What is Going to Do Us In

Popular Mechanics just publised an article "12 Ways the World Could End in 2012". It covers all the basics from pandemic to robot uprising. While I think it is unlikely that this will be the year (contary to the Mayans), what do you think our eventual demise will be?

It depends what you mean by 'the end of the world'... If we're talking about the total destruction of the human species then I'd say the most likely candidates are probably: technology gone wrong - the experiment that creates a black-hole, or the robots take over a la The Terminator, or the genetically modified/ engineered virus which goes awry; super volcano bringing on a nuclear winter. However, I can't see the nuclear winter or virus wiping us out entirely - but since you asked, I'll say the robots are what will get us eventually.
I think we'll have the technology to deflect asteroids before the big one comes. I imagine we'll be long gone before the Sun expands or a nearby star goes supernova. If we meet aliens we'll find them before they find us (they'll probably be microbes, but even if they are advanced by then we'll be more advanced than they).

If 'end of the world' means getting thrown back into the bronze age then there are many more possibilities: the pandemic which will come, probably within the next century; some computer virus/ malfunction wiping out financial records and thus starting a new depression; the volcano is still there, as are earthquakes destroying cities like Tokyo, or California; the collapse of Las Palmas to create the mega tsunami which will level the east shores of the Americas (look it up); nuclear war between India/ Pakistan, or the two Koreas, or Israel/ Iran; a momumental climate shift; a dirty bomb set off by nutters in New York, London, Paris... (Of these I'll go for the pandemic to make a lot of mess - a recession and tens of millions dead, say - the earthquake to send us into depression, but less than a million dead, the super volcano to put us in the stone age, population crash as crops fail).

What about humans becoming something else - does that count? If we meld ourselves with machines, or make changes to our genetic code to 'improve' ourselves - does that mean the end for the human race..?

I recommend Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century? by Martin Rees, it's a good round-up of all our enemies ahead.

They're all unlikely, but if we're going to have anything like an "end of the world" in the next 25 years, my money's on a pandemic. If 100 years, that and risk of nuclear war (again). Alien invasion can only work on the theory being that something about becoming "modern" (eg., sending out first radio signals) raises our profile fatally.

I don't see computers being a trigger. If computers were basically perfect, we could worry about catastrophic failure. But computer systems are buggy already. Sure, you can see disaster piled on disaster, but so long as people program computers, disaster will be a normal case, and the possibility built into how they function in the real world.

I don't see true AI or cybernetics within the next century, but I could imagine a "Gattaca" world, and especially one where eugenics were unevenly distributed, creating a new and dangerous social and political dynamic.

Pandemic could bring down civilization, but I think it's highly unlikely to wipe out the human race in its entirety. There is always a small percentage who have some mutation that renders them unsusceptable.

>4 stellarexplorer:

A natural bug could not, I think, bring down civilization. You don't get bugs that both kill everyone and take forever to start. But a modified and especially weaponized germ, like the Dutch H5N1 or a weaponized smallpox, could do incredible damage.

Has anyone seen Contagion? It seems to me they don't really imagine what a highly contagious 30% killer would do to society globally, and how it might create secondary effects as bad as the disease. There's a good case to be made that it would send the economy into a tailspin, cause huge famines in the second and third world, etc.

Interesting stuff, and amusingly most of the ideas were covered by Popular Mechanics (they must have someone tapped into this site or one like it). The idea of us merging ouselves with machines was one I hadn't heard before, and not sure if it qualifies. (And I don't need to look up Las Palmas. Read a thriller some time back about terrorists planning to set off a bomb or shoot a missile at it or something, and the author went into great detail about what havoc the resulting tsunammi would cause. Who says you can't learn anything from fiction.)

I agree though that most of these are not true extinction events. Scientists claim that the explosion of the Yellowstone Caldera would wipe us out, but I don't know if I buy that. It might have killed off the dinosaurs, but humans are more resilient than a bunch of giant lizards. We might be set back to Bronze, or maybe Stone Age subsistance, but I think some would survive.

I read something somewhere about the whole nuclear winter scenario, and how it was blown largely out of proportion as a scare tactic for all during the Cold War. I can't speak with any authority about that. I just mention it in passing.

nuclear winter scenario

Even if so, it would require a massive nuclear exchange. Do we see that happening now? I could certainly see a few bombs going off in the next decade or so, but, for now, I think we've kissed goodbye to a world-ending exchange. No?

Yeah, I think the "ensured mutual destruction" thing is over for the moment.

And then there's the Rapture... :)

I don't think we're likely to see the end of humanity anytime soon. But I think our civilization has become more fragile as it has become more complex and globally integrated. The Black Death killed a third of the population of Europe, but didn't destroy European civilization, because there were still plenty of people who knew how to grow crops and do the limited manufacturing that existed then. Today a similar pandemic would probably cause irrecoverable damage, because of our dependence on global trade (which would cease or be severely disrupted) and the specialization of most occupations.

Fewer than 2% of the population of most developed countries are farmers, and not many more work in occupations which are truly necessary to supply basic human needs such as food, clothes and shelter. Most of the population of developed countries, in other words, would be redundant or useless in a pre-modern economy. So if our civilization ever regressed or fell into a Dark Age, it would be very dark indeed.

I fear that we will lose our ecological webs, as species continue to be eliminated. Continued use of pesticides and other proven toxins is the single most stupid activity of humans.

I think that madpoet is right, but that his reasoning may be too limited. The effect of slicing through a population that is as highly specialized as the populations of the "developed world" is nothing as narrow as radically reducing those who know how to grow food - although it is certainly true that industrialized food product has made that situation much more "fragile" than it use to be. Rather, think of all the other things that go into maintaining anything even close to "our" present lifestyle. Anyone want of volunteer to explain how to make all the basic parts of a personal computer or a contemporary automobile or a television or a vaccine. See, e.g., I Pencil While I doubt that we're going to fall to the point of hand inscribed manuscripts, those cheap mass produced pocketbooks could easily go away along with your daily newspaper.

Maybe "civilization" is less fragile, after, of course, an "adjustment" that would take out about the same percentage of the population as did the Black Death, but it is a civilization of the mid-19th Century. The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible

no one mentioned.....complete failure of the bee population. How quickly the whole thing would fall apart. That would be a rather ugly end as crops die off and farm animals have nothing to eat. I think that would pretty much end the world as we know it peeps!

I think the demise of the bee population won't be quite as dramatic as that. It's estimated that 1 in 3 mouthfuls of food we consume is pollinated by bees, the corollary of that is 2 in 3 mouthfuls aren't. Sure there will be a great reduction in the amount and variety of food available, and there will inevitably be more starvation in the world, but once the population levels adjust accordingly I don't think we will be much worse off.

Personally, I'm tipping pandemic to wipe out a good chunk of us.

Einstein said if the bee were to disappear from the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. While a pandemic is definitely a scary probability, the bee thing freaks me more. At least a pandemic would most likely be relatively quick in comparison to the starvation and slow death we would face with the bee thing. Ive got plans to build a few bee hives myself this spring. My apple trees will be happy anyway...

I'm not sure Einstein would be the person to weigh in on this subject most authoritatively...

Yeah as above:
The Earth is pretty much invincible in any reasonable timescale - eventually we'll be swallowed by an expanding sun, but thats stupidly far along, and everything else will leave a rocky planet still orbiting the sun.

Humanity - again very very unlikely to disappear completely. A few populations will survive any single cause event. Eventually a small population of surviors might wither away from evolution, or a number of subsequent bad luck events.

Civilisation - really quite fragile. Any major change in climate whether from asteroid strike, nuclear war, or just global warming could disturb society enough to bring down civilisation. Pandemic, fuel shortages, technology failures, equally. " We're only two meals and twentyfour hours away from barbarism" - although I'm not sure who said it as a quick google doesn't bring up much. Anything that effects enough people to strain the backbone services that keep everything running. - once the schools stop, parents have to stay home, hospitals become overloaded, and food deliveries fail then there is very very short slope to a loss of order. If the situation becomes prolonged by more than a month, I'd say the chances of recovering civilisation would be very low. How many countrie would have to be effected for it to become a global problem? Just the US? maybe. Japan/UK?Germany/France ?? would spread disorder very very fast.

I wonder if any of these apocalyptic conspiracy theories could become self-fulfilling. I mean, if enough people believed it was the end of the world, and stopped working and following their regular routines, could that cause an economic and social crisis that spirals out of control and leads to the actual collapse of civilization? Ok, it's unlikely: but I still think all the pessimism about the future that we've been seeing in recent decades is unhealthy. When was the last time you saw a movie, or read a book about the future that wasn't apocalyptic, or at the very least dystopian?

17- When was the last time you saw a movie, or read a book about the future that wasn't apocalyptic, or at the very least dystopian?

Yeah, but hasn't that been the case for a long time. Where's the story in a movie or book where everybody is living happily. Stories evolve from conflict and move towards resolution. No conflict, no story. And if the conflict is species wide, all the better. I am trying to think of older movies and books about the future and I can't think of any that portray the future as a happy paradise.

As far as the self-fulfilling prophesy, I think it would depend on the circumstances. I don't think a lot of people are spending their life savings in anticipation of the end of the Mayan calander, for example. But if the fit really hit the shan I think society as we know it would break down pretty quickly. I don't think that breakdown would happen though until we were already knee deep in the muck. I think most people listen to the news, hear the warnings of appocalypse shrug it off and go about their daily routines. Just look how most people react to the minor disasters we deal with all the time. Last February we had a city stopping snow storm in Chicago. The weathermen had been talking about it for a good week before it hit and warned that it was going to be very bad. They were right it was very bad, but noone stayed home from work or school that morning. Buisnesses didn't close up shop, most didn't even close early after the storm started. And I think the reason for this is that we are constantly barraged by dire warnings. I think that people have become innured to this. You hear the warnings, shrug and go about your business.

The answer is to look at extinction-level events which have occurred in the past. The worst major extinctions seem to have been caused primarily by massive and lengthy volcanic eruptions which continue for years, or decades, and poison the atmosphere and the seas. These events almost destroy the ability of most plant life to reproduce and are deadly to most advanced life forms. However, some species seem to survive to repopulate the Earth over a period of millions of years. Human beings, resourceful as we are, are still vulnerable to a massive die-off if food supplies suffer a major interruption for more than a year. I can see the world population dropping by billions over a period of several years, until the population matches the available food supplies.

I can see the world population dropping by billions over a period of several years, until the population matches the available food supplies.

Actually, billions WILL BE the available food supply for several years until the whole thing stabilises.

20- That's frighteningly hilarious. I am not disagreeing with what you propose, But your phrasing caught me by surprise and I had to laugh. However in the type of event JT is talking about, I don't think billions would survive several years to be eaten. Of course that doesn't mean survivors wouldn't hunt other survivors. Or even delegate part of their own groups to be "food herds". Gross. I'm really starting to rethink this whole surviving the appocalypse thing.

Makes me think of "To Serve Man "....