Super interesting article about the end of humanity

[Event]

http://www.discover.com/issues/oct-00/features/featworld/

Great read, and scary as well, especially with the cosmological events.

 

[Danoff]

I like the last one the best. That and the vaccum destabilization thing. Pretty cool. A lot of these are pretty far fetched, but they're interesting anyway. The gamma ray burst is a real possibility - like an asteroid impact, that could be devastating and happen without much warning at all. I don't buy the humans destroying the world bit. If we were really powerful enough to destroy the world accidentally, we should be powerful enough to undestroy it.

 

[YSSMAN]

The end? Well, that is a long way off (I think). If anything, Asteroids and Nuclear War pose the biggest threats to mankind, although my least-favorite thing to worry about that could kill a helluva-lot of people is indeed the "eruption" or should I say explosion, of Yellowstone National Park.

...But for me, I prefer to just live on living...

 

[niky]

Yes... probably... but since we haven't invented the restorative equivalent of the atom bomb (nano-tech re-assemblers? ), destroying the world is much much easier than restoring it. Remember, all systems tend towards decay... thus, it's easier to break stuff...

The Gamma-ray burst is an interesting tidbit... and some speculate that gamma ray bursts are part of the reason we haven't found intelligent life yet. Imagine a huge one from near the core of the galaxy, every few million years, or lots of local ones, cleansing space (you can't escape it) of all intelligent life.

Vacuum destabilization sounds cool, but it's hard to put numbers on whether it may happen or not, or whether it's happened already. Scientific truism: Anything that can happen, will happen somewhere... which is why I scoff at the idea of cold fusion and water-powered cars... I haveyet to see the ocean bursting into flames.

Particle Accelerator accidents... well, it's an unknown. As for quantum-sized black holes, we don't have the power (yet) to make anything big enough to actually harm us.

 

[Danoff]

Yes... probably... but since we haven't invented the restorative equivalent of the atom bomb (nano-tech re-assemblers? ), destroying the world is much much easier than restoring it.

If we were really powerful enough to destroy the world accidentally, we should be powerful enough to undestroy it.

Granted we can do more damage than we can undo. But we should be able to fix the stuff we weren't even trying to do.

 

[kennythebomb]

Granted we can do more damage than we can undo. But we should be able to fix the stuff we weren't even trying to do.

I'd like to see you back that up logically.

It seems to me that there are many facets of life, where making a mistake can cause irreparable damage to something. Humans have the power to prevent many things, but we can't find or fix all possible circumstances of 'end of the world' scenarios. For all we know, two elements could be created one day and put in neighboring test tubes or something and then accidentally be mixed... that could set off a chain reaction that would instantaneously destroy the world.

 

[niky]

Granted we can do more damage than we can undo. But we should be able to fix the stuff we weren't even trying to do.

Ahhhh... Master Debater (wait, that didn't quite come out right... )... should and can don't always go together.

Falling down a hill and climbing back up one aren't exactly equal in terms of difficulty. If we fall down a hill small enough and gentle enough (medium scale world war), then it's no problem. If it's a bigger hill (full scale war, depletion of easily attainable oil resources in that war), much harder. If we fall down K2 (full-on Nuclear/Biological/Chemical exchange, extremely high death toll) and end up at the bottom with nothing but a torn pair of pants and a couple of toothpicks that used to be a pickaxe... well, I can imagine it'll take us quite a while to get back up there.

 

[YSSMAN]

...I still like the idea of an Alien Invasion to destroy the world. Might be fun to have an Independence Day-esque moment in which the world bands together to fight-off the evil invaders. Plus, we probably get to use Nuclear weapons... And that would be super cool!

 

[Event]

...I still like the idea of an Alien Invasion to destroy the world. Might be fun to have an Independence Day-esque moment in which the world bands together to fight-off the evil invaders. Plus, we probably get to use Nuclear weapons... And that would be super cool!

if you consider eons of radioactive residue across the globe causing extremely high number of births to have more limbs or heads than usual super cool, then yea, it'd be ****ing awesome.

 

[Evolution.]

...I still like the idea of an Alien Invasion to destroy the world. Might be fun to have an Independence Day-esque moment in which the world bands together to fight-off the evil invaders. Plus, we probably get to use Nuclear weapons... And that would be super cool!

Yeah, but Independence Day was created in Hollywood. Hollywood is the furthest terrestrial thing from realism. See Event's post.

 

[YSSMAN]

Well, it was a bit of a light-hearted joke, but since we're being so serious...

...I wonder if the T100 will come back in time and try to save us from the Aliens, since in our universe we created the T100s to fight the Aliens, because they can't suck out their brains...

 

[Evolution.]

Can you imagine what the world would be like if people found out the world was ending? It would be a worse fate than the Apocalypse itself.

 

[Thiele]

That was weird, most of that stuff is never going to happen.

 

[FoolKiller]

Yeah, but Independence Day was created in Hollywood. Hollywood is the furthest terrestrial thing from realism. See Event's post.

Actually it was created by HG Wells and then stolen and updated by Hollywood, they just never told anyone. They should have though, it was a much better update than the Spielberg/Cruise fiasco.

Honestly, I can't believe they listed things like mass insanity and alien invasion. I was taking it seriously as these are things that maybe, possibly, has slight odds of happening until then.

 

[niky]

Alien invasion never makes any sense. Too much trouble for too little payback. What could they want from us? Metals? Asteroid mining makes more sense, and you don't have to tug megatonnes of material out of a gravity well (Earth's, in this case). Resources? What resources? An interstellar civilization would most likely be more interested in skimming hydrogen from a gas giant than bothering with crude hydrocarbons on our planet's surface.

Take over our planet as prime property? That's more believeable... but then, you have all that alien biota to deal with (namely, us)... drop a couple of hydrogen bombs first... or seed our clouds, change the Earth's albedo, plunge us into an Ice Age to kill us off... why waste resources fighting it out on the ground, when you've already got an advantage being out in space?

 

[kennythebomb]

Mass insanity would be a gradual process, but given enough time and enough crazy people in power...

 

[FoolKiller]

Mass insanity would be a gradual process, but given enough time and enough crazy people in power...

The only way I can imagine mass insanity large enough to end civilization would be if one of the other natural disasters happened first and the whole planet went Lord of the Flies.

But then that would be more of a regression than going insane, so I don't even know if that would count.