Human Extinction Scenarios

i dont think nuclear annihilation is considered possible, there simply aren't enough nukes on the planet (probably never were)

there never were enough nukes, old man. there never were. *kicks dust*

http://gizmodo.com/5899569/how-many-nukes-would-it-take-to-blow-up-the-entire-planet

Of course, none of these figures take fallout and other atmospheric effects into account—just square mileage blown away. So it'd actually, technically, require fewer warheads to exterminate our species. But that's irrelevant, Maximilian points out: "There are an estimated total of 20,500 nuclear warheads in the world today. If the average power of these devices is 33,500 Kilotons, there are enough to destroy the total earth landmass." And why do we need so many of these things again?

This website looks like it'd be good for many of these topics: http://armageddononline.tripod.com/nuclear.htm

i like physics disasters, among a bunch of disenchanting punishments for hubris wherein we insignificantly fizzle out, it'd be nice to prove our importance by DESTROYING THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE.

worried about this poll ending

ends with us all being raptured

Polls tend to end in a whimper

world will be ended by dozens of lurkers all voting at once

d3athdr0n3 maybe

world ends when we're tied up and can't prevent a certain box from being opened.

really so many of these scenarios enlivened my childhood

i was terrified of nuclear war as a kid, still kind of am... but since I get kinda panic attacky thinking abt how the world will actually end I went with a lolsy fiddle-dee-dee answer

tbh most of this stuff scares the crap out of me *peeks out from under blanket*

i used to stand on the big hill behind my house and listen real intently for incoming icbm. #bornmorbid

also i swear to god i remember getting a duck and cover lesson during the last major round of nuclear brinksmanship but i have to wonder if my mind didnt invent it because i have to assume that by '84 to '86 d&c was considered a pretty lol proventative measure.

9-9-9 tax proposal = proof that humanity is living in a simulation

I took solace in the fact that we lived in the central of so many urban areas (Baltimore, Philadelphia, DC) and close to a major AFB so we'd probably die in the initial strike and not have to cling to some cruel mockery of life like those suckers in The Day After.

strongo, how old are you? I remember a duck and cover drill in elementary school in the 80s, including the part about putting newspaper over your head, which I know wouldn't work having seen The Day After and ruminating near constantly on our inevitable total nuclear annihilation.

i swear half the teen fiction i read when I was a kid was about end of the world/nuclear holocaust

z for zacariah, children of the dust, tomorrow when the war began, etc

read them all like they were handbooks, lol

Alas, Babylon

For some reason, I distinctly remember the part about their struggles to find salt.

I harbour post apocylptic fantasies and read/watched anything like that as a handbook too. Children of the dust was amazing!

I took solace in the fact that we lived in the central of so many urban areas (Baltimore, Philadelphia, DC)

security blanket #1 against being abducted by aliens (aliens would never abduct me because so many other people would see them!)

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Excellent.

I thought Colossus The Forbin Project was pretty awful. But I did like that they tricked the omniscient supercomputer into looking away by faking being a couple in love, and then convincing the computer they needed some privacy while making love, during which time they plotted its demise.

You guys have seen this right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2D71CveQwo

*cries*

No way, that's cool.

Almost as cool as being able to grow organs.

http://i462.photobucket.com/albums/qq341/ZombifiedToast/zergling.gif

i was crying re: poll results

pff i can run and i once grew organs but you don't see me ending humanity.

what is the "gray goo" wrt accidental misuse of nanotechnology? is it like that futurama episode where there were billions of molecule-sized benders?

flawed superintelligence is gonna be so pissed that we didn't give it any credit.

cheetahs can go way faster than that...they shoulda been more realistic w/ the name

9-9-9 tax proposal = proof that humanity is living in a simulation

― Clive "The Chip" Crinkly (King Boy Pato), Sunday, April 8, 2012 4:51 PM

For real if you set all the taxes in Sim City 2k at 9% you were made for life.

gray goo is: a bunch of tiny self-replicating nanomachines endlessly self-replicate while consuming the matter around them in search of resources for self-replication, and their numbers grow exponentially until eventually the earth is covered and then devoured by a gooey (apparently) swarm of nanomachines

also while checking that i discovered a widespread convention i was unaware of

Denial-of-service attacks in the virtual world Second Life which work by continually replicating objects until the server crashes are referred to as grey goo attacks.[11] This is a reference to the self-replicating aspects of grey goo. It is one example of the widespread convention of drawing analogies between certain Second Life concepts and the theories of radical nanotechnology.[12]

I thought Colossus The Forbin Project was pretty awful. But I did like that they tricked the omniscient supercomputer into looking away by faking being a couple in love, and then convincing the computer they needed some privacy while making love, during which time they plotted its demise.

― and i don't even care, similar to how a badass would respond (Abbbottt), Sunday, April 8, 2012 8:02 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I guess I just liked its unrelentingly bleakness - from the word go, things get worse and worse for our heroes and there's just absolutely no hope. Also, the evil computer's voice is pretty cool.

I would have voted genetically engineered biological agent. My personal fave 'whimper scenario' is Vonnegut's Ice 9. I have been hunting for some not too heavily academic non-fiction about past extinction events and got recommended Tony Hallam's Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities: The causes of mass extinctions. It's mind-blowing that our pre-human mammal ancestors somehow managed to cling onto life during some monumental double dip apocalyptic events.

Lolled all over again at most heinous fart

A good recent review of evidence for the end-Permian extinction event (the big one 252 million years ago. Siberia covered in lava, CO2 skyrockets, global warming, ocean thermal stratification, photic zone anoxia, widespread purple sulfur bacteria, hydrogen sulfide releases choking coastal dwellers and destroying the ozone layer. Nearly everyone dies.

Also,

These emerging insights from geology, geochemistry, and paleobiology suggest that the end-Permian extinction may serve as an important ancient analog for twenty-first century oceans.

Excellent, thanks.

It seems counterintuitive with the current population level, but I’m starting to think evolutionary self selection/declining fertility rate is the real elephant in the room. Could get really ugly.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-world-might-actually-run-out-of-people/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ImRyPymRAM

Surely climate change is a more pressing issue, even if you assume that the authors' projections are correct?

That’s the conclusion Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrell Bricker come to in their newest book.

A journalist and political scientist are not my go-to experts on the reproductive behavior of humanity over the coming centuries. Human populations have suffered steep declines in the past, but it's always because of resource depletion, famine, war or disease, never because of evolutionary self selection/declining fertility rate.

“In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline,” they write. “Once that decline begins, it will never end.”

I think the first sentence of this summation of their thesis is likely correct, but due to increasing climate change leading to famine. The second sentence, um, "never"? O rly? This reads more like clickbait than respectable demographics.

Yeah, except it mostly makes sense. Fact is, in most ways, having kids is not directly beneficial to the person who has them, so once we have options, we exercise them. Making 2.1 babies per uterus is a pretty onerous standard when we have our own stuff to do. We also currently have a lot of magical thinking where many with no intentions to procreate are super concerned about climate change for the sake of all those kids other people must be having. But not themselves. Population is already declining almost everywhere where options exist, and options are obviously good, so that’s a problem. A problem we’re currently solving by propping up the stability of those nations with a morally inconvenient resource - a surplus of people born in other places that mainly exist because their parents had less reproductive freedom. That’s one of those other vertical knowledge mistakes people make - that immigration happens for generous, sharing reasons. Not really. It’s a dynamic that functions on the reality of coercing their bodies to create new humans in lieu of our own. Self extinction seems like a big price to pay, but many are more than content with their decisions so what can you do? So looks like the choices are going to be to perpetuate reproductive inequality in the name of population maintenance (kinda evil), or somehow start motivating more of the free (which should be all of us) to choose it. Something we are failing at so far. So I dunno - it only takes a generation or two for a collapse to manifest. Seems pressing enough. Religion will present some kind of countermeasure, but humans have a pretty sketchy track record there. Maybe we can rely on robots and grow just enough new babies in tanks. A foolproof plan.

Controversial thoughts maybe? Climate change is real though. Maybe things will work out.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521

fwiw I was on the ‘we are obviously overpopulated=doom!’ train until sort of recently, but I changed my mind in the face of new evidence.

Oh and!!! Another possible complicating or mitigating factor is if science really is as close to artificially extending human life as they seem to be. A lot of new breakthroughs regarding cellular aging announced in recent years, a bit hush hush, just here and there. Rightly so because the implications are massive.

one reason why it's kinda hard to take this seriously is that the rate of change has accelerated so much that it almost seems impossible to predict what life will be like in 2035, much less 2100. I'm 35 and it feels like I've lived through more societal and technological change than there was in like, the entire Renaissance era. to put this in more broad ilxor terms I remember buying an iPod at the age of 18 and thinking it was the final frontier of music. about 5 years ago I was using it at my desk and someone said "holy shit, you still have one of those? do you just like vintage technology or what?", which caused me to realize that I hadn't actually seen another iPod Classic in years. now no one can make fun of me for it since I don't really go into the office anymore!! things have changed so much!! (the iPod still works, by the way, gotta hand it to Apple for that one)

that said despite all this technological change human beings are kind of a static thing, and as I start to get more into history (both in a broad sense and within my own family) I realize that people don't really change that much. hell just the other day on Wikipedia I saw a drawing that had been saved from a 7-year old from like 1400 and it drove home that kids back then were kind of the same as kids today. my son is very similar to me personality-wise but he exists in a world that is just so incredibly different than what I grew up in, so it's really been fascinating to see him navigate that. I think that's significant here because child-rearing is the one aspect of human life that really can't be streamlined or optimized or crowdsourced. kids are always gonna need more time and attention than you feel you can give them. "stay at home parent" is the one occupation that will exist through all of human history.

Since life expectancy in the USA has dropped recently, shocking demographic experts who had never seen or contemplated such a thing, it seems premature to predict huge advances for anyone here, except perhaps the 1%.