How will humanity be snuffed out?

[Kodos]

Doomsday Scenarios: 13 Ways the World Could End Today Photo Gallery - Nuclear Holocaust - Conspiracies on truTV.com

Humanity will likely be wiped out at some point. How will we go out? Poll to come!

[lighthousekeeper]

i swear we did this a few years ago

[Kodos]

Probably. But we need to update. Times have changed!

[path12]

I picked asteroid/comet. If it is good enough for the dinosaurs it's good enough for me.

[BillJasper]

I think the black hole one is funny...

" How long until one of these nomads bumps into the Earth? No one is sure, and it's a big universe, but everyone agrees that it's going to happen sooner or later.

It hasn't happened yet in four billion years. So I think I'm going to put this one on the low end of the probability scale.

[PilotMan]

I've always thought that all it would take would be an insect mutation to be able to wipe out humanity. They ruled the world once, they outnumber us by a crazy amount, and they are destined to rule again.

[revrew]

You left off an important option: By the hand of God. That would have gotten my vote.

[molson]

I think a lot of these things can (and one or more of them will) wipe out a good chunk of the world's population, but not all of it. Then in a few hundred or thousand or hundreds of thousands of generations, technology will recover. Humans are pretty crafty. Eventually, we'll colonize the universe, or at least, have control over earth enough to ensure liveability for a smaller population.

[BillJasper]

So many of the options should just be listed as "Human Stupidity".

[mckerney]

Astroid impact that causes a super volcano eruption.

[Suicane75]

One of my farts.

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by lighthousekeeper

i swear we did this a few years ago

Kindof similar but not exactly:
Colossal Events Poll- In your lifetime, you will see... (Please read 1st post first) - Front Office Football Central

SI

[Antmeister]

Only a resident alien would ask something like this.

I chose Zombie Apocalypse, but I was thinking more along the lines of Mutated Zombie Ants infected by Killer Fungi bio-engineered by, you know, that Illuminati gang. All in the name of population control. But of course the fungi get out of control and soon we are wiped off the planet.




But, of course, that was not an option, so I picked one that seemed close.

[JonInMiddleGA]

At the moment I might be inclined to say "snow/ice"

[flere-imsaho]

Originally Posted by Antmeister

Only a resident alien would ask something like this.

My thought as well.

I'm going with runaway global warming, though it'll really come down to whether or not we can adapt fast enough to still be able to grow food in a warmer climate.

[stevew]

Super Volcano or Asteroid hit seem like the most likely. Fire Ants from Greyditch are certainly a possibility as well. Even if there was nuclear war I don't think it would end humanity. It might knock the numbers down some.

[molson]

Could something like runaway global warming kill EVERYONE though? I'd think at some point, enough people are killed off so that competition for remaining food is virtually non-existent, and we're no longer destroying the atmosphere. Then maybe things would recover gradually, over hundreds of years.

[Lathum]

I say superflu. I've read The Stand one too many times.

[Sun Tzu]

Why is this even a poll? Everything is obviously spelled out in the Bible.

Sheesh.

[Chief Rum]

Originally Posted by Sun Tzu

Why is this even a poll? Everything is obviously spelled out in the Bible.

Sheesh.

I do find it funny that Revelations is not one of the options.

[Scarecrow]

The largest super volcano (Yellowstone) is about 30,000 years past due to erupt...

[BishopMVP]

Originally Posted by molson

I think a lot of these things can (and one or more of them will) wipe out a good chunk of the world's population, but not all of it. Then in a few hundred or thousand or hundreds of thousands of generations, technology will recover. Humans are pretty crafty. Eventually, we'll colonize the universe, or at least, have control over earth enough to ensure liveability for a smaller population.

This is where I am. Even in the event of a dinosaur-extinction like asteroid strike/volcano, I think some people would still be able to adapt and live in like the NORAD caves or submarines or something. In case of a super-flu you'd have some people who just maintained isolation and make it through unscathed. In a nuclear holocaust it's not like every where in the world would be bombed - and even in that case, there's already some semblance of life around Chernobyl. I'm all for pushing space boundaries (and hope the Chinese gov't really goes for it so we start a 2nd space race with them) and trying to set up biodomes or whatever or the Moon and Mars, but I don't think any one event would lead to species-wide extinction other than the black hole or expanding Sun theory, but thankfully both of those are millions of years off at the least.

[Kodos]

Originally Posted by Chief Rum

I do find it funny that Revelations is not one of the options.

I tried to stick with plausible options.

[NobodyHere]

Fox News says it will be Obama

[DaddyTorgo]

So many good options...and I can only pick one?

[Kodos]

That is the dilemma.

[BillJasper]

Robot uprising.

[NobodyHere]

I think it will start with an earthquake...

[BillJasper]

Originally Posted by NobodyHere

I think it will start with an earthquake...

I think the end will be near when the Cleveland Browns win the Super Bowl. So we probably have a while.

[molson]

I like how two of the choices have exclamation points.

[King of New York]

Other: galactic trout.

[AENeuman]

Originally Posted by revrew

You left off an important option: By the hand of God. That would have gotten my vote.

I agree, there is not enough love in our hearts to avoid God's smite.

Also, to show His humor, I think the hand of God will be backhanded.

[mckerney]

Originally Posted by BillJasper

I think the end will be near when the Cleveland Browns win the Super Bowl. So we probably have a while.

:25 seconds left, the Browns up 5 and just need to kneel the ball once more. But right at the snap the ground begins to tremble causing the QB to fall backwards and fail to receive the snap. An opposing linebacker then picks the ball up add runs it back 65 yards for the winning touchdown, because there are things that are impossible even in the apocalypse.

That is assuming that the NFL hasn't banned kneel downs and allows teams to just opt to end a half following Greg Schiano's second tenure as an NFL head coach that saw his teams win 2 Super Bowls and deliver 6 career ending injuries to QBs trying to take a knee.

[Vince, Pt. II]

Originally Posted by King of New York

Other: galactic trout.

Disappointed it took 31 posts to get to a trout reference. We're slipping, people.

[Kodos]

Originally Posted by molson

I like how two of the choices have exclamation points.

They needed a little dressing up.

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by molson

Could something like runaway global warming kill EVERYONE though? I'd think at some point, enough people are killed off so that competition for remaining food is virtually non-existent, and we're no longer destroying the atmosphere. Then maybe things would recover gradually, over hundreds of years.

I've long wondered what percentage of the population needs to survive a calamity for modern society to mostly function. Is it 50%? 20%? 5%?

Let's start with a plague because that's the easiest to tweak and think about. If it kills 20% of all people, what are the economic impacts? At what point do we reach martial law? And at what point can the military withstand the people revolting?

Let's say at a virus of 50% that law and order cannot be maintained. Or whatever that point is- sooner or later? At what point do the secondary effects cause a second mass wipeout? Who is watching the nuclear weapons? Who is maintaining safety at the nuclear power plants? Keeping biological agents at a quarantine facility from getting out? What happens when enough nuclear plants start going, well, nuclear and not only irradiating large parts of the countryside but causing massive climate shifts, spewing radioactive dust into the air, etc that causes global deaths to spike?

Then beyond that, what if there's some calamity like we're talking about (super volcano, asteroid, etc) where only 1 million people survive, how long is it going to take to build up the expertise to get back to the industrial revolution? Europe's population was about 100M at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Does society require that many people before it builds up the needs and means for an industrial revolution? Does the science just follow as a natural consequence of a need and that many people. Is an Einstein-ean genius that pushes science forward just the inevitable result of there being that many people on earth and the ideas infrastructure in place that such advances are inevitable (there's a great 90s Outer Limits episode about that idea)?

Even if the calamity is non-discriminating and the group that survives society includes an aerospace engineer, radiologist, microchip designer from Intel, and the resurrected corpse of Steve Jobs, we don't suddenly have airplanes, MRIs, and a Mac-PC war all over again. There's no high volume manufacturing, there's no high tech mining of the minerals needed to create these items, and there's no real demand for them, at least above and beyond getting food, shelter, and basic terraforming to make the earth livable again. And that knowledge will die out as it's much less useful to learn than Farming 101 and Advanced Firemaking.

One of my favorite scifi tropes is a modern society like ours believing they are clearly the most advanced to ever live but that one came eons before that was even more advanced (think Canticle for Leibowitz, Stargate, Chrono Trigger, etc). It's just so deliciously egotistical to believe that nothing smarter or better could have existed before just because we haven't yet found evidence of it with our incomplete and primitive technology.

SI

[jbergey22]

Good question. Will eventually need the resources from other planets if the population continues to skyrocket.

Eventually, an asteroid, gamma ray, black hole will conflict with Earth. The question is will we have killed ourselves off or become advanced enough to travel through space at ridiculously fast rates by the time that happens.

[britrock88]

Originally Posted by mckerney

:25 seconds left, the Browns up 5 and just need to kneel the ball once more. But right at the snap the ground begins to tremble causing the QB to fall backwards and fail to receive the snap. An opposing linebacker thenpicks the ball up add runs it back 65 yards for the winning touchdown, because there are things that are impossible even in the apocalypse.

That is assuming that the NFL hasn't banned kneel downs and allows teams to just opt to end a half following Greg Schiano's second tenure as an NFL head coach that saw his teams win 2 Super Bowls and deliver 6 career ending injuries to QBs trying to take a knee.

This will be in the AFC title game, mind you.

[britrock88]

Oh, and who's my biodiversity buddy? (Though the LHC black hole was an enticing option, too...)

[dzilla77]

Winter is coming. . .

[CU Tiger]

Originally Posted by sterlingice

I've long wondered what percentage of the population needs to survive a calamity for modern society to mostly function. Is it 50%? 20%? 5%?

Let's start with a plague because that's the easiest to tweak and think about. If it kills 20% of all people, what are the economic impacts? At what point do we reach martial law? And at what point can the military withstand the people revolting?

Let's say at a virus of 50% that law and order cannot be maintained. Or whatever that point is- sooner or later? At what point do the secondary effects cause a second mass wipeout? Who is watching the nuclear weapons? Who is maintaining safety at the nuclear power plants? Keeping biological agents at a quarantine facility from getting out? What happens when enough nuclear plants start going, well, nuclear and not only irradiating large parts of the countryside but causing massive climate shifts, spewing radioactive dust into the air, etc that causes global deaths to spike?

Then beyond that, what if there's some calamity like we're talking about (super volcano, asteroid, etc) where only 1 million people survive, how long is it going to take to build up the expertise to get back to the industrial revolution? Europe's population was about 100M at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Does society require that many people before it builds up the needs and means for an industrial revolution? Does the science just follow as a natural consequence of a need and that many people. Is an Einstein-ean genius that pushes science forward just the inevitable result of there being that many people on earth and the ideas infrastructure in place that such advances are inevitable (there's a great 90s Outer Limits episode about that idea)?

Even if the calamity is non-discriminating and the group that survives society includes an aerospace engineer, radiologist, microchip designer from Intel, and the resurrected corpse of Steve Jobs, we don't suddenly have airplanes, MRIs, and a Mac-PC war all over again. There's no high volume manufacturing, there's no high tech mining of the minerals needed to create these items, and there's no real demand for them, at least above and beyond getting food, shelter, and basic terraforming to make the earth livable again. And that knowledge will die out as it's much less useful to learn than Farming 101 and Advanced Firemaking.

One of my favorite scifi tropes is a modern society like ours believing they are clearly the most advanced to ever live but that one came eons before that was even more advanced (think Canticle for Leibowitz, Stargate, Chrono Trigger, etc). It's just so deliciously egotistical to believe that nothing smarter or better could have existed before just because we haven't yet found evidence of it with our incomplete and primitive technology.

SI

On a very similar note, I've often wondered if humanity is a just a giant cycle...we build and evolve and grow until something largely wipes us out and takes much of technology with it...then we are left to start over fending on leftover technologies until they fail and then resorting to primeval methodologies only to eventually "re-invent" things,

What if we didn't discover electricity in the last 300 years but 3,000,000 years ago for the first time. What if the planet has already experienced and survived a nuclear holocaust. What if the dinosaurs were a three eyed fish creation of a previous radiation tragedy...or what if I just need to start drinking again..

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by CU Tiger

On a very similar note, I've often wondered if humanity is a just a giant cycle...we build and evolve and grow until something largely wipes us out and takes much of technology with it...then we are left to start over fending on leftover technologies until they fail and then resorting to primeval methodologies only to eventually "re-invent" things,

What if we didn't discover electricity in the last 300 years but 3,000,000 years ago for the first time. What if the planet has already experienced and survived a nuclear holocaust. What if the dinosaurs were a three eyed fish creation of a previous radiation tragedy...or what if I just need to start drinking again..

That's why I mention A Canticle for Leibowitz, which centers around the idea of history repeating itself, tho it was written in the 60s in the height of nuclear war fears and with a healthy dose of religion thrown in so it may appear dated to some by now.

SI

[Young Drachma]

Kodos have your alien overlords told us something we need to know down here?

[Kodos]

Ummm, no... nothing like that. For reelz.

[EagleFan]

Originally Posted by Chief Rum

I do find it funny that Revelations is not one of the options.

Don't feed the troll.

[EagleFan]

Over-population.

[stevew]

Originally Posted by AENeuman

I agree, there is not enough love in our hearts to avoid God's smite.

Also, to show His humor, I think the hand of God will be backhanded.

the Pimp hand of god.

[Edward64]

I said Nuclear Holocaust but am rooting for Zombies.

[Simbo Klice]

I voted for colonize the universe. I don't think we're more than 300 years away from sending out seedships.

[Julio Riddols]

Originally Posted by stevew

the Pimp hand of god.

It would be bitterly hilarious if the last thing we heard as a species was a giant voice booming "Bitch!" while the ethereal visage of the hand of god swipes us out of existence.