The end of the world

[Marvin]

Humanity has only in the very recent past even been capable of wiping out its own habitat.

You can't exactly do that with bows and arrows.

I question how easy it is to wipe out our habitat without a conscious, concerted effort. Like consider India. India is a huge mess, and even then, it's not remotely close to hopeless.

 

[AnOminous]

I question how easy it is to wipe out our habitat without a conscious, concerted effort. Like consider India. India is a huge mess, and even then, it's not remotely close to hopeless.

I'd call collecting enough nukes to wipe out civilization several dozen times over to be a conscious, concerted effort. It may be the biggest "public works project" in history, even. All it takes now is to actually launch them.

 

[Marvin]

I'd call collecting enough nukes to wipe out civilization several dozen times over to be a conscious, concerted effort. It may be the biggest "public works project" in history, even. All it takes now is to actually launch them.

I think that's much easier said than done. Like you specifically have to have someone with the goal of eradicating humanity and actually have them in a position where they're able to launch them. I'm not that worried about nukes.

Maybe if in a few centuries, humanity will collectively forget about the existence of nukes, and some nefarious group goes around collecting all of them in an attempt to bring about the apocalypse.

I don't know, to me, it's just a bonkers scifi plot.

 

[Zim]

I'd call collecting enough nukes to wipe out civilization several dozen times over to be a conscious, concerted effort. It may be the biggest "public works project" in history, even. All it takes now is to actually launch them.

Well we supposedly came really close to nuking everything during the cold war. I really want to believe that no country would actually nuke another right now since everyone is aware of how much bigger nuclear bombs are now compared to the ones that actually got used. It would cause a global catastrophe no matter where one went off effecting weather, crushing the world economy, and having radioactive particles drifting all over the place. I think that if a nuke goes off it will be from some terrorist shit heads detonating a dirty bomb. Of course I feel the chances of this happening are pretty slim since nuclear material is strictly controlled. No one would want to be the country that a terrorist nuke gets traced back to.

 

[Tragi-Chan]

I think it would take something truly spectacular to wipe us out. I can see major cataclysmic events taking place over the next century - resource shortages, pandemics, whatever, but I think what would happen in such a case would be that the population would shrink to a more manageable level and then go back to something approaching normal.

Global nuclear war I think is extremely unlikely, because you'd need a scenario where 1) you have someone who has nukes in quantity, 2) they are prepared to use them, 3) they are prepared for the consequences. Even at the height of the Cold War, both sides had a "no first strike" policy.

As for why apocalypse scenarios are popular, I think Neal Stevenson put it best in Snow Crash:

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.

 

[AnOminous]

Of course I feel the chances of this happening are pretty slim since nuclear material is strictly controlled.

It's strictly controlled in functioning countries. Like the United States and France and Israel and probably even India and Pakistan.

And there used to be something called the Soviet Union. It doesn't exist any more and there's all kinds of questionable shit about how they handled their nuclear material and actual nukes, and the government of Russia is basically run by criminals and lunatics and who knows where all that got off to.

There's also the fact that there are a lot of highly educated former Soviets who used to have nice jobs involving those nukes, and a lot of them don't any more. When certain people know certain things, it's generally a good idea to ensure they have jobs even if you don't have anything for them to really do anything, because otherwise, they have incentives to do something with all that knowledge.

I just don't think all that Cold War shit is as safe and secure as everyone seems to assume it is just because nothing has gone off yet.

 

[KatsuKitty]

When you consider it in a secular tone, "the end of the world" isn't something that makes any sense. How exactly do you define when the world "ends"? Is it the destruction of the environment? The collapse of all major powers? A natural event like an asteroid strike?

There's really not much humans can do to end the world, strictly speaking. Nuclear weapons are bad, but they can't tear the planet apart. Even during the Cold War, a nuclear attack with retaliation may not have meant the world would be destroyed, although it would have sparked a major worldwide war, a death toll in the billions, and the dawn of a "new normal" characterised by the loss of much economic progress when the dust finally settles. At the very worst, we would be set back a century in lifestyle, and revert to a kind of feudalistic (or even Somali-style anarchistic) living. You can cite nuclear winter, but the short and intense nature of a nation-state bombing war wouldn't probably do much more than what the Kuwati oil fires did to the climate, which was measurable but not significant.

The only thing that can truly destroy the world is a natural celestial event that exerts far more energy and destruction than anything man has conceived of thus far. Two events can bring this about. An asteroid strike can impact the climate in such a way that renders industrial-scale agriculture virtually impossible world-wide; I'm pulling this number out of my bum but I'd hazard a 90% reduction in all life on the planet. The other thing that can bring about worldwide destruction is if Earth found its way in the direct path of a gamma-ray burst. While unlikely, a gamma-ray burst emits so much of its energy in the form of radiation that Earth would literally be cooked alive before we even realised what was happening.

So yeah, at least currently, our "type 0 civilisation" status doesn't really let us truly do anything that can "end the world". You have nothing to worry about in that sense, although worldwide economic collapse and the destruction of all major technological progress in a gruesome war are all very real concerns.

 

[Johnny Bravo]

Humanity "as we know it" will most likely disappear through natural selection or genetic or bio-mechanical manipulation. We're adaptable and our population is extremely high, at this point the only events that could wipe us out would probably wipe out all life on Earth, too.

 

[AnOminous]

Humanity "as we know it" will most likely disappear through natural selection or genetic or bio-mechanical manipulation. We're adaptable and our population is extremely high, at this point the only events that could wipe us out would probably wipe out all life on Earth, too.

Not really. There's plenty of life that would survive conditions that would get rid of humans. There are extremophiles living in boiling steam vents or in toxic acid pits where no other life could survive, and there is bacterial and other life miles below the surface that would survive a return of the planet to the Hadean state where the surface was mostly lava.

 

[meatslab]

Not really. There's plenty of life that would survive conditions that would get rid of humans. There are extremophiles living in boiling steam vents or in toxic acid pits where no other life could survive, and there is bacterial and other life miles below the surface that would survive a return of the planet to the Hadean state where the surface was mostly lava.

Or we'd have a humanoid race of cockroach people who continue to eat their own feces.

 

[Johnny Bravo]

Not really. There's plenty of life that would survive conditions that would get rid of humans. There are extremophiles living in boiling steam vents or in toxic acid pits where no other life could survive, and there is bacterial and other life miles below the surface that would survive a return of the planet to the Hadean state where the surface was mostly lava.

True, I forgot about those, but it would still take a global catastrophe to wipe us out. Even if the Earth was hit by another asteroid like the KT extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs our species would still survive, especially since we would see it coming a long time in advance.

 

[QI 541]

It would cause a global catastrophe no matter where one went off effecting weather, crushing the world economy, and having radioactive particles drifting all over the place.

Maybe this is why our weather is so bad and everyone's getting cancer.

 

[Whatisgoingon]

I don't know, for some reason I feel.....indifferent about the world ending for some reason. Mind you, I'm sure that I would be terrified if such an event were to occur, but in my head I don't even consider the end of the world, as we know it or otherwise, to even be a reasonable thing to think about during my lifetime.

 

[Some JERK]

Maybe this is why our weather is so bad and everyone's getting cancer.

lol @ Britain testing all of their nukes on Australia.

 

[Sanae Kochiya]

Like some people have mentioned, it's unlikely that the world will end in this generation at the very least, given our limited technology. It's not like we have some kind of orbital death laser to kill everyone, and as insane as an "all the nukes" scenario is, the very insanity of it is the one reason why it'll probably never happen. "Mutually Assured Destruction" and all of that Cold War jazz. Outside of some freak celestial or environmental disaster that we can't see happening nor prevent, I'd say we have a good 100 or 200 years ahead of us.

That being said, I'm honestly very apathetic on the idea of the world ending, much as I am on the inevitability of my own life. Everything has a time and everything dies (thanks Hellblazer), whether it be the world, our lives, or a really good Kiwi Farms lolcow. The best thing you can do is not really think about it and enjoy what time you have. At the end of the day, we're all gonna be dust in the earth, so enjoy what you do. In some ways, Chris is better off than a lot of people because, as huge of a spastic that he is, he's at least enjoying his life. Whether the world ends tomorrow or a million tomorrows from now, I'll honestly be cool with it if I can at least say I enjoyed myself at the end of the line.

.... But in all seriousness, we better have a motherfucking zombie apocalypse. We can all gather up at 14 Branchland Court and turn it into the greatest motherfucking zombie stronghold ever.

 

[GS 281]

The world is incredibly dynamic and as things change everything either adapts or disappears. I am coming to a point where I believe that we will push ourselves out of existence as we use technology to facilitate adaptation.

We like to say that "the more things change, the more they stay the same", but the natualness of just about everything we do has been given up in lieu of efficiency and effectiveness.
We will eventually absorb ourselves into a robust technological infrastructure where everything "human" about us will be sacrificed for what we gain as cyborgs. There will not be one event, just a series of logical conclusions where society tips towards general acceptance of adaptation of new technologies.

 

[AnOminous]

lol @ Britain testing all of their nukes on Australia.

At least Australia got a chance to be useful for once.

 

[Tragi-Chan]

It's strictly controlled in functioning countries. Like the United States and France and Israel and probably even India and Pakistan.

And there used to be something called the Soviet Union. It doesn't exist any more and there's all kinds of questionable shit about how they handled their nuclear material and actual nukes, and the government of Russia is basically run by criminals and lunatics and who knows where all that got off to.

There's also the fact that there are a lot of highly educated former Soviets who used to have nice jobs involving those nukes, and a lot of them don't any more. When certain people know certain things, it's generally a good idea to ensure they have jobs even if you don't have anything for them to really do anything, because otherwise, they have incentives to do something with all that knowledge.

I just don't think all that Cold War shit is as safe and secure as everyone seems to assume it is just because nothing has gone off yet.

I don't doubt that there are rogue factions that have nuclear material (assuming it's all still functional after a quarter-century). But I believe that for a truly world-ending conflict, you'd need loads of nukes flying all over the place. Otherwise, I think the worst you could do is cause an economic impact by taking out a couple of cities.

The biggest risk would be a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, which would fuck Asia up and, due to the economic impact, it would probably screw the rest of the world up. North Korea apparently has nukes, but the moment they seriously started waving their nuclear dick around, China would probably make them put it away again.

 

[AnOminous]

I don't doubt that there are rogue factions that have nuclear material (assuming it's all still functional after a quarter-century). But I believe that for a truly world-ending conflict, you'd need loads of nukes flying all over the place. Otherwise, I think the worst you could do is cause an economic impact by taking out a couple of cities.

Pick the right couple of cities and the full scale exchange is next. Of course, only an absolute lunatic would want to do that.

But those have existed and have even tried to acquire nukes in the past. For instance, Aum Shinrikyo.

Luckily, the Russian mobsters they approached were more interested in ripping them off than selling them a nuke, but they did manage to get ebola and to recruit enough chemists to set up a functioning nerve gas factory. Their sarin attack on the Tokyo subway system finally got the authorities interested, although they had been murdering people with impunity for years before that.

 

[Cave]

Nuclear war is an intensely scary scenario.