The recent trend of doomsday prepping is a paranoid, and sometimes even laughable, affair. It’s on par with the belief in a zombie apocalypse. It is, however, more practical in that it requires things like food stockpiling and various forms of training. In the chance of an apocalyptic event, this multi-purpose jacket doesn’t just make you look crazy – it keeps you alive.

It’s a design by recent Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Marie-Elsa Batteux Flahault. She calls this ensemble the On The Edge jacket; of what, were not sure – the world or your sanity. Besides presumably blocking UFO tractor beams, it carries a multitude of functions. There’s a visor for eye protection. Parts of the collar and surrounding areas inflate for a floatation device. Its fold-out orange flaps alert those around you to the impending (or your own mental) demise.

At its most practical, the waistline unfolds and turns into a NASA blanket-style wrap, and the hood contains diagrams on how to use the drawstring as a food trap. At its most crazy, one of the sleeves contains a switch blade, most likely for use with fighting off all the post-apocalyptic rape squads, and the same diagram shows how to use the drawstring for self-defense.

Flahault’s personal philosopy almost perfectly reflects that of the jacket. “For me the jacket is the image of a movement,” she said in a recent Dezeen interview. “All kinds of equipment could be featured in the jacket. I chose the jacket to show this principle but the way I see it, it could be applied to a whole range of objects.”

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There was a time not terribly long ago when most people assumed the world would end within their lifetime. In fact, between the Cold War, Y2K, 9/11 and various other incidents, several doomsdays have come and gone just in the last 60 years. To prepare for this eventuality, many families and communities around the world decided to build shelters to wait out the end of the world. While it never came (or hasn’t yet come), their handiwork stands to remind us all of just how frightening those times were.

Photographer Richard Ross spent five years touring the world, taking photographs of bomb shelters meant to save their inhabitants from the apocalypse. The above photos are from Ross’ book Waiting for the End of the World; they show one of the more interesting locations: Emigrant, Montana. There, a group of people from the Elizabeth Clare Prophet Church built a shelter fit for 90 families because they believed the world would end on March 15, 1990.

Of course, the world did not, in fact, end on that day. The shelter was full to capacity on March 15, and when the end never came, everyone simply left unscathed. Although it’s still maintained by Charlie Hull and some volunteers, the shelter is no longer needed as the church no longer believes the end is coming in the foreseeable future.

Shelters are built for many different reasons, but the one overarching reason is a perceived threat of some kind. The shelter above was built by and for a family in Salt Lake City, Utah. Their perceived threat is the nearby airport; the family believes that being located near an airport automatically makes their home a target for terrorist attacks.

Although the shelters have, so far, been little more than expensive holes in the ground, who knows what the future may bring? Will we all one day wish we’d had the foresight to sock away years’ worth of supplies in a safe place? Or, when the end of the world comes, will it come with such force that a reinforced box in the ground simply won’t make a difference? Until then, these bomb shelters offer a bit of morbid nostalgia for those of us who have lived through some of the various predicted Armageddons.

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With all the talk about global warming and climate change, ongoing wars, and Earth’s recent surprise brush with an asteroid, it’s no wonder that so many people are concerned about the future of humanity. Given the panicked responses to the completely fictional marketing campaign for the movie 2012 (so panicked, in fact, that Sony was forced to clarify that it was fictional), it’s safe to say that the continuation of the human species is a subject near and dear to most of our hearts. Here are just a few of the creative ways humanity plans to save itself from the various apocalypses in our future.

Conceived by Robert Shapiro and William E. Burrows, the Alliance to Rescue Civilization calls for an ark full of human knowledge to make its way to the moon for safe keeping. A hard disk of all human knowledge would be buried beneath the surface of the moon in a secure vault in case of Armageddon. But that’s only the first phase of the plan – later phases include establishing a colony of humans on the moon and setting up radio transmitting towers that will send information to Earth radios on how to survive after doomsday.

If we can’t escape Earth, we can at least do our best to protect it. Believe it or not, scientists spend a good amount of time trying to figure out how to keep asteroids from hitting the planet and wiping us out dinosaur-style. Some of the top 10 methods: nuclear bombs, solar sails, giant nets and rockets.

The Long Now Foundation was founded in 1996 (or 01996 in LNF terms) with the goal of shifting our thinking to the long term. The idea is that, if we act on the assumption that we are making decisions that will affect us 10,000 years in the future, we might think twice about burning that pile or tires or killing more endangered rhinos. Their most well-known project is a ten-millennial clock, but one of their other initiatives is the Rosetta Project. The Rosetta Project aims to preserve all “endangered” languages on the planet by engraving samples of each language onto a metal disk.

Geoengineering – or “planet hacking” – is getting some serious attention from scientists and the US military. The plan is basically to artificially change the planet’s climate to counteract the effects of global warming and natural climate change. That can be done through adding materials to the atmosphere or changing the composition of the oceans or the land.

If all else fails, just rebuild. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is meant, in part, to help guard against a worldwide food shortage. In the vast underground vault are over 400,000 types of seeds, along with large stores of some seeds to replenish crops in the event of a large-scale agricultural crisis.

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