The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.
Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all – no one's around to write horror stories.
The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.
Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.
If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.
We will soon create intelligences greater than our own ... When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.