Not many do, these days, if they keep up with cosmology. The universe is not only not slowing down its expansion fast enough for that to happen, but something is making the expansion accelerate over time. That makes the Big Crunch look unlikely.
The expansion of the universe has nothing at all to do with earthquakes.
I don’t see how earthquakes could have anything to do with any plausible scenario for worldwide disaster. Well, a large asteroid impact could cause a global disaster, and would cause an earthquake as well, but that’s obviously not what’s happening now. Large earthquakes can trigger other earthquakes, but not to the degree you’d need to threaten life or even civilization all over the Earth. One earthquake triggering another is also not what seismologists think is happening now- they think this string of earthquakes is coincidental.
Actually, now that I look at the rest of the thread, proclaiming that a few earthquakes in a couple of months isn’t statistically significant… I’m not sure that this observation really is empirically valid. I really doubt that over a long period of time that this “Ring of Fire” hypothesis will really pan out.
Hypothesis? It’s not a hypothesis. The Ring of Fire is real. It’s a plate that happens to be surrounded by subduction zones well known for violent earthquakes and volcanism. What part of “90% of the world’s earthquakes occur around the Pacific plate” seems like a hypothesis to you?
Now when you say “over a long period of time”… that means very different things depending on whether you want to talk human time or geologic time. The entirety of human civilization to date and the foreseeable future as we know it (our lives, our children’s lives, and our great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren’s lives) will continue in exactly this fashion, yes. Now over a really long period of time, i.e. the next ~50-100 million years or so, things will change significantly as the plates continue to shift. But that seems almost beyond the scope of our concern, considering all of the other problems our civilization will have to deal with during this time period.
We do know there are eruptions on other planets,strikes by meteors etc.,since no one lives on those planets we can say it is just an act of nature, the way the planets work. No punishment by any God! There have always been earthquakes, comet strikes etc. long before man lived on earth. people happen to live in areas where those things occur. Floods, storms. and things happen but they also happen in unoccupied areas.