And they are an engineering MARVEL.

that's what the last dinosaur said

http://tinyurl.com/md7kuzc

Sudden end to civilization: maybe
All life on earth? I doubt it.

Human civilization certainly, but the end of all life, or even most life? As chumbucket says, that is doubtful. Studies done in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone have found that life is actually a great deal more resilient than science had previously assumed; it's not merely extremophiles, even large, complex organisms, like wolves and songbirds, can survive (even flourish!) in highly irradiated areas. Cities would probably be rendered fairly uninhabitable, due to the slurry of toxic industrial chemicals that would leak out everywhere, but there's good reason to suspect that much of the planet would bounce back within a few decades of our demise.

Having read and watched my share of apocalyptic scenario stories I've often wondered if the behavior of human survivors has been modeled into a computer simulation to see how humanity could continue on after such types of sudden planet-changing events. Would civilization, in any form, actually fizzle out? Or would people find some adaptable form or regressive form of civilization to cling to and help try to continue the longevity of the species? Or are we such a wild-card kind of species that there would be know way to predict how or if we'd make it? Fun things I think about.

Humanity already survived and flourished in at least one ice age, plus we are the most adaptable mammal on the planet. Combine that with our ability to manipulate our environment and i feel that while, sure, major cities may turn into radioactive craters, plenty of the earth already inhabited by indiginous, nomadic and tribal populations would remain largely untouched due to a lack of strategic or tactical value.

I think that we would witness a reshuffling of the distribution of power and wealth, as most of the northern nations would be reduced to ash and then freezing, the equatorial regions would be warmer and largely untouched by durect nuclear attack.