan has access to such weaponry, and some have “improved upon” the atomic bomb’s destructive capacity. As such weapons become more and more commonplace, poorer areas will gain access to them (as we have already seen with North Korea), and given how common strife between countries in such areas is (thanks to western intervention), one can only hope that those countries will have more self-control than the U.S. did during World War II, or else the world truly will end in an atomic, hellish fire. Note: I apologize for the lack of formatting; the computer I currently have access to is unable to view the "compose" option, and I am thus forced to work with HTML formatting, which I am not at all used to.