What's the worst that could happen?

The seventh in our series of Big Questions is a simple one, often used rhetorically: what’s the worst that could happen? It's the question at the heart of much great literature, from plagues in Genesis and floods in the Epic of Gilgamesh to madness and loss in "King Lear" and "Death of a Salesman". We asked four writers, a lawyer and a politician to give their answer. Now it’s your turn. Over the next few days we’ll be publishing our six contributors’ answers and arguments online, but our online poll is open now.

Two of our writers chose a horseman of the apocalypse. The Economist's business editor Robert Guest went for famine. "The chronically malnourished," he writes, "are doomed to live half-empty lives, struggling to imagine anything beyond the battle for subsistence." Edward Carr, foreign editor of The Economist, argued that war is the ultimate catastrophe, specifically one between China and the United States, which would "drag billions back into poverty". Kah Walla, the leader of the Cameroon People's Party, also took a geopolitical view, arguing that it would be the failure of Africa to realise its potential as one of the world’s "greatest repositories of human talent and natural resources". Or perhaps you’ll be swayed by something more insidious: Irving Wardle dreads cultural erosion and the spread of technology "bringing us to dust". Finally, two of our contributors turn inwards. The civil-rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith argues that fear itself makes us "spend hours catastrophising horrors that will never come to pass", and Ann Wroe that "the worst that can happen is to imagine the worst that can happen".

Have your say by voting in the poll below. Or, if your vote goes to pestilence or death, or anything else that could destroy the world, the human race, or a single life, please tell us why.