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20 Ways The World Could End
kevlar wrote to us with the online version of Discover's 20 Ways the World Could End. Ranging from Asteriod Impacts to Mini Black Holes, it's all sorts of fun potential disasters.
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Votenader.com
Somebody really should ask Robert Frost what he thinks about all of this.
Oh wait, they already did.
Fire and Ice
SOME say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost (1874-1963). Miscellaneous Poems to 1920.
(From Harper's Magazine, December 1920.)
ANONYMOUS ROBERT FROST LIVES!
I once read a science fiction story in that the Earth, our solar system and in fact the entire arm of the Milky Way galaxy in which out solar system is located had been drifting thru a region of space that contained some kind of energy field that limited the intellectual capability of mankind and animals. Over the past couple hundred years, we were slowly drifting out of this energy field and that's why our scientific and technical knowledge had begun to expand at an exponential rate. In this story, mankind suddently went from the electronics/computer/space age rapidly to being able to build interstellar, faster-than-light spaceships within only a few years time after finally drifting out of the edge of the energy field. The drift was so slow that we were already drifting out of the edge of the field during the time of dinosaurs on earth... implying that the strength of the field was immensely greater before that time. In the story, some scientists were on a light-speed spacecraft exploring the universe and inadvertently flew back into an area of space where the field was strong. Their mental capacity diminished down to the point they could no longer pilot their ship, and about all they could do was lie on the floor and drool and puke all over themselves, fortunately the ship was going at lightspeed on autopilot and eventually cleared the region of space and the crew recovered.
What if such a thing really exists and that explains why our rate of knowledge is increasing so fast in these past couple hundred years relative to before. Also what if the animals also are getting smarter and suddenly decide they don't like the order of the food chain? What if our solar system is drifting INTO such an energy field? Ooooooh, spooky, eh?
Most of this article centers around the end of humans/life not the big ball that we call the earth. Black holes are nice but how do you make one in a reasonable amount of time to crack open beer and watch the fun from alpha centari? That's what I want to know.
Ahhhhh...... memories.
See also:
BBC SciTech: Supervolcanos
These "supervolcanos" occur more frequently than "Flood-basalt volcanism".
A couple of other possibilities:
The solar system could pass through a cloud of cosmic dust. This was once suggested as a cause of ice ages, now considered unlikely.
There are vast quantities of the greenhouse gas methane locked up in a hydrated form on the sea floor. If the sea warmed and/or sea levels decreased (lowering the pressure) the methane could be released leading to a runaway greenhouse effect.
M$ could win the antitrust case. They proceed to completely take over the software industry and the internet. Soon all the world's banking, trade, communications and government services are running on on one big monolithic system. Then, one day, all the screens turn blue.
Although not exactly human, H.P. Lovecraft built into his Cthulhu mythos previous races. We are just one in a long series of "rulers" over the Earth. The Elder Gods were before us (as well as other races) and some spider-people will succeed us (eventually). Thus, there is some literary background for this idea. (To avoid archaeological problems, Lovecraft placed the previous races in vast underground caverns, places currently deep under the sea (for example, where Cthulhu currently sleeps), or Antarctica. However, there is sufficient evidence (from carbon-dating, age of universe calculations, etc.) that the Earth has had a finite past and that most likely, in the early years, no life could or did exist on Earth.
The 13th Floor did this quite nicely. Or at least played close to this idea. A lot of people thought it was a dumb movie, but looking at it from a philisophical POV, instead of a shoot'em'up movie point of view, I though it was great.
Well, think of it this way. If you uploaded yourself into a computer, would you just say, "ok, cool, all uploaded" and off yourself?
I don't think so.
You're still "here" and still exist. Basically you made a copy of yourself. There's no difference to other people, but to you, the you who just uploaded your thoughts and memories into some supercomputer, killing yourself still means [insert afterlife image here].
The "you" in the computer would probably feel the same way (no idea how you'd "live" inside a computer, but that's something for a different time). You'd be the same as the human, but you'd be living in a different environment and be able to do different things. I don't think you'd want to kill of your creator, especially when you know that you're an uploaded being. You'd just (well, you might...) go on doing what you're doing, explore, play with things, do whatever someone living inside a computer system does.
A long time ago I read the question:
"How do you know you're not a brain in a tank being fed stimuli to see how you react?"
Answer: you don't. How do *I* know that you all actually exist and you're not just some random test of how I react to such philisophical questions. Linux? Linus? maybe he's the engineer behind the experiment that made himself wonderful so that when I eventually chose my aliance I'd go on his side.
Hmm... 'eventually'? Maybe today is the only day (see "Dark City"). How do I know that the rest of my life and existance before responding to this post actually exist,and I'm not a computer experiment in AI being tested on philisophy issues?
Eh?
Don't worry, stats is useless. I read chapter 13 as well I think. Granted, not much of that class stayed with me.
All I learnt in stats was to never trust statistics, because now I know how they are created....
Oh, I'm not saying it's a hugely relevant or non-argueable statement, I'm just saying that it's something to think about. Sometimes the simple ideas are the ones that make us think the most, or bring in the *really* interesting stuff.
:)
No offense taken, it was a perfectly valid comment (I *did* first hear that when I was quite young) :)
/me returns to taking over the world
My favorite... Collapse of the Vacuum...
/. ID is lower than the real Bruce Perens'.
The current state of affairs becomes the next "false vacuum" due to expansion cooling. The new vacuum takes over, changing physics in its wake as it spreads at the speed of light.
The real Threed's
--Threed
See, Super Mario Brothers 2 didn't suck, it was really a end-of-world prophecy.
Oh thanks! I hadn't seen the movie yet and now you've ruined it for me! You should really put a SPOILER WARNING in your subject heading next time.
(I am joking, of course. Who hasn't seen SMB2?)
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
It was called 'Survivor'. :D
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I disagree. I think Asimov decided to explore robot sci-fi from a non-technical position on purpose, instead exploring the nature of human & robot social interaction. Bicentennial man is easily his best story demonstrating this. Others include robot-as-pathos (Bard) and the blurring between robots and humans (Segregationist).
He also explored the Frankenstein complex in short stories like Thou Art Mindful Of Him.
Sure, some of Asimov's stories were supposed to be fun (the Powell & Donovan series) and some were meant to ask "what if" (the Calvin series). I think this demonstrated that Asimov was trying hard to explore robots from all angles: social, economic, pathological, psychological. One of my favourite Asimov short stories revolves around the idea of a robot growing tired with life (and I won't give the name to avoid spoiling it).
Asimov wasn't cyberpunk like Gibson, but I don't think it's at all fair to say Asimov never developed a "serious understanding". He mightn't have developed a technical understanding, that I will admit, but I think Asimov had one of the most serious understandings of the human/robot relationship of any sci-fi author, living or dead.
I also like David Brin! His short stories are much better than his novels. Brin is very much like Asimov in that respect.
You yourself say "the most technical thing..." and this I think proves my point. Asimov didn't go the terrible route some authors travel where they try and explain the technology in terrible excruciating detail: Arthur C. Clarke does this all the time and I personally can't stand it.
Asimov instead gave pseudo-science answers like "positrons" then hastily moved on. Clearly the pseudo-science was irrelevant to the story. I think Asimov was far more interested in ethical and social problems like interpreting the three laws and imagining the various ways humans/robots would interact.
Too many sci-fi authors spend time talking about the science. I find it far more interesting when the author says "this science exists which can do this, I'm not going to explain how it does this, but I will try and find out how it would change us for better or for worse". This is what I enjoy. Asimov's short story Election is a perfect example of this.
I'm not hero-worshipping Asimov. I just think that he has a damn good ratio of hits to misses.
You're so right! I hate long-winded sci-fi novels. They are almost without exception boring. Michael Crichton has to be the worst offender IMO, but there are so many others competing for the title.
Um, robots didn't take over in the Foundation series. In fact, if you only count the original Foundation series (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, 2nd Foundation) then there weren't any robots at all. In the extra books (Foundation's Edge, Prelude to Foundation, Foundation and Earth) that were written so long after Foundation became popular, then at best you can say robots were guiding humanity. In the end the power that takes over the Galactic Empire is decidingly non-robotic!
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Here is the proof:
1) The Backstreet Boys
2) N' Sync
3) Britney Spears
4) George Bush
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
You are right!
I am still amazed that we survived MC-Hammer.
Even more mazed that he still is alive.
To add to your list:
1) Mr T
2) Boy George
3) Newt Gingrich
4) The entire cast of 90210
5) Vanilla Ice
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
"Well, once again my friend, we find that science is a two-headed beast. One head is nice, it gives us aspirin and other modern conveniences,...but the other head of science is bad! Oh beware the other head of science, Arthur, it bites!" - The Tick
STFU about slashdot bias.
"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents."
-- Nathaniel Borenstein
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Might as well advertise the original paper that Egan references, since I wrote it: it appeared in the Astrophysical Journal in 1995. Terr est rial Implications of Cosmological Gamma-Ray Bursts
I guess hollywood just got 20 more ideas for disaster movies :-D
donfede
And before that, by Chuang Tzu.
A pretty girl agrees to go out with me...and likes it!
But the Human Race could go out far more easily - most people live withing a few km of the earth's surface which by volume is a rather tiny part of the earth.
A kiler event needs only to happen to this volume.
Even an asteroid the size of mars would leave a chunk of rock of the right size, but nobody would be living there.
God may sue over prior art.
Does anyone here also frequent www.memepool.com? If not, then do.
This story was posted there last Thursday.
Yellowstone National Park in northwest Wyoming is a pretty place. Pretty dangerous, that is. About 70,000 years ago the place blew up in the largest volcanic explosion ever know to have occurred on Earth. Analysis of human mitochondrial DNA shows that the human race went through an evolutionary chokepoint at about that time. It is thought by some that this massive explosion drove humanity to the brink of extinction, possibly down to as few as a couple thousand barely surviving individuals. This volcano *will* erupt massively again, and if it does there will be serious trouble.
e stions/grp7/north_america/question733.html
http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/frequent_qu
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Armageddon
Armageddon
Armageddon
Armageddon
(... well this thing 15 times)
Cut! Cut! Cut! Lights off! Thank you people, hope no rehearsal is needed...
If we patented these methods of world destruction, could the human race survive forever?
Only until the patent runs out.
When I want your opinion I will beat it out of you.
While Discovery's phrasing is odd, the statement seems to be partially correct. Scenarios 8 through 17 each have a likelihood that probably increases with global population.
Twenty-one #654995387: Slashdotters invent an infinite number of doomsday scenarios, all numbered "21". Having an infinite number of scenarios, the probability of "the twenty-one event" occuring becomes infinite. Like Wile E. Coyote's looking down and causing gravity to take effect, the realization of the certainty of a twenty-one event causes one to occur.
Twenty-one #655835601: The infinite density of the #21 causes all ideas to collapse into it, turning the rest of the world into a place just as mindless as slashdot.
Twenty-one #659995379: Just because.
it's not a misspelling, he's just from the bronx is all...
-dk
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
What don't you understand about it?
People walk to Alask from Siberia, then down the Americas.
Said people carry diseases.
One of said diseases is virulent and spreads quickly.
This disease is deadly to many mammals present in the Americas.
Thanks to the spread of human settlement, a large extinction takes place.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
There's a good bit of speculation on this theme in the Annals of the Heechee series by Fred Pohl.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Had to be said.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Al Gore
Brittny Spears
Madonna
Kevin Costner
Information SuperHighway
Dot.com riding high
Dot.com flaming out
Violence in the Middle East
Low fat diets
This year's hemline
Might as well explode
My take on this, and other potential disasters, is that at worst it will only end life as we know it.
So why is that?
My theory is that if we know that there is some sort of timeline that we are all walking on, then it gives our empty lives a sense of meaning. Like we're actually making a difference, no matter how little, in this big cosmic play that we're putting on. It makes life seem, well, more real in my opinion.
-davek
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
The article focused on disasters likely to wipe out humans in the near future. But here's some more ways that the Earth will likely end, not soon, but likely:
Solar evolution
The sun is slowly growing hotter, and in about a billion years will be hot enough to start a runaway greenhouse effect on the Earth. The stratosphere will also become moist with water vapour. The water in the stratosphere will be broken up by solar radiation, and the hydrogen will be lost to space.
Close passage of another star
Stars pass by each other all the time, but usually the distances are so great that it doesn't matter. But there is a small chance that a star will pass so close to the sun that it affects the orbits of the inner solar system and the Earth could be ejected from the solar system. Interestingly, this scenario will actually allow life - but not human life - to survive on the Earth longest. The oceans will freeze over but not freeze solid because of the Earth's internal heat. Life could continue around the deep ocean vents for many bilions of years. Earth would also have a small chance of being captured into a stable habitable orbit around the interloper star.
Supernova
A really close supernova (30 light years or closer) would have a similar effect to that described for gamma-ray bursts. The nearest star to Earth that will go supernova is Canopus, about 150 light years away, and that star is due to explode sometime in the next 5 million years.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
I dont think we could prevent it, but I'm sure we could get them in court after.
It's interesting to note that most of them could be summarized as human stupidity or human selfishness.
Mario.
Gore is pretty up front about the fact that he was born into politics. Bush is being presented to the people as an "outsider" who hasn't been corrupted by "Washington". People don't seem to notice that he has the same name as the guy that ran our country eight whole years ago. That's why he is referred to as "George W" or "Dubya" all the time.
-B
as opposed to throwing your vote away on someone you don't agree with, like gore or bush?
21. Slashdot Effect. An extremely popular story directs 1/3 of the population to www.microsoft.com, who registers the flux of traffic as a major DOS attack. It responds by automatically activating a little known feature in MS Word, which causes the paperclip to resurface and begin chanting the lyrics to "In A Gadda Da Vida" in a shrill monotone. Humanity goes berzerk, Napster fills up with Barry Manilow covers, Apache benchmarks fall below IIS, and collapse of civilization follows.
but this dosen't make sense
"About 12,000 years ago, a sudden wave of mammal extinctions swept through the Americas. Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History argues the culprit was extremely virulent disease, which humans helped transport as they migrated into the New World. "
But Bush is seen as a moron. Morons aren't very well liked on /. Gore at least has some smarts. He usually knows what he's talking about, rather than faking his way through it.
We're even closer to world-destruction than I thought.
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Jeebus is the true son of dog! This "Jebus" character is a false prophet.
--------
As I was reading this article, it felt like the author was pulling statistics out of his pocket (ala the "Whose Line?" sketch on Whose Line is it Anyway?) and then trying to tie the statistics into his point.
It is truly mind-boggling to see how statistics are misused in everyday life (and not to mention the computer industry). After all, 47% of all statistics are fabricated. But really, the statistics were used completely out of context and with no basis given - there's no way to tell under what circumstances the data is valid, and even how reputable a source (NASA or his mother?) the data came from. In other words, his entire factual basis feels ungrounded.
If anyone's interested in this sort of statistical man-handling, there's an awesome book by John Allen Paulos Innumeracy : Matehematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences dedicated to the topic. For those of you who don't know him, Paulos is a rather eloquent and humorous writer and mathematician.
On the complete other hand, some of what was said in the article was indeed quite interesting, it's just that for me it was overshadowed by his random "facts". Oh well. It was a fun read though.
---
"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
I use the term "download" because I am assuming the process would originate from the computer, not the brain. I have yet to find an ftp program suitable to the task in MY filesystem...heheh.
I wonder what people will do once they figure out how to download their brains into a computer?
Well, let's first assume that we do actually exist in a physical world (paradoxes to follow). So now we've got a kickass hugely powerful computer, that say, Linus Torvalds (or any other brilliant mind for that matter), has downloaded himself into.
Let's even say that he has the resources and capability to increase the power of this computer on his own, given enough time. Computer controlled chip fab, plenty of electricity/power, lotsa sand lying around with which to manufacture silicon, etc.
Now, Linus is trapped in this computer with nothing to do, right? Well, almost nothing. Assuming that this machine is infinitely powerful and infinitely expandable, why not start creating one's one little world within the machine? We could create little 'bots' to run around inside the system and interact with each other. We could make some bots weak (worms/flys/bugs in general) and some very strong and crafty (humans/cockroaches).
Now Linus is the only one who has access to his own machine and he's got 30,000 years to tool around with it. So now we've got a simulated earth sitting in some data center somewhere. But of course, Linus isn't the only one doing this.
Bill Joy has built his own little world somewhere in what we would call Alpha Centauri. All these little worlds are connected together via the Internet, but security protocols make it extrememly difficult for one 'bot' to travel between worlds, i.e. rocketship to Alpha Centauri.
But then Linus says something that pisses Bill Joy off in the Diety Daily Herald. Bill then just sends some nanobots two blocks over (we're all really living in Silicon Valley, just don't know it) and turns Linus's data center into primordial goo.
And thus we have the end of existance as we know it.
Of course, that assumes that there has been someone infringing on the patent by doing it without first licensing it. Oops.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Of course, that won't protect us against a gamma-ray burst unless we get out of this whole galaxy, and it won't protect us against the collapse of the vacuum if that's even possible.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Actually, while much of his statement was a lot of overreacting, the so-called "terminator" seeds are real. They're the creation of Monsanto, a biotech company on the same level of consumer disdaining evil as Microsoft. Monsanto is also the inventor of PCBs & Agent Orange and a big promoter of rBGH. They also have a pretty hideous record of being fined for pollution.
My favorite quote from them is from Phil Angel, their director of corporate communications: "Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job."
Here's a great paranoid website tracking the antics of this company and their money-over-lives attitude. Granted, it is off an organic foods website, but the articles they link to are all for real.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Or aliens might accidentally upset our planet or solar system while carrying out some grandiose interstellar construction project.
;-)
Golly, where have I heard this before?!
o/~ Join us now and share the software
Wonderful. I go and read this just as I was about to go to bed (given that it's midnight European time).
Wonderful...sweet dreams... :-/
Mommy, can you leave the light on?
cya
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Therein lies the problem. What makes you think it will be a brilliant mind? I'd like to submit into evidence Robocop 2
Or more to the point, what makes you think that even a brilliant mind would survive the transition intact? Not quite the same, but cf "Holy Fire" by Bruce Sterling.
--sugarman--
For the good doctor's fans out thee, he dedicated an entire book (non-fiction) to this very subject.
A Choice of Catastrophes: The Disasters That Threaten Our World
Vote for your favorite method of word destruction! (Can the poll handle 20 options?)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Our first man could conclude that he is likely to be the last, however, what are the chances of being one of the first humans?
If there's only ever one human, 100%.
If you take a population that is growing exponentially, and you draw a name out of a hat containing the name of everyone who ever lived, you'll probably pull the name of somebody from a recent generation.
If you know nothing of how the world will end, and don't know how many humans there will be in the course of our existence as a species, a purely statistical analysis of the population won't tell you anything about the lifespan of the human race as a whole (unless, of course, the population is already 0).
If the Doomesday argument was valid, I could note that the number of marbles in existence now is comparable to the total number of marbles ever created, and use that to predict the imminent destruction of marblekind. Doesn't really make much sense, does it?
This argument is obviously crap. The essence of it is that Bayes's is being misapplied. You're dealing with an essentially infinite number of possible "urns", with an unequal chance of selecting each one.
:-), and applied it in a similar manner, he would conclude that he was probably also one of the last humans.
Here are a few examples to demonstrate this:
1) If the first human knew Bayes's theorem (i.e., he was Bayes
2) Using the Doomesday Argument, for a population that doubles every generation (i.e. exponential growth), each generation will always contain more individuals than all previous generations combined. Thus, each generation will conclude that it is probably one of the last.
Rather than use the "urn" analogy, a dice analogy would be more appropriate. Imagine that each generation rolls 5 dice. Certain combinations result in extinction (these combinations do not change, but the number of deadly combinations is unknown). You look at the previous record of dice rolls, and see that humanity has not yet been wiped out, but that 40% of all possible combinations have been rolled. The fact that a deadly combination has not yet been rolled makes it less likely that the next roll will be deadly.
This is what happens when you try to use statistics without thinking... As Mark Twain said, "There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics." (He was actually quoting Benjamin Disraeli, but whatever.)
I think a mini pint sized black hole would do wonders for our morale! Think of the possibilities of a joyride as your body gets twisted and bent through space and time, I know I'd pay for that ride!. On a side note, it's disasteRs with an R.
cheese logs keep my wang warm at night.
a sufficiently advanced civilization would be able to create lots of virtual worlds and populate them with virtual lifeforms who would have no idea they were inside a simulation.
Yeah, there's a pretty good movie that came out a while ago (1999) with this in the plot... quite interesting really, makes you think a bit.
If you're interested, check it out, it's called The Thirteenth Floor
Neil..........
I used to have a cool sig.
I like the following method, which has the additional advantage that we don't have to first understand how the brain works, 'only' how an individual neuron works. Build nanotechological artificial neurons, that can interface to other artificial neurons and to natural neurons as well. Build 'installers', each of which seeks out a single natural neuron, copies its entire state to the artificial neuron, kills the cell, and installs the artificial neuron in its place. Take a capsule full with each meal; in a year or so you'll have finished 'uploading' yourself into your new immortal robot brain, never have noticed any transition, and have no messy blob of meat left behind to argue that you're not really you.
This is the way the world ends /. effect
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang
But with the
God Fucking Damnit
copy over your brain to your linux box and still keep your body for running around (doing all those fun things you can only do with a body like eating pizza, drinking beer, having sex) but still have the super humongous computer brain.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
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Ranging from Asteriod Impacts to Mini Black Holes, it's all sorts of fun potential disasters.
For all intents and purposes, humanity's already over. You may believe the year is 2000, but it's actually closer to the year 3000. We don't know for sure...
We don't know who struck first, us or them - but we do know that it was us who scorched the sky... Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
I'm sorry slashdotters, I didn't say it would be easy - I just said it would be the truth.
http://www.talknerdy.org
It is a bit fun to think of ways to go though©©
--
This message brought to you by Colin Davis
Colin Davis
s/Bear/Egan/
I always get names of my favorite authors screwed up. I have a few novels and collections by both of those guys on my shelves and was reading some of Bear's stuff yesterday.
Thanks for pointing that out. I will now go stick my head in a hole in the ground...
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
A lot of the entries on the list have been well covered by good authors in the field of 'hard' science fiction (as opposed to 'soft' sci-fi like Star Schleck Technobabble). Their novels are amazingly informed and informative as to what could happen.
Okay, everybody eventually takes a shot at explaining the Tunguska meteor, from Doctor Who at the 'soft' end to Larry Niven at the 'hard physcis' end, you name it. (Ironically, it's never actually a simple meteor; it's always Something Else.) So I won't go there.
Gamma-ray bursts are interesting. Greg Bear did some similar stuff in Diaspora, which should be interesting to /. readers anyhow.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
The only remotely likely items on the list are nuclear war, pandemic, and asteroid impact - though global warming is an up-and-comer.
Oh really? You have the information on what causes those immense gamma-ray bursts, the likelihood of a superflare, and know that the vacuum isn't going to collapse? Wow, I wish you'd share with us, there's probably some serious scientific knowledge trapped in your head that nobody else knows.
Oh.... you just DECIDED those events are unlikely, and decided to act as if your assumption was the truth. The fact is, things like those currently fall into the area of "unknown probability". Sure, maybe they seem less likely because they haven't occured around here before, but how do we know that's not like someone rolling a die 10 times and getting a six each time, and thus concluding that any other number is unlikely? We could be lucky that things occured as they did, and a return to the more likely event is around the corner.
There's no use in worrying about them, as we can't affect them, but that's not reason to assume they're not going to happen. Wait a second, there's something on the news about an unusual flare on the sun...
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
OK, someone please tell me that movie wasn't obscenely predictable? Did the writers / producers feel that they'd come up with a train of thought that had never occured to anyone before. Still, at least the technology wasn't disgusting and spelled funny like Xistenze (or whatever the hell it was called)
Intolerant people should be shot.
its "or" not ":"
Intolerant people should be shot.
Why 20 reasons? Reminds me of the good old days of D&D..
DM: And then suddenly the world of Almathia was destroyed by...
(roll d20... 18.)
DM: Alien Invasion!
Player: Aww, geez! Oh well, time to roll up another character...
Of course, you can get into philosophical arguments about what a "real" world is, and how to determine the "root" world from where all others spawn is really the real one, and not spawned itself.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
I've actually heard a semi-rational argument in support of this. It assumes that a sufficiently advanced civilization would be able to create lots of virtual worlds and populate them with virtual lifeforms who would have no idea they were inside a simulation. Since there would be many virtual worlds and only one real one, the probability is that an arbitrary lifeform is more likely to be in a virtual world than the real one. Not that I believe it, but interesting nonetheless...
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
This post is, I believe, an excellent example of the average Republican mentality... either drunk and barely intelligible or just plain stupid and barely intelligible.
Not that Democrats are much better, but with the exception of Gore's debate performance, at least they're not quite as obnoxious.
If you're talking politics and what you say isn't funny or insightful or informative, it's probably just flamebait.
Like this post.
Oh please, I am a conservative
And...? My post was directed at Republicans specifically. You wanna identify yourself as conservative, that's fine by me. Everyone's entitled to their own fragile ego-based belief system, including me, so go for it.
your post is complete inflammatory tripe
Inflammatory, yeah, but I'll need to look up the definition of tripe before I can agree there. If by "tripe" you mean "ca-ca", well, I wouldn't call it complete ca-ca.
There is SOOO much anti-Bush and anti-Republican crap on this site
Yup. That's because they're morons, and Slashdot users lean more toward the non-moron side of the scale... such people don't tend to look kindly upon morons.
Al Gore is no better a man than GW Bush...
No kidding. Oh, well, except if by "better" you mean "not as stupid" or "doesn't seem to take pleasure in killing people". Minor quibbles - they are both poor examples of human potential.
I'm voting for neither
Then you and I got no beef. I don't care if you vote Browne, Buchanan, Nader, the Natural Law candidate, or write yourself in, I won't make fun of you for it. Those are honest votes. And a passive vote for Gore or Bush is a chump vote, and that's just kind of sad and not really deserving of scorn. But anyone standing up and rooting for either team deserves to be heckled for it. And let's face it, heckling Democrats is nowhere near as much fun because the Democrats tend to be... I dunno, except for Gore sighing loudly during the debate, nicer about things. It's the Republicans that seem to come across so often as obnoxious, ignorant assholes (a certain "funny" talk-radio host springs to mind, for example, or practically the entire Christian right, or your stereotypical garden-variety redneck). And there may be things about Nader that aren't so great, but man, you gotta give the guy credit for at least trying to bring real issues to the table instead of the constant stream of bullshit the republicrats put out. I'm surprised anyone would lump Gore and Nader into the same category.
Sure it's great to insult Bush
It sure is, Kevin... it sure is.
Hmmm... you're at least partially right about my attitude. I suppose I need to work on being a little more specific. For example, there's a difference between a Rush Limbaugh fan and a PJ O'Rourke fan (I count myself as one of the latter, actually), and a further difference between a highly-educated Republican and the good Reverend Phelps, for example. But for practicality's sake, it'd be a little cumbersome to split hairs and differentiate between all these various categories of "Republicans". Although not entirely accurate by any means, it's still generally true that most people in the public eye and most people I have met personally who staunchly identify themselves as "Republican" are stupid fucks. Notice I did not say most people who identify themselves as "conservative", which is a different thing. I can debate a conservative. Conservative does not automatically mean moron. However, I wouldn't waste my time trying to debate a Republican.
I hope that makes it a little more clear. I don't have any problem with people who hold different opinions from mine. There are lots of people out there who liked "The Thomas Crown Affair" - that's fine if you do. I think it's a celluloid abomination. That doesn't make you stupid if you enjoyed it, that just means you and I probably won't be watching a whole lot of movies together. But if you're a Rush Limbaugh fan, I do think you are a fuckin' moron... not because I have a different opinion, but because I'm really pretty sure you're obnoxiously stupid and you deserve to be called out on all the outrageously wrong and asinine things you say and believe in. It's no different than calling the Rev. Phelps out for his evil ways, or Pat Robertson for the sick things he says and believes in. Why shouldn't I? If they're going to be so obnoxiously wrong, I reserve the right to make fun of them.
And believe me, anyone who wants to make fun of my opinions/candidates can feel free. Chances are I'm going to think they're wrong and stupid for doing so, unless they have some well-considered and backed-up opinions, or are at least entertaining, and we can agree to politely disagree. But chances are they will think I'm wrong and stupid, too.
Which is just fine by me. Some people long for purely civil discourse, polite and scholarly... I do too. But it isn't always called for. Some people disagree with that (hi mom!). Some people also think there are "bad words" and think nudity in films is a bad thing. I don't truck with them cats. I say what I mean and mean what I say... and sometimes that's "geez, what a stupid bastard."
Annnnyway... I hear what you're saying about people beating up Bush and rooting for the other guy. I feel the same way about people who bash Clinton on his "character" and cheer for Bush... as if stealing millions from S&Ls and doing coke and so on is some kind of moral high ground over getting an Oval Office hummer. I hear ya. All these candidates are trash of some kind, you just gotta pick your poison.
And good point about Carville. I forgot about him. For some reason I always think of him as more mercenary than idealogue... which isn't necessarily an accurate perception, but there you go. I tend to think of Democrats as kind of sad-sack underdogs in the race to be most evil, but Carville is certainly the outlier there.
"If we patented these methods of world destruction, could the human race survive forever?"
No, But if we patented "1 click" world distruction then the world would be safe for at least 5 to 7
years while the legal battle ensued.
AdFuel
Just as the robots are about to make the decisive strike againt humanity, their eyes will turn blue and they will fall to the floor, begging for a reboot.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
would "Bill Gate's taking complete and utter control of the OS world" fall under? Mass Insanity?
- --
Eh, I vote for #20 in the list. Fear me, for I'm not all that sleepy!
----------------------------------------
aka earth crust displacement ? (http://www.habtheory.com/100.htm) Of course, global warming and the melting of the polar caps may make this less likely to occur, but still a nice extra posibility to worry about ! ;-)
Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon...
No, I said "do something interesting", not mod this post interesting.
Shit, I'm sure that forteen year old boy found the post boring, so for God's sakes, don't encourage me!
The cake is a pie
Go, Nader!
The cake is a pie
Yes, we're all just a great big game of SimEarth 3590 and it is vitally important that we keep this place interesting. If the forteen year old kid who is running this thing gets bored and decides to run UltraMegaQuake ]})|({[, we're toast. So for the Earth's sake, everybody go out and do something interesting. The fate of the Planet is in the balance.
The cake is a pie
11. God replaces Earth_Linux 2.4 with Windows 2000 Professional.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
As someone who doesn't live in either china or india, I don't find your argument very compelling.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Doesn't this belong in a quickie?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/10/05/01423 5&pid=361#377
Read it and weep. Kid. ;)
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
Starting with discover.com ... ;)
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
> it started with a bang, but will it end a crunch?
Fortunaley, no. The universe is expanding. I saw a science documentary (Space 2000 I believe) that said the universe was not only expanding (which we knew for ages), but the recently (~ late 1990s) we finally deteremined the rate was accelerating. Others say the rate of expansion is constant.
In either case, the universe will eventually expand out into the void, which you can read one transcript of on pbs/a&g t;
Okay, I'm a bit confused.
In way-we-could-all-die number 8 it says:
"About 12,000 years ago, a sudden wave of mammal extinctions swept through the Americas. Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History argues the culprit was extremely virulent disease, which humans helped transport as they migrated into the New World."
My question is when the heck did we migrate to the new world 12000 years ago? This was like way way before the egyptians let alone trans-continental boat travel...
hobbz
I really see this one as the slow downfall of the human race. The most prescribed drug is anti-anxiety medication and millions who are mentally ill go wandering about untreated living an extra-difficult life of mood-swings, suicidal feelings, anti-social behavior, etc. Not really knowing if they're ill or just "lazy", "dumb", "moody", "a loner", etc.
These are the people we hear about on the news who hang themselves, go on shooting sprees, kill their family then themselves, etc. While the clueless media focuses on video game violence and how many "subversive" books he or she owned.
I don't know when its going to reach critical mass, but considering that universal healthcare in the US is largely cosidered a joke, toss in the stresses of overpopulation, and the taboo on mental illness is as strong as its ever been I have a good feeling where its going to start.
Trivializing mental illness with bad taste in cinema is really a bad start if you want to convince people that mental illness isn't a serious problem with humanity and especially industrialized nations.
Time for insanity? How does this even remotely make sense? Mental illness makes one less functional and in a competitive environment (starving to death as you put it) they will be the first victims to dire circumstances.
Unhappiness and major depression have little in common. Happiness can be affected by a variety of factors and neither state (happy vs. sad) lasts for very long. A person with major depression is stuck in a state of despair and hopelessness for weeks or months at a time. 90% of suicides are from mentally ill persons, which should show you the severity and sheer torture of this condition. Now toss in the generalized anxiety and bipolar disease and you have quite a number of people, mostly untreated, with serious problems that don't need to be trivialized by people like you. In fact bipolars have the highest mortality rate of any disease, it eventually forces you to take your own life by your own hand, just like depression.
Surely no one defends the practices of big business especially in the third world, but there's a reason why anti-anxiety drugs are the most prescribed drugs in the US. Because there are a great many people suffering from anxiety, panic attacks, etc. None of these things should be taken lightly.
The profit margin is especially high in the US because of the politicians here are very easily bought and breaks on prescription medicines are rare for non-senior citizens and universal healthcare will probably never happen.
Anti-depressants do not make you happy, if they did they'd be used in recreational ways. When was the last time you saw someone selling Prozac or Paxil at a rave? They simply don't just put you in la-la land like ecstacy, they treat a serious mental disorder. They help balance serotonin levels to keep people non-depressed and functional.
I can see you're upset about sleeping sickness, but the problem lies not with mental illness being a myth for fattened westerners, but with how the pharamcutical industry operates and the politics of the nations of the people who get this disease.
This is so uninformed, the flat tax proposal would only help the rich and hurt working families. The rich pay more taxes percent wise than lower classes, and that's the way it should be. We've given them breaks like corporate welfare and an absurd amount of power to change our laws to their whims.
As for "crackheads," keep your stereotypical views, rehab may not be perfect but there are many people who need it yet can't afford it. What if one of your friends make a few mistkes in his life and tried to get into rehab but was turned down because of lack of insurance. How about physical or mental illness then, dont you think a responsible government has the responsibiloity to help those who can't help themselves?
The flat tax is propaganda sold to those who aren't much interested in poltics but want simple, easy to understand solutions that really just help people like Steve Forbes.
As if I didn't have enough things to be paranoid about *before*...
If anyone needs me, I'll be under my bed.
Hopfully, the radiation from my cell phone will kill me off first.
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
In Greg Egan's Diaspora a gamma ray burst from two colliding stars destroys all biological life on earth. Luckily the post humans have already uploaded themselves to firmware by then and spread out into the universe to figure out why the heck it happened.
And before that on the Wizard of Oz.
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
21. Carrot Top, Barbra Striesand, Yanni, and Kenny G go on tour. This upsets the balance of any decent form of entertainment forcing anyone hearing the sound snippet during the evening news to instantly go into convulsions and die. Efforts made to 'pull the plug' on the show go in vain as Gahleger, Polly Shore, Celine Dion and Regis begin their own tour to allert people to the dangers caused by the original tour.
You say you want a revolution?
According to a documentary I saw recently, two similar 20th-century impacts have been tentatively identified in Arabia and Brazil. With 3 on land, we can estimate about 6 or 7 happened at sea, giving a frequency of one every ten years. Of course, even if a Tunguska-sized bolide hit Mexico City or New York it would still be just a local disaster.
I doubt that a micro black hole would do any harm (but see David Brin's Earth, which also includes war, biotech, aliens, and mad scientist for good measure). It would probably immediately evaporate into Hawking radiation. There are some theories that such an object could be stable, but they pretty much prevent it from growing.
The article claims:
As measles is caused by a virus, there's nothing new about its resistance to antibiotics, which only affect bacteria.
Ask me if I've been required to disclose any crypto keys.
Besides, would you actually have time to play with a 32 processor Alpha if you had NP wearing only a trenchcoat/smile and a Lamborghini? Hmm.
Of course he would... Natalie would only be able to distract him for what? 30 seconds? 2 1/2 minutes? And then as soon as it was over (for him, not her) there'd be that temptation to go for a drive or boot up the Alpha...
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
=(.\')=
Damn it. I was sure that I had invented Jebus. I thought it was just wack shit that I talked about when I was high. Then I saw that Simpsons episode , which made me roll, and now this.
ANyways, mark me down as a follower of Jebus.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
The movie 'The Thirteenth Floor' dealt with this topic. I don't remember when it came out - a year or two ago - but it was lost in the Matrix's wake (they're only similar superficially).
I'll criticize Nader. He's a socialist idiot. Anyone who votes for Nader either isn't very bright or hasn't spent enough time thinking about the issues. Vote Browne and the Libertarians!
Greg Egan's book, "Diaspora", is set in the future, where a vast amount of people have "downloaded" themselves, and are now software agents. They discover that there is an incoming Gamma Ray burst occurring, and mount a diaspora, to flee the incoming tragedy.
As an aside, the gamma ray burst _is_ caused by two colliding celestial bodies (suns? can't remember), which are falling together faster than they should - this suggests underlying physics theorems which allow our intrepid heroes to escape to a different universe.
Of course I'm not proposing that (at least, not yet!), but currently we do we have the resources to go "We've got 5 years to get off this planet!!", and do it? How about 10? 20?
Anyway, check out Greg Egan's work. He is an Aussie, from Perth, and has written other books which should especially appeal to slashdot readers, including "Permutation City", and "Distress".
Cheers,
SuperG
The world will end when someone posts an on topic first post that gets modded _up_. Its in the bible. Somewhere in the back.
"That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling, can preserve a life beyond the grave; that all the labors of ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; and the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation be safely built." - Bertrand Russell, 1923.
I can see that. Our race could be the Borg. From the Borg's point of view, the species they assimilated were not being eradicated, but becoming part of the collective, which absorbs the entire race's experiences and knowledge.
It wouldn't be our death, we would be the perfect race, and we would go around the galaxy and eventually the universe assimilating every race we came across.
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
Watch Algore get happy as the few surviving members, on the planet he destroys, live in peace harmony with what's left of nature . .
living on leaves and tree bark. Think about it! No controling legal athority could tell you which tree to hug.
There is at least one true sign the world would end shortly...
The day Microsoft develops an Operating System that doesn't crash
FoonDog
The idea that waking up from the dream could destroy the world is something I've always suspected. That's the reason I hate mornings.
Other than those black hole arguments, particle accelerator mishaps, and whatever would eat away at the planet, I'm sure the Earth will keep on doing what it does best... spin around in circles around the sun and be a mother to her children...
Since we're at the top of the chain, we're also the most likely to go out if any of these disasters were to occur. Life would repeat itself starting with the smallest surviving bacteria and work all the way up to a species like... us.
But I always had this thought, "What if we're not the first human-type generation."
Dislaimer: I'm obviously no scientist, but I just want to share a thought.
How does our technology stack up to determine the life of our planet or even our universe? I can see estimates (ie. Earth is 4 billion years old), but nothing that will determine that the Eart IS 4 billion years old.
So here's my idea... the human-type generation
We are not the first to roam this planet successfully. We are not the last to die here either. Instead, maybe billions upon billions of years ago, we did exist on this planet. And we eventually did kill ourselves off through technology or maybe some natural disaster.
In turn, Earth eventually heals itself and here we are again. When humans die off. The Earth would do the same thing again.
Space travel would save us, right? Who knows, maybe the last human-type are the aliens we think that are out there.
Of course, this is all an idea. And I'm sure it's not the first time it's been thought of. If you're still scratching your head... don't worry, I tried reading this again, I couldn't make sense of it either... Have a great day :)
--
Neafevoc
If we patented these methods of world destruction, could the human race survive forever?
Come on, these ideas are interesting when you're about twelve.
Pete
Pete
That's why all natural quantities come in discreet units. Yes, the units are incredibly small, but they are discreet none the less. Digital system? Wouldn't surprise me.
------
Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Ha. That's no moon up there, that's a space station!
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
The shooting room paradox, taken from the site you linked to, seems to be the best refutation of the doomsday argument:
In the shooting room experiment we are to imagine a room of infinite capacity. First a batch of ten people are led into this room. A pair of dice is thrown in front of their eyes. If a double six comes up they are all shot. Otherwise they leave the room safely and a new batch, this one containing a hundred people, is thrust in. The process continues, with each consecutive batch ten times larger than the previous one, until there is a double six; whereupon the people in the room at that time are shot and the experiment ends.
Suppose you have been thrust into the room. You are asked to estimate the odds of leaving safely. One the one hand, since whether you will leave or not will be determined by the throw of a fair pair of dice, it seems that you have a 35/36 chance of exiting alive. On the other hand, 90% of all people who are in your situation will be shot, so it seems you have only a 10% chance of exiting alive. That is the paradox.
The connection to the DA is obvious. Except for the fact that each consecutive batch in the shooting room is postulated to be ten times bigger than its predecessor (which corresponds to an indefinite exponential population growth in the case of the DA), the two situations are structurally very similar.
I think the key idea is that given that I exist at this point in time, the probability that I survive is independent of what came before, 35/36 - in fact, the probability that each subsequent generation survives may be higher since it is more difficult for a catastrophy to wipe out a larger than smaller number of people (barring weapons of mass destruction).
[Scene: Ravine floor. Ahead looms the dark of the Fire Swamp]
Westley: Ha! Your pig fiancé is too late. A few more steps and we'll be safe in the fire swamp.
Buttercup: We'll never survive.
Westley: Nonsense. You're only saying that because no one ever has.
(Quoted from here.)
Stefan.
It takes a lot of brains to enjoy satire, humor and wit-
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
Try William S. Burroughs instead.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
...How long has the earth avoided all of these catastrophies? Call me crazy, but even if our species is wiped away, I don't think that the earth is in much danger for awhile... and who cares if everyone dies, it's not like we do anything important anyway...
-HobophobE
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
So, your argument then, to summarize, is; the rich don't pay any taxes as it is, since they have loopholes, so, how can Nader justify taxing people more, who make more money? I think you just answered your own question. ;-)
Free music from Jack Merlot.
I'm from Minnesota. If Jesse Fricking Ventura can put the smackdown on two entrenched good ol' boys like Skippy and Norm, Ralph Nader should have no problem winning this one.
I'm voting Nader for sure. I absolutely could not look myself in the eye if I voted for either of those two walking penises.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
my thought when i read that part was somethign like this, "DUH!". lets look at it this way.. if there is only 1 person alive when doomsday coems then only 1 person will witness it. if there are 6 billion then 6 billion will witness it. it's only logical to say that the more people tehre are, the more will be effected by a global event.
In fact, with us gone, nature might get a second lease on life.
Second lease at what?!!! This reflects a bizare combination of arrogance and self loathing. Man can not really undo life on earth. If you accept that life evolved from some tarry mass, you must predict its rise in any event. To look at the removal of man as anything positive shows an utter disregard and hatred for you fellow man. Save yourself! Get out and do something!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The odds of being one of the people to witness doomsday are highest when there is the largest number of witnesses around so now is not such an improbable.
Actually, there will be no human witnesses to human extinction. Think about it. Well, never mind, I'll just explain. The highest chance of extinction occurs with the lowest number living, and no human will see the last die.
17 Mass insanity
My bet's on this one! You saw it here first. 1840 was the end of the world, we are all just living a dream (20 has occured?) Someone, pinch me.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Deals with the whole theme of ultra wealthy individuals in a society where there is enough computing power to accomplish the downloading of their barin into a computer. Really decent series. I recommend it highly.
No Bill Joy vs. Linus Torvalds virtual deathmatch, but good nonetheless :-)
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
Certainly the richest x% pay more in taxes than the rest of the population, but that is because they hold x^n% of the wealth. It is ABSOLUTELY FAIR that if we decide to tax the wealth of the population that the amount of the taxation any one person experiences should be proportional to the amount of wealth that passes through their hands.
RMS and Bill Joy rely greatly on the security that they enjoy not being overrun by hungry poor people, do they not?
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Humor is quite appropriate for this article. Although we can affect things like global warming and biotech meltdown, for most of these events, it's not like the end of the world is the kinda thing we can do much about.
Rule 10: You take life too seriously.`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
That thread went back to the early/mid 80s -- and even then it was old. Of course, back then they were talking about usenet (the internet was then known as ARPAnet, and was limited to defence groupies).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I've done that once.
----
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
it's all sorts of fun potential disastes I don't know, I find black holes to taste very good. Most of the time it just needs salt. An asteroid is really an aquired taste, though, and the texture can be a real put off.
----
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
A disaste is a catastropy in New England. Example: My brothe's ca was wrecked last week. A huge disaste, what a pissa!
--
EFF Member #11254
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Or aliens might accidentally upset our planet or solar system while carrying out some grandiose interstellar construction project.
Is it just me, or does that scream VOGONS to anyone else?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
First of all, to shamelessly quote the anthropologist A. I. Hallowell (note 1), It is normal to share the delusions traditionally accepted by one's society. Abnormality involves the development of of a delusional system the culture does not sanction. Consider, for example, the many Americans who saw nothing wrong with Titanic getting all those Oscars, or the many Britons who consider broad beans to be food.
Next off, a few tidbits from the article:
By 2020, depression will likely be the second leading cause of death and lost productivity, right behind cardiovascular disease.
Cardiovascular disease? that disease the affects people who get too much to eat? Surely, in most of the world, there is no time for insanity - most of one's daily activities surround not starving to death (note 2)
Gregory Stock ... believes medical science will soon allow people to live to be 200 or older ... One possible solution-- promoting a certain kind of mental well-being with psychoactive drugs such as Prozac-- heads into uncharted waters
Sorry, that's just too good. In an age when no drug company in the whole world is willing to make, let alone research drugs to treat sleeping sickness, a massive killer in many tropical countries, because the profit margin is too low (read: not enough rich people get bitten by tsetse flies)(note 3), and zillions of dollars are poured into treating diseases that claim people who have money to burn on cigarettes, over-processed foods, and a sedentary life! And here we're positing that in a mere twenty or thirty years, most of the earth's population will be blowing obscene sums on drugs to treat unhappiness! Arhgh!
notes
1 - This is not a made up guy, or quotation, but notice this - his name can be further abbreviated to A.I. Hal. Spooky or what?
2 - I'm just one a them socialist Canadians, I can't help it
3 - don't read this one if you're queasy, but... The current treatment for sleeping sickness is so caustic that you have to inject it from a glass syringe - it will eat right through a plastic one. The effects of injecting it intravenously are what one might expect. And no company will put any money into researching a better treatment.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
"Or aliens might accidentally upset our planet or solar system while carrying out some grandiose interstellar construction project."
sounds a bit like Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy to me....
This post has been encrypted in several of the most advanced ROT-26 algorithms
Certainly JFK benefittd from being a Kennedy, but it's probably much less than than Bush2 has. JFK's dad was a senator and ambassador to Britain who didn't think we should get involved with WW2 (at first anyway), while Bush1 was Prez during a nice little TV war. What do you think is better to the average Joe?
Also, don't forget Bush2 used his family political connections to get an Air National Guard commision during a war his daddy supported, JFK used his to get a Navy combat command and nearly died because of it.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
21 - the 12th planet comes back and crashes into the Earth, turning it into another asterioid belt.
And if you believe that, I've got an umbrella for sale that will protect you from meteorites, guaranteed.
First, God will start to toast the world. Then, Man will try to enhance his existance via the Hunman Enhancement Project (Human Instrumentality Project if you are Gendo).
I don't suppose you remember the "Imminent death of the net predicted, film at 11" threads back on news.* (and the rest of Usenet) circa 1991-1993 do you? Applying the same logic at that time, I could have argued that as I was user number N of the internet (where N was probably in 100,000s back then), it was likelier that there would only be a few 100,000 users of the Internet ever, and that in fact the internet was most likely due to croak by 1995 or so. In fact, given the fact that we're up in the tens of millions of users now, I can make a much stronger argument for the imminent death of the internet now than i could back in 1992.
And to keep this on-topic.. um.. No, I don't think the world should end.. ;)
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
First of all, I think a 20% flat tax would be ridiculous. I think if we actually gave some thought to where we threw our money, 10% ought to be plenty. And second of all, your whole problem seems to be (correct me if I'm wrong, I probably am ;) that the people making dirt-wages would end up screwed. Well people under the "poverty" level (or whatever) ought to be able to keep their money. (This does go against my "no exceptions" comment tho doesn't it? Hehe..) Anyway. Who cares. I'm always gonna get screwed, so deal with it, eh? ;)
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
Here, here! Some of those crackheads in action now! ;)
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
GWB is in no way a redneck. He is dumb but not a redneck. He wants people to think that because most people in the US are threatened by what he really is. He is a rich spoiled brat from conneticut who went to a fancy prep school (phillips exeter or phillips andover or groton i cant remember which off the bat) and was admited to Yale on the strength of being Gerge BUSH, grandson of a conn. senator. In fact Bush is even related to the british royal family. Bush has relied on being Bush his whole life the only money he ever made (when the Texas Rangers were sold) was a political favor to his father. Now he is trying to get elected using his family name, money , and connections.
Im just saying he is not a redneck or a man from the people or whatever bullshit populist crap his campaign wants people to believe. It is not bad to have a rich family what is bad is being able to slide by to the presidency on it.
Gore makes no claims about not coming froma polititians family. he is upfront about it. He also is smart enough to get into Harvard on his own merit unlike Bush.
"Get smited by God, Rod."
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I get so tired of people who claim to be intellectual and they are really just afraid to smile or laugh about anything. Get a fucking grip. You people are the ones who make me sick. Learn to fucking laugh about something instead of be so damn critical. Youll live longer, and you may get a girlfriend some day.
Ooooh.... oww... stopit... your gonna make me cry...
Heh, Its *HUMOR* I can give a shit what you think but you have very obviosuly missed the point of me making fun of myself for other peoples amusement. I did that on purpose so insulting me about it is only going to make ME laugh which I did when I read this reply.
Jeremy
No.. im not that funny really.. well some of the time maybe.. i just take humor for what it is. And people tell me im smart but I dont feel that way., I wasnt even upset at the poster, I was just in a foul mood and that was the first thing that struck me as utterly pointless.. But I thank you for your actually thoughtful reply to my very rude and untidy post.
Jeremy
21) SKYNET
SkyNet makes its move, directing Russia's missile system to launch at the US, which of course triggers our response. This wipes out humanity, allowing the machines to take over. Our only hope? John Connor.
22) THE COMPANY'S ALIEN RESEARCH
The Company finally gets rid of Ripley and is free to pursue its Alien research. Inevitably, facehuggers escape the lab and begin taking over humans left and right.
23) THIS STATION IS FULLY OPERATIONAL
Earth is wiped out by the Death Star, which (even though it appeared to be far from completion) was actually fully operational, much to the chagrin of the Rebellion. And us. Especially us.
24) GENESIS PROJECT
A rogue Klingon gets hold of the Genesis Device and converts our Solar System into one big Oort Cloud.
25) DALEKS
Dr. Who suffocates when he rolls over, dozing with his scarf wrapped around his throat. Poor us.
26) NEO TAKES THE WRONG PILL
(Corollary to #20)
Neo fails to do the right thing and takes the wrong pill from Morpheus. We never find out The Truth.
27) SPEAKING OF "THE TRUTH"...
In the final season of X-Files, Agent Scully and Robert Patrick's character immediately fall in love and give up on Mulder's whole "truth" trip. The US and indeed the whole world are left defenseless. The aliens fulfill their plans, leaving what few survivors there are enslaved.
28) EINSTEIN WAS WRONG
Turns out, E=MC^3 instead. First room-temp fusion reactor turns the Earth into a lifeless Oreo-cookie of a lump of slag.
29) VONNEGUT WAS RIGHT
Ice-9 really does exist. Unfortunately, Bokononism doesn't. We never "do, doodley do, doodley do, doodley do..."
30) BIG BROTHER STOPS WATCHING
The Two Minute Hate gets out of hand. Oceania has actually been both friend and enemy (at different times) of both Eastasia *and* Eurasia. War is not peace. Freedom isn't slavery. Pandemonium reigns.
--
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
If the world is like Super Mario Brothers 2, NO ONE better be feeding vegetables to an evil frog! I still have so much to live for, like the final build of Mozilla!
Isn't this kinda like that crappy TV show Reboot? And will Linus have to escape the evil virus Megabyte too? Now THAT would be mediocre TV!
illenium.net - ultimate sk8 shop online
...a extremely fatal, fast spreading disease.
I think a virus will pop up, worse than ebola, that will have people spewing a variety of putrid liquids out of holes they never thought they had, all the while convulsing and suffering some severe delerium. Within hours, you make a loud death rattle and THWACK! your dead.
This message brought to you by the one of the most successful species that has ever lived, homo erectus, 6,000,000,000 strong and growing, the vast majority of whom couldn't conceive of an ecological balance if one fell off a shelf at wal mart and smacked them on the head.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Soylent Green: This concoction becomes so popular that the last human on earth eats himself, much like the Zen snake devouring itself from the tail up.
#21: Mass slashdotting of discover.com causes a superdense nova to occur inside web server.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
"Imagine that two big urns are put in front of you, and you know that one of them contains ten balls and the other a million, but you are ignorant as to which is which. You know the balls in each urn are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 ... etc. Now you take a ball at random from the left urn, and it is number 7. Clearly, this is a strong indication that that urn contains only ten balls. If originally the odds were fifty-fifty, a swift application of Bayes' theorem gives you the posterior probability that the left urn is the one with only ten balls. (pposterior (L=10) = 0.999990). But now consider the case where instead of the urns you have two possible human races, and instead of balls you have individuals, ranked according to birth order. As a matter of fact, you happen to find that your rank is about sixty billion. Now, say Carter and Leslie, we should reason in the same way as we did with the urns. That you should have a rank of sixty billion or so is much more likely if only 100 billion persons will ever have lived than if there will be many trillion persons. Therefore, by Bayes' theorem, you should update your beliefs about humankind's prospects and realize that an impending doomsday is much more probable than you have hitherto thought."
Well, anyone who has attended an economy course would know that that's called progressive taxing.If you think about it, it is much better for social good than a more regresive taxing method like flat rate tax. For example, if you are earning $1K, 10% of your income means hell lot to you. But if you are Bill Gates, you can still live much more than comfortably if 50% of your income is taxed. Of course my answer is not very economics but then, that was ten years ago.
That is because the richest 250,000 people owns 90% of the economy? (or was it much more than that now?)
That would be disaster #20 then.
There it is, right there.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Which is totally unlike Gore, right? Just change a few locations and names......
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
with the slashdot effect! Now, what did I do with those URL's for the sun and the earth's core.....
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
I have an idea, has anyone thought that since the universe is quantinized (I misspelled that badly), it is really a simulation running on a computer with a finite amount of memory?
Physics would then only be the study of the limits placed upon the objects in the simulation. There also would be no way to prove that this is in fact a simulation rather than a non-simulation because for all intents and purposes it would be a real universe to us.
The new Pentium XXIII comes out in 2014. It creates so much heat that there is a 50/50 chance that when you turn it on, it will burn a hole to the Earth's center.
All in the name of progress . . .
------
Not a typewriter
It is possible that another, even more stable kind of vacuum exists, however.
Oooh, and maybe it'll run a little quieter than the Eureka I have in my closet!
---
Hold the mold, Klunk.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Here's another way: use Microsoft Windows software on nuclear weapons systems. The system crashes, the missles launch, and it becomes nuclear winter. Another good part of this system is that as a side effect, it breaks up Microsoft.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
This list -- minus nanotechnology and other modernities -- reads almost exactly like a synopsis of Isaac Asimov's 1979 book "A Choice of Catastrophes", found here or here. It's an excellent read. The good doctor especially emphasized the importance of trying to deal with "domestic" problems (environmental issues, society, economy, overpopulation, allocation of resources) first, since there's really not that much we can do about straying black holes and stuff anyway, except colonize more planets -- which we can't do well unless we become a more organized species first. Well, we can keep an eye open for doomsday meteorites, as described in Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama" and "The Hammer of God" (or a certain, really disgusting Hollywood film I won't mention), so let's do that too.
By the way, I read this book first when I was 15, and I remember being amazed by how well his explanation of black holes worked for me. I thought the ones in charge should put some of Asimov's writing into school textbooks, instead of the stuff they fed us back then :-).
"People are stupid."
Don McKellar is a Genius... (not a term I use often..).. he's in the same league as David Byrne and Tim Burton..
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, he has the ability to portray weird people reacting to absurdist situations, but still have the audience watch with total belief.. the only way I can describe it is "spiraling down the rabbit hole"
Ever see "Twitch City"? absolutely hilarious.. I wish there were more episodes..
"What is real and what is not real?" is one of the most mind boggling questions you can ask. On the surface it seems so obvious. But when you start picking away at the places where our sense of reality is ill defined, you begin to see that it is not such a simple thing after all.
I rate this question right up there with the question: "How can anything exist at all?" A question that, quite frankly, makes me realize how much evolution is left for us to complete.
The human mind does have its limits. These questions are excellent koans to stretch our minds to explore the dark holes of consciousness.
One of the fundamental errors that we all make is confusing "reality" with our models of reality. There is even a word for it, "reafication". Although I may be misspelling it. A nice word to know.
By the way, if you find an answer, you're wrong. And no cheating by blaming it on God, the oldest cop-out in the world.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen. Ludwig Wittgenstein
It would be the end of the world as we know it if Linus Torvalds died.
Daniel
The Merry Minuet
They're rioting in Africa
They're starving in Spain
There's hurricanes in Florida
And Texas needs rain
the Whole world is festering with unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don't like Anybody very much.
But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud
For man's been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud
And we know for certain that some lucky day
Someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away
They're rioting in Africa
There's strife in Iran
What nature doesn't do to us
Will be done by our fellow Man
-- Sheldon Harnick @1958
YES! STAR TREK! Some people actually LIKE it.
Surprising really... Do people really think all problems can be solved in the space of one epsiode, in some cases 2 episodes?
--- Can i borrow your Clue-Stick(tm)? I need to go beat a few people with it...
Asimov wrote about more than just robots. IMO, two of his best "End of the World/Universe" stories have nothing to do with robots at all. The first is called "The Last Question" and deals with entropy. I forget what the other is called but it is about a binary star system that has a planet that is always in daylight except for once every thousand years. Interesting.
If we lose our magnetic fields, I wonder if people would stop wearing those little magnets?
managers...why god invented purgatory
Slashdot story: World ends.
SPAM was cause of destruction.
Pork responsible.
Just my latest contribution to the world of spam haiku, and it's even on topic. Go me!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah, actually, I just realized that. Granted, some say that an English haiku should in fact have around 12 syllables total; But I was going for an elementary school-style haiku, and hosed it up. My bad.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As to the nuclear blast: Yes, it shouldn't be set off right next to the thing, where the force vectors would apply too much instantanious force and radial stress... But you must realize, that a nuclear explosion in space, is a diffrent animal then one on the ground. The awesome blast force you see from an atmostpheric thermonuclear detonation is because all of the matter surrounding the thing for a good ways has a huge ammount of energy poured into it, and [being matter] expands a great deal. In vacuum, all you are giving off is a lot of radiation preasure; which, if placed close enough [but not -too- close] would cause the exposed surface [the part not in the asteriods own shadow of the blast], to heat enormously, causing an effect like you see on the ground. The primary propulsive effect isn't so much from kinetic motion imparted by the nuke, but instead from the ejecta from the asteriod.
You're also neglecting that, even assuming you did want to park it -on- the asteriod (so to speak), and therefore tend to fragment it... Even so, lots of small rocks are preferrable to one huge rock, due to the hugely increased surface area of the same total mass... which allows more of it to burn up in the atmosphere. If you could repeat this, and fragment it into small enough pieces, virtually none of them would ever even hit the ground.
--
man sig
---
the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
In the beginning, this article verges nicely on the scientifically competent... but later delves increasingly into pseduoscience and your classical luddite-esque scare mongering and silliness.
;) ]
;)
;)
1. Asteroid impact. Wholly plausible, although it must be said that it should be possible to divert it with a chain of precisely launched nuclear warheads detonated as closely as possible to it [the heat from the radiation pressure would cause massive ejecta from the surface, and newtons second law would tend to do the rest, (unless it is mushy or claylike and easily broken into pieces, in which case further blasts could be placed in it's wake to fragment it as much as possible to maximize surface area resistance and encourage burning up in the atmosphere. Block out the sun for a while, but advanced civilization would manage to survive]
2. Once again, plausible, but also notably more speculative. There have been no observed gamma-ray bursts you could call in any way close, they -may- only have tended to happen in a far younger universe. Then again, we've had a devil of a time really triangulating them with all that much accuracy... it's an unknown, put possible. The complete damage of all unshielded electrons equipment would be devastating, [as well as lot's of cancer, etc]
3. Well, I guess the spectrum is not a perfect reasoned to silly, as this is far more implausible [and based wholly on unconfirmed speculation and hypothesis of a fundamental cosmological nature... This one should have come just before divine intervention, to make the ideology spectrum smooth
4. Rogue black holes. Yep, could happen. We'd know about it for a few decades a head of time, hopefully would provide a sufficient rallying cry to learn to live comfortably and self sustainably in space.
5. A conceivable threat, but the likeliness is indeterminate. Most amusing is that the science quoted in the end referring to the existence of strong evidence that the major element in previous world climate change is caused by variations in the sun's output tends to strongly run head-on into the presumptions assumed in #9:"Global warming", but hey.. Who said an article about science in the mainstream media should concern itself with self-consistency
6. I'd never heard of this one before! Interesting. Certainly, geomagnitism provides most of our shielding from energetic particles from the sun... It's happened before without causing huge problems in the fossil record, though. It would probably just cause, at worst, a sharp upswing in mutations and cancer. [Which is -good- for animals, where it is a question of evolution and adaptation. It's only bad where the death of an individual counts, which only applies to people, anyway]
7. A risk. It would devastate world agricultural production! As to whether or not we are "due for one", I couldn't say... but I can't deny that current man has a lot of hubris in fearing himself more them the vagaries of nature. Worst case, much of human population dies, high tech nations sustain a limited population via technologically produced foods. Certainly would be a field day for Darwin. Most amusing is the fact pointed out that 95% of all species were wiped out, [nothing like the most liberal figures of mankinds current impact], and guess what, the ecology rebounded just fine.
8. That would suck for many people. Random deaths. Still, probably wouldn't kill more then 90%, leaving more then enough gene pool to repopulate and rebuild. Plus, advanced quarantining, national emergency... Many may survive in private enclaves, quarantining against all outsiders until the problem is dealt with [say, effective testing, triage, "tuberculosis colonies", etc.]
9. First of she states the earth is getting warmer as a given [before even bringing in the necessary authority of science to bolster her argument]. Many climatologists and geophysicists don't believe there is sufficient evidence to claim that. [Recent ocean readings via satellite actually showed the earth cooling slightly]. Others conclude that the earth does seem to be warming slightly, but that it is correlated most directly to the output of the sun [see #5]. The venus argument is just silly, the earths liquid oceans provide an excellent heat pump, via convection of water vapor in the atmosphere, to radiate a lot of energy into space. Of course, it's still possible, in the sense that anything is possible.
10. Now this isn't even real science anymore, but is beginning to descend into classic left-wing polemic. People forget that evolution has always been all about the most successful [and, it has often turned out, the most complicated and therefore adaptable] of species winning out, creating new playing fields of competition. Mankind is a part of nature! We are the [thus far] height of natures expression on earth. Yes, we are outcompeting other less adaptive DNA in the struggle for resources. It's still -nothing- like the 95% extinction mentioned above. [[Or the almost -complete- extinction of all life that happened with cyanobateria evolved the nasty and horrible ecologically evil habit of pumping out vast amounts of poisonous pollution as a result of a new trick they learned for obtaining energy, causing the greatest percentage wise extinction in of life's history... In case you don't get it, they produced -oxygen-! [Which outcompeted earlier, less successful DNA that was chemotropic, and allowed a whole new plane of competition [free oxygen allowed more complex, more active animals, as oxydation is a significant part of our power source]]]
11. Oh god, the descent into leftist fear-mongering and neo-ludditism reaches new heights/depths. Genetic engineering could never hurt the environment; ultimately it could only help it by introducing more expressive traits to me commingled in the great evolutionary dance. Humanity has been practicing genetic engineering to a limited extant for millinea. [Animal husbandry, agricultural breeding]. Now we can be more precise about it. Argh. Modern ludditism so annoys me.
12. This one is actually perhaps possible as to the mini black hole, although a strong argument can be made that it would spontaneously evaporate into hawking radiation as it would have so little mass that just a few virtual particle interactions would decimate it. [Not enough statistical likelihood to stand on it's own, quantum wise, if you want a loose and innacurate metaphor]. The notion of strangelets and a phase change in the ether is as well an unknown, but a complete and wholly speculative one, based on [albeit interesting] theories with no demonstrative evidence to back them up whatsoever. Argumentum ad ignorantiam is logically worthless.
13. Nanotech disaster. F*ck fire or ice, that's the way I would want to go!... to have gotten so close to true near-total dominance over nature, with a promise of easy off-planet and even interstellar expansion of human life and thought... Surely worth the risk, which could be wholly eliminate by intelligent initial deployment in the beginning, and by design of countermeasures [nano-tech immune systems] after it becomes widely disseminated.
14. Oh yikes. I'm not even going to bother with this one. The output from a good volcano is far less then the toxins of most industrial output. And there is a straw man in arguing that cancer rates are bad for the environment. Mutation and a bit of extra death of animals is no big deal, part of natures old plan. Only in humans does cancer really matter in the slightest, which sort of defeats the loosely implicit notion of ecological catastrophe... Ah well, even the reporter admits that this is not an accepted or plausible theory of in real deemed risk in scientific circles.
15. Yeah, a real worry, but it certainly wouldn't wipe out humanity. Lots of people would survive. Wouldn't be nearly as bad as a small-to-medium sized asteroid strike, and advanced non-sentient life has survived that in the past, I'm sure we'd make it through. [It might take a century or two to be building scanning-tunneling-microscopes, though]
16. Heh, if we're outcompeted, I don't see that as disaster. Besides, those robots are likely to be a synthesis of downloaded human minds, with extensions. And besides, I really don't think such intelligent beings would see any need to wipe us all out. At worst, they might forcibly download all of our pertinent structure [mind and DNA] into nanocomputers, and put us in something like the Matrix [with the full option of exiting at any time, of course, and join the real world of human progress.]
17. This reporter, and much of what she implicitly dumps in from traditional media bias makes me wonder...
18. All I can say is, if our culture was outcompeted and replaced by a more advanced one, -why would that be a bad thing-? That's Darwin, people! I'd be happy to learn.
19. I'm not gonna touch this one with a ten-foot inverted religious implement.
20. I'm not gonna even bother to touch this one either, with a ten volume set of postmodern philosophy. [Actually, it does interest me a little. It has sometimes amused me to realize that it is possible that we are all genetic life that has evolved in a complex alien uber-computer, created by beings far more advanced then us... Our lives are only so painfull because invisible cameras follow us around, and the multitasking awareness of our pathetic tragedy gets good ratings on transcendental cable tv, and helps sell alien soap...]
--
man sig
---
the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
>new Lamborghini with a 32 processor Alpha machine in the backseat.
a Lamborghini with a backseat?! are you mad!!!
Microsoft will buy the world. If that doesn't end the world as we know it I don't know what would.
_______
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- RFC 1925
At what point would your 'soul' transfer? Ive been running this through my brain a lot lately, because they technoligy will soon be here. What if you transfered your soul to the computer, and your biological body was still alive? Which one is you?
Let's see how long it takes for hollywood to make movies out of each one... oh wait, they already did... nevermind.
witty sig goes here
*David Letterman voice*
Tonight's top ten list has been extended to the top twenty, because well all hell bound loosers! So top twenty ways the world will die!
*/DL voice*
Please put down the Star Crunch and back away
from the keyboard. Quickly move towards your
fallout shelter (i.e. your bathroom). Thank
you for your cooperation.
Down with GNU. Long live the ENL.
The author of that article really knew their stuff... William S. Burrows was a fantastic writer?
Oh.. Wait.
headonfire
Maybe the end of the world will come. Mass insanity can be caused by listening to Gore and Bush debate for an hour and a half. I read that after those debates Nader rose from 2% to 7%.
my sig sucks
Thank you for proving my point. Maybe if I tell a funny worthless joke it will be deemed the most important contribution to the article ever imagined. Slashdot get some moderators that are over the age of 14.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
Your post should be moderated up. The only thing you failed to mention was a "1-Click" or "Open-Source" or "Spam" other than that it is a work of art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
Someone had a lot of time on their hands.
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
get drunk
Doctor Strangelove: How I learned to stop worrying, start living, and love The Bomb.
__________
I might have forgotten some details in the stuff Asimov wrote just before he died. These books weren't very memorable -- and didn't have strong continuity with his earlier books.
But you've reminded me of a far better example of benign robot takeover -- Ian Banks's stories about The Culture. Although, I'm not sure Banks thinks of it that way. I suspect he was just doing a cybernetic version of the Marxist Utopia -- a society that's evolved beyond any social institutions based on scarcity (money, government...). I'm not sure he realizes that he's created a world where robots (he calls them "drones") do everything that matters, and humans just putter along, trying not to get in the way.
Then there's Jack Williamson, who came up with a really scary concept: "humanoids" programmed to protect humans from physical harm at all costs. Result: civilization totally devoid of risk, and thus of all activities that humans actually enjoy. Unfortunately, he managed to rather beat the concept to death.
__________
If that's true, why are so many of the robot stories about pseudo-technical issues? He's famous for the "Laws of Robotics" that he invented mainly to indulge his love of cute little puzzles. And his "roboticists" regularly talked about the mathematical equations that supposedly drove his "positronic brains". (Asimov himself said that he had no idea why positrons made good brains.) The most technical thing I ever heard him say about his robots was that they were presumably driven by "some kind of computer" -- a statement which actually contradicts some of his stories!
I don't mean to run Asimov down. He wrote in an era when most SF was based on made-up "science" and wasn't full of references to the latest discoveries and inventions. I rather prefer that approach to stories that read like a rehashed Scientific American article, the way so many recent stories do. But let's not get all hero-worshipy. Asimov had his intellectual and creative limitations -- as do we all.
I also like David Brin! His short stories are much better than his novels. Brin is very much like Asimov in that respect.
I seem to recall enjoying all of Brin's short fiction. I often think the short story is where SF works best. Unfortunately, what the marketplace seems to want is thousand-page overplotted, overpopulated, underedited sagas, padded even further with half-baked rants on meaningless topics. Which is why such nonsense accounts for 90% of Brin's output.
__________
I seem to recall that Egan had most of humanity uploaded before the Big Disaster, leaving a few holdouts in an uneasy truce with the uploadees. (Egan invented interesting names for all the various social groups, but I forget them now.) The most interesting part is when the uploadees try to persuade the last holdouts to give up their physical bodies rather than be killed in the Burst. Most of what I like about this novel is little ethical issues like this.
One thing that disappoints me is that Egan, even though he puts a lot of imagination into imagining life-as-software, never really deals with practical implications. Imagine a society where you could create duplicates of yourself at will. Or merge yourself (or bits of yourself) with other people to create composite individuals. You'd probably end up with a society in which there were few or no "individuals" in our sense of the word. Gibson hints at this sort of thing in Neuromancer, when he mentions that one of the AI characters is "just a kind of subroutine" of a larger personality.
Instead, Egan uploadees never duplicate themselves except to expedite interstellar travel, and always feel obliged to merge with themselves (and only themselves) at the earliest opportunity. I suppose you need to assume that kind of convention in order to have a coherent novel -- but it's still implausible.
__________
6 Reversal of Earth's magnetic field
Poul Anderson wrote a story on this theme. The name escapes me.
8 Global epidemics
The novel Earth Abides and the BBC TV series Survivors (no cash prizes).
9 Global warming
Everything recent by Bruce Sterling, but especially Heavy Weather
10 Ecosystem collapse
A real popular category: Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, Wylie's The End of the Dream, and Streiber & Kunetka's Nature's End (not reflective of Streiber's recent UFO obsessions). There are many others, of course -- most of them pretty bad.
I'm fond of Spinrad's Riding the Torch, although this is more about the kind of humanity that ecodisaster might produce, not about the disaster itself.
11 Biotech disaster
The Death of Grass falls into this category, even though the technology Christopher warns about (traditional agriculture! it seems that most of our food crops are related to ordinary grass, and thus subject to the same diseases) is pretty primitive.
13 Nanotechnology disaster
A secondary theme in Stephenson's The Crystal Age.
15 Global war
I'm tempted to say that this theme died with the Cold War. But at least one writer (Eric Harry) seems to be making a living off the idea that It Could Still Happen. And of course, all the talentless technothriller authors manage to find minor countries (Argentina will rise again!) capable of setting off the Holocaust.
If there was ever a movie for Slashdotters, it's Doctor Strangelove. ("You can't condemn a system because of one little error!") The interesting thing about this movie is that it started out as an adaptation of a serious technothriller, Red Alert. But Kubrick found that he couldn't write about Armageddon without making jokes!
The movie Fail-Safe is worth mentioning, mainly because it's about a nuclear near-war triggered by technological failure. A good movie, but unfortunately based on a very bad book that happened to be a conspicuous rip-off of Red Alert. So Kubrick's lawyers kept it from getting a proper release.
16 Robots take over
David Brin has done some good stuff on this theme (an author I used to enjoy, before I realized that everything he writes is a sort of novelized flame war). Gregory Benford's Galatic Center series has some good points, but is hampered by an absence of focus -- and Benford's regretable tendency to read like a creative writing assignment.
It's interesting that the doyen of Robot SF never developed this theme. But maybe not suprising -- Asimov never really developed any serious understanding of computing, cypernetics, or robotics. His robot stories are really a combination of old-fashioned handwaving (can "don't kill people" really be made into a mathematical principle?) and social comentary (notice the stories where robots are addressed as "boy"!).
18 Alien invasion
Certainly more crap in this category than any other. V and Independence Day tell us that aliens will invade us to steal resources like minerals and water -- things they can obtain from solar and planetary rings and halos with much less trouble. Fortunately, Mars is uninhabited -- imagine the lawsuits if it weren't!
__________
This was done before that by Lum and company, in Urusei Yatsura 2 - Beautiful Dreamer.
is a very good reason not to bother napping co-workers.
I knew that :-P
--www.mp3.com/kruhft--
Of course, since the site is /.ed, I might have missed the "Hail of Bullets Raining From The Sky" scenario...
--www.mp3.com/kruhft--
I didn't see any mention of a giant marshmallow man destroying the earth. don't these people watch TV. Not to mention Godzilla or Gamera. These people obviously have not done their research. Not one mention of the sky falling. These people call themsevles scientists. Bah. Bunch of crackpots is what they are.
Hardier, yes. Tastier? Who can tell. More nutritious? Not likely. More profitable? Absolutely.
The real danger from Franken foods is not that they'll brew up some disasterous toxic chemical (though it could happen, as there is no extensive testing guidlines for the stuff) but that they allow agribusiness corps to control way too much. Stocks of corn (cattle feed and sweetener) can be engineered to be effectively sterile, forcing farmers to buy seed from the source corporation (patented and licensed DNA, baby!). As certain sterile breeds start to dominate the market, it becomes more and more easy for a single virus, bacteria, or insect (or climate change) to effectively wipe out all the crops (an argument FOR biodiversity).
[pink beam of light]
I like this one, but it's probably the creepiest of all if you think about it...that there is some mind out there sick and twisted enough to dream up the violence in the Middle East, the Unabomber, Hitler, and Britney Spears...
This is a Chao. A Chao says "Mu."
it started with a bang, but will it end a crunch?
redsaso
You mean like JFK?
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
and we have yet to see its like in the dirty tricks department. (which costs money)
And that was daddy's money
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Let's think about this "flat tax" thing.
:)
Two years ago, I worked at Tower Records. That's $5.15/hr, or about $41.20 a day, or roughly $1,200 a month, gross. Now let's take a fictious computer programmer who makes $48,000 a year, or $4,000 a month, gross.
Now, I don't know where you live, but a decent figure for rent in a place where you won't get shot or robbed the first day in my area is $500. Let's say income tax is a flat 20%.
So Tower Records employee comes away with $960 a month ($240 taxes), minus $500 rent, leaving $460 a month for food, rent, car insurance, power, etc. Fictitious programmer comes away with $3200 a month ($800 taxes), which should be more than enough than any single guy would ever need to live comfortably.
Now, let me ask you, if Tower Records guy, who (I know from experience) works a much more physically and socially grueling and difficult shift than Computer Programmer, ends up beating up Computer Programmer and stealing $200 from him so he can eat, can you really blame him? Well, yes, you can. But you can see why he did it anyway.
So, I say, structure the tax so Tower Records Guy can keep his $240--even if Computer Programmer has to pay $1024. And, yes, I am a programmer, although I am not that good. Of course, the best scenario would be to end the war on drugs so Tower Records Guy can pay $0 and Computer Programmer can pay $600
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
It's all in the Bible.
Perhaps if you had READ THE ARTICLE, you'd have discovered that Discover included Divine Intervention as an Armageddon possibility.
Idiot! Read before you troll!
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
I call him an idiot because he posted without even reading the article. This is my sole reason. Don't drag me into some religious debate because I've been in many and it's impossble for either side to defend any points because they're not debating from the same paradigm.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Just because this may not coincide with some moderator's opinion on tax structure does NOT make it flamebait!!!!
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
They say:
To which I would counter:
"Formerly, I, Chuang Chou, dreamed that I was a butterfly, a butterfly flying about feeling that it was enjoying itself. I did not know that it was Chou. Suddenly I awoke and was myself again, the veritable Chou. I did not know whether it had formerly been Chou dreaming that he was a butterfly, or it was now a butterfly dreaming that it was Chou. But between Chou and a butterfly there must be a difference. This is a case of what is called the transformation of things."
- from Taoist Tales, ed. Raymond Van Over, Mentor, 1973
Note the second-to-last sentence: "But between Chou and a butterfly there must be a difference." Assuming such is not the same as proof, of course.
but how do we know that's not like someone rolling a die 10 times and getting a six each time, and thus concluding that any other number is unlikely?
/.ed...whats the vacuum one? just by the name it sounds like the biggest load of uneducated crap ive ever heard of.
Uhm...ok, roll the die once a year since life started on earth. If you get a 6 each time and conclude that any other number is unlikely, nobody here would blame you.
and discover is
"This is where god would go if he wanted to get off blow!"
> even related to the british royal family
And this is bad how, exactly?
I recall Douglas Adams's theory of the Shoe Event Horizon. As civilization progresses, a greater portion of our gross national product is dedicated to the design, production, marketing, and distribution of shoes. Eventually society collapses, after the planet's surface is covered with the remnants of cheap Italian high heels.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
I'm sure most of us have heard many of these possibilities of doomsday. But who cares? I would say they're all pretty much unavoidable and in many cases you won't see it coming. I suppose it's kinda interesting reading about it (death by alien invasion sounds like it might be fun), but hardly anything to lose sleep over.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Some h4x0r causes all cell phones to ring at once
With the resulting Hello the entire population is nuked like pizza slices.
"We start[ed] seeing these new accounts being created, but that could be an anomaly of the system."
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
The Slashdot Effect
I planned to write a sequel to that in which we find out this was a device made to bring about the End Of The Universe by the following means:
- Gather as much brainpower as possible by swallowing intelligent beings capable of heuristic thinking;
- Wire them all up in a faraway galaxy-sized superbiocomputer dedicated to solve an extremely hard math problem (like finding out if all possible sequences of K-base digits are present in the K-base expansion of Pi for any value of K, none, or an infinite number, or something equally outrageous)
- The makers of the devices have somehow deduced that the resolution of this problem will expose a self-contradiction in Mathematics (like, the aforementioned K both does and doesn't exist). If a sentient mind (or collection thereof) walks all the logical paths leading to that, everything will cease to exist, even abstract concepts.
Alright, I'm going to take my medication now...
*Gakkk!!!* STAR Trek!!! @%#$&!
No way Jose. It just decided to go away for some reason. It was as alive as before.
rm -rf *
#21 - Earth sets up a website and gets hit with the Slashdot Effect.
t m
-------
Our Fish Keep Dying! Try not to laugh at the results!
http://udel.edu/~jgephart/fishcounter.h
------
Let me give you the lowdown
Did anyone happen to notice the copyright at the very end of the article?? Ironically it's our happy friends at the Walt Disney Co. There is nothing like doomsday Mickey Mouse style.
I recommended a book in a previous post, but I have yet another recommendation.
Lost in the flurry of the massive major mega-movies "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon," was a Canadian film called "Last Night" by Don McKellar. (And according to its website, which I just visited now, for the first time, I guess it's going to be playing in L.A. and New York on November 5th...? I'm not sure. Check it out for yourself.)
Unlike its monstrous cousins, it is, by comparison, almost mind-bogglingly low-budget. The premise is that the world is ending. Everybody has a week left to live. So, what are people doing about it? Implicit is the knowledge that there is no hope; I guess Bruce Willis was never born in this universe. Interestingly, the exact catastrophe is never mentioned in the film. It's not really relevant anyway. All we know is, there's a clock ticking down to the end, and then it'll be over for everybody.
Some people are living it up, some people are sulking. Some are trying to complete their lives in some way, and others have gotten completely unhinged. Some are throwing all conventions and morals to the wind, while others are clinging to them more strongly than ever.
It's a fascinating take on the genre. I highly, highly, recommend it.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Unless one (or more) of the other things happens first, I believe #16 ("Robots take over") will definitely occur. And I'm firmly on the side of "next stage in evolution" rather than "end of humanity."
Ray Kurzweil has written a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines. In it, he basically predicts that human kind will be supplanted by its own creations. This will not be a takeover of the kind depicted in Terminator or The Matrix, but a slow merging of the two "species" and an eventual complete transformation of the very definition of "human" and "life."
This is happening already. Consider the term "brain-dead." When it was still novel, people distinguished "brain-dead" from "dead," but I'm pretty sure there are many people now who basically equate the two (maybe not doctors, for whom it's probably a clinical term). At one time, a beating heart indicated life, and a lack thereof, death. Now, the death of the brain is the "real" death. This is a subtle modern shift in what it means to be "alive." I suspect that as the function of parts of the brain get figured out by scientists, a new term-- "mind-death"-- will appear.
I don't know if I agree with all of Kurzweil's reasoning, but I fully believe in the conclusion. In fact, I cannot see how it could possibly end otherwise. However, I don't see it as a hostile takeover, but an enhancement of everything that makes us who we are: an expanding of our abilities. It won't limit us, or de-humanize us, or destroy any part of us--it will allow us to be what we want to be, more than ever before.
Okay, I sound like I'm evangelizing now, and I'm drifting off-topic. I recommend the book. It's got some very interesting ideas.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Although not mentioned by name, the Stay Puft Marshellow Man would fall under #19 Divine Intervention: the Gozer Worshippers' belief in the Comming of Zeul.
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
quadrillion, havn't io heard this discussion before,
quadrillion = 10^(6*4) to 10 quadrillion = 1 with 25 zeros not 1 with 16 zeros.
but it does make the americans feel richer.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
If you like the ideas in this post, go see the movie The Thirteenth Floor
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
#10 - dirk gently reference?
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
hey, if you can't solve a problem in 30 minutes, you've obviously forgotten your lines. ;)
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
each and every one of them more or less as valuable and worthy as a real walt disney plotline, too.
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
the kid gets bored every 20 turns or so, hence, a war every 20 years.
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
The article forgot about #21...
... roughly the same as an alien invasion but twice as scary.... :-)
The Slashdot Effect!!
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - E.W. Dijkstra
I think Paul Davies is an excellent science writer and and this book is one of his best.
1) Buried alive under AOL discs - or at the very least, suffocated by the fumes generated from desperately trying to burn them all.
2) All the documentation on XFree86 window server installation notes, questions as to the mode you'd use with a Nigli SVGAblaster and a KonuchiWinti 1200 monitor, etc. gets put into one place, undergoes gravitational collapse, and becomes a black hole
3) The Internet reaches a certain size thanks to people like AOL and WebTV and the universe reaches critical stupidity mass.
4) Signal 11's Karma reaches a point where it critically unbalances the magnetosphere and the earth gets roasted with solar flares.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
The remainder of the earth's population, unable to stop laughing long enough to inhale sufficient oxygen, dies within hours.
This is the word of the DoS. Amen.
---
---
Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
Read the TNG novel called Vendetta. It's the sequel to this episode of TOS.
YES! STAR TREK! Some people actually LIKE it.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
however its gonna end, I wish someone would just get on with it.
==============================
==============================
PROUD to be GEEK
Aim for the moon, dammit! :-)
--
Vote Homer Simpson for President!
Unlike passing black holes or vacuum changes, asteroid impacts are known proven events. All of the nuclear weapons ever built don't hold a candle to the power of such an event. Has everybody already forgotten the comet impact on Jupiter a few years ago? If that had hit us we'd all be toast.
The next asteroid strike is coming, it is just a matter of when. If I remember correctly there was an asteroid in the 1930's that passed earth well within the orbit of the moon. I don't find this a difficult scenario to believe at all.
for(int i = 0; i < 20; i++)
{
It's the End of the World As We Know It
}
I don't think I can take that much R.E.M. I'll end the world myself before that.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
#21 - Someone Actually Punches the Monkey and Wins!
Does anyone else think that #3- Collapse of the Vacuum (Sounds like a good PlayStation Game) was just put in to make the list a nice, even 20? I was going to make a Don Ho / Tiny Bubbles joke, but it was too much of a groaner.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
I thought these were all legitimate untill I got down to things like robots taking over and aliens invading. What are the actual chances of these things happening?
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the Singularity or similar arguments that delve into nanotechnology and how it can advance the human race and all that jazz. Take a look at this FAQ here for a little of the "are we in a dream" scenario stuff.
See, Super Mario Brothers 2 didn't suck, it was really a end-of-world prophecy.
-
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
true method by which the world will end...by all the evil in the world, black and evil....It is currently stored in a metal container, innocently labelled "Spam"
How Jaded Are You?
I'm not sure if anyone will ever notice this after the topic's so big, but here's another book people may be interested in:
After Man
It's a pretty interesting book about what animal life might be like some number of thousand years in the future after man kills himself off. I personally haven't read it in years but I think it'd be worth a look to those interested in that sort of thing.
21. We all realize that we are living in a screen just as the dungeon collapses and we die. Meanwhile the big root user in the sky just -wipes it and creates a new one.
--------
Won't you be... my neighbor?
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
Did anyone else notice that these doomsday concepts were: © Copyright 2000 The Walt Disney Company?
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Ever seen Star Trek: First Contact? That could be our very own earth! "Sensor scans reveal high concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. Population: 80 billion - all Borg."
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
They forgot: "Earth: a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Microsoft Corporation."
Kind of like, "California: A wholly-owned subsidiary of the Department of Corrections"
Being sent out into space would deffinitly be the coolest way to go. Just think, hurtling like a astroid into outerspace. The earth could then in effect be the cause of some other life bearing planet to cease to exist by crashing into it. Just leave it to good ol' Mother Earth to destroy the universe. It would be like Spaceballs all over again
[ ]
I think a good start would to be elect G.W. Bush as the US President.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
My other sig is extremely clever...
And yet... We are all living longer and healthier than our grandparents. So either the toxins aren't, or there are some awfully good things around to balance them. Take your pick.
as soon as we're nearly extinct, we'll just clone some more of us :)
--------------
This really isn't farfetched at all. All you'd have to do is take out a brain and rewire it to provide artificially created inputs that simulate vision, touch, smell, etc. The technology to do this however won't be around for a very long time.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
Asimov's short biography
He wrote an amazing number of books. He wrote popularizations of science (astronomy, etc), books on religion, obviously science fiction, etc etc. He was no dummy. He was pretty sharp.
I own a World Book Encyclopedia yearbook from 1962 that has an article by him about science (the picture has him surrounded by chemistry lab equipment).
Btw, I personally dislike Brin's short stories but I love his novels. The BEST of Brin IMHO:
1. The Practice Effect,
2. Glory Season,
3. Earth,
4. The Postman.
If you get any of his books get the Practice Effect not only is the novel FUN but it plays a really cool game with one of the laws of thermodynamics! Also the only flame I see might be in Glory Season as the novel is a sort of response to a pastoral society ruled by women.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
the end is near
Be sure to visit Joystick101.org for in-depth gaming news.
This is about the worst thing you could possibly do... This would cause the asteroid to break up and we would be killed by thousands of small asteroids instead of one big one... The workaround however, is to use something like an ion propulsion system running on solar power over a very long period of time... (requires knowledge of the impending impact many many months in advance)
6.It's only bad where the death of an individual counts, which only applies to people, anyway.
I can hear PETA fans screaming bloody murder. :)
10.It's still -nothing- like the 95% extinction mentioned above
I think the larger issue here is that if the wrong plant/animal goes, it may set off some sort of chain reaction, causing large amounts of the species of earth to die off... Whether or not it would affect us is anyone's guess. As a side note, a method of preventing this (and other problems) is to try and get people to stop reproducing... Not forcibly or anything, I just think that promoting birth control of any sort (for you church-goers chastity is just as good as any of the others as long as _some_ people actually go along with it) and trying to convince people to stop mating would be good. It would at least slow down the rate at which we move into other areas and kill off species to make room for us to live in. It won't happen anytime soon, but it would be quite beneficial to slow down the population growth until we know more about our effects on the earth and can find other planets to colonize and so on...
11. Genetic engineering could never hurt the environment; ultimately it could only help it by introducing more expressive traits to me commingled in the great evolutionary dance.
Genetic engineering could lead to certain species all having a single trait in common that was cause by GE and causing the entire species to become extinct from one virus that they couldn't defend. However, as long as GE is conducted by people who are not idiots and who actually have an inkling of how to consider what you're doing will effect the world, we shouldn't have to worry too much about this... The bigger threat is from Ebola and friends becoming airborne on their own...
13. Nanotech disaster. F*ck fire or ice, that's the way I would want to go!
Gotta agree with you here. Nanotech has the potential of eliminating the need for GE, and we might with this be able to advance humans and so on incredibly quickly... It could lead to an explosion in the complexity of life on earth, and foster intellectual growth faster than has ever been possible before...
17. Mass Insanity
Again, I agree... What the heck is this doing on the list? Is this some sort of joke?
18. Alien Invasion
Based on the fact that we haven't seen much out of SETI yet, I'd say that one of three things is true; We're in for an invasion soon; Life is exceedingly rare in our universe; The Communication forms that we use either don't occur to most advanced species, or we've missed some sort of transmission method as of yet that is FAR better than our current technologies.
19.Divine Intervention
I'll also not touch this except to say that I think all these religious people are looking for meaning where there may be none...
20. It's all a dream.
This is an interesting idea I've thought about before... Unfortunuately, there's not really much you can say about it without making assumptions that simply cant be justified.
"Save me jebus!" - Homer Simpson (btw, I'm probably talkin out of me arse)
I liked the article, a good balance of information and humour. There were one or two problems though -
Particle accelerators are an extremely improbable source of what have been described as 'quantum foam phase changes'. The earth atmosphere (as a single example) is bombarded with 'cosmic rays' actually relativisic speed particles (Is it a wave? Is it a particle? Well see, it's kinda uncertain!) the upper energy of which is really high, far higher than the bombardments caused in particle accelerators. PA's are also unlikely to produce black holes, apparently the energy density ain't high enough.
Vacuum collapse is another example of phase change - also improbable.
The reversal of the earth's magnetic field one had me puzzled: the title, followed by earth's magnetic field getting stronger, followed by the lack of a magnetic field leaving us open to particle storms. Seemed a bit random and unstructured.
My vote is mass insanity.
Elgon
This is just another good reason to get off this god-forsaken rock. I especially like the black hole disaster, now that one SUCKS!
scattered covered smothered chunked
that the world is not going to end because Discovery web site gets slashdotted... because it just have happened.
--
--
On scale from -14 to 56 this post is '-15, Nonexistent'
Something like one fifth of all the people who have ever lived are alive today. The odds of being one of the people to witness doomsday are highest when there is the largest number of witnesses around- so now is not such an improbable time.
That doesn't sound right to me: The likelihood that someone witnesses Doomsday does not increase with the size of the earth's population. If and when it finally hits, odds are that everyone will notice. IMHO, this implies that the number of potential witnesses does not have any influence on the likelihood of Doomsday happening. Or am I completely on the wrong track here?
As an aside: Am I really the only person who doesn't see the end of mankind as synonymous with the end of the world. In fact, with us gone, nature might get a second lease on life. Or is that a case of 'If earth spins on, and there is noone here to watch it, does it still spin?'?
Take care and don't get extinct without me...
May the fork(2) be with you
boy, Discover certainly is discovering how wimpy their server and internet connection is...
As all sentient beings know, the primitive civilization of humans on earth ended when, in 2020, President Bush pulled out The Really Big Cable that connected all the world's information systems.
Without the Net, civilization rapidly crumbled, especially due to the use of Windows: Bubble Version 20, which presupposed that the Net didn't really need to route around damage.
Noone really missed the humans, of course.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
I'm talking about a certain version of the Gaia hypothesis. Here, let me explain:
Imagine you're walking down a dark corridor, with no windows to look at and no means of determining how far you've come or how far you have yet to go. Periodically, a blinding flash fills the corridor, and you occasionally have the luck and the dexterity to cover your eyes when you do so. At other times, you fail, and the flash illuminates the blood vessels in your retinas, reflecting off the inside of your eyes and perceived by you as so many wriggling worms.
In your arrogance as a sentient human, you may interpret your fortune in avoiding pain as the sign that you possess the powers and privileges of a deity, and that you have dominion over those worms. In reality, both they and your divinity exist only in your mind.
It's a metaphor for our (human) existence on earth. Without us, no one would exist to see the light or the worms; for the former would fall on no one's eyes and the latter would not be imagined. We owe it to the corridor (earth) and the worms (morality) to walk through that corridor. Even if it is dark and we are without sunglasses.
-- Anne Marie
I think certainly in the UK a mass suicide would have been very possible if they stopped showing Big Brother on the TV and net. Oh no, that would have left me rejoicing because not only am I freed from the torment of who was going to win, but also I would finally have the solitary life with just me and my pal puter for ever... too bad it didn't happen really isnt it?
1. I'd be dead
2. I don't plan on waking up any time soon.
3. The '3 Laws of Robotics'.
4. Most people are already crazy, mass sanity -now THAT worries me.
5. print scalar reverse god;
6. If war breaks out I'm going to Canada. Who cares about Canada?!?
7. Most of these would cause human extinction, not the extinction of ALL life. Something better will probably come after us.
8. I'm a nerd, I wouldn't know it happened till I read it on Slashdot and wouldn't believe it till Tom reviewed it.
9. I thought the only choices were fire or ice.
10. I heard They have a contingency plan.
11. The future of everything is not based on the continued existence of humans or this planet.
12. It is more likely a functional communist* nation will appear in the next 100 years than any of these happening.
13. The Maytag man and his dog could fix it.
14. I doubt the Pentiun 4 produces that much heat.
15. None of the plans in "Teach Yourself World Distruction in 21 Days" actually work.
16. Catch-22
17. It would get rid of all the 'boy bands'.
18. The RIAA and MPAA would both file for an injunction, or Microsoft would claim a breach of contract.
19. Why sould I care?
20. Like everything else it must come to some sort of end.
*I am not against communism.
"Human-Triggered Disasters"
"The Earth is getting warmer"
So, should I think overcolcking could be a threat for us ?
...is to colonize Mars!
Human extinction is on the way.
That should have been a "Top 5" list - Corey S. Powell needs to find some line of work more suited to his talents than digging through back issues of Discover magazine to fill 5000 words. Either that, or liven up the writing and put it in the "Humor" section. What an awful fluff piece...
OK, - B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
LOL!!!
Or how about, "Get sent down to Hell, Mel."
The problem's all inside your head, she said to me
If you want to turn your planet into piles of debris
Then you should buy yourself a copy of "Discovery"
There must be...twenty ways the world could end.
She said I really do not want to panic you,
as I know that these scenarios probably won't come true
and I really doubt, that you'd sleep better if you knew,
There must be twenty ways the world could end.
Twenty ways the world could end.
Just hit a black hole, Joel. Watch the world go insane, Lane.
Make a bunch of gray goo, Lou. Just listen to me.
Have a nuclear war, Moore. See the vaccuum fall flat, Matt.
Dioxins from PVC, Lee, will set yourself free.
She said I normally don't tell my good friends this,
but if the ozone layer goes you will be burned into a crisp.
I said, that's great to hear, and would you please explain again about the twenty ways...
She said, since Brandon Carter says we're gonna fry,
Why should I waste my time explaining all the ways that you could die?
But I kept bugging her, until she told me with a sigh
There must be twenty ways the world could end.
Twenty ways the world could end.
Have a comet impact, Jack. Get a burst of gamma ray, Jay.
Catch a bad pathogen, Len. And listen to me.
Flood-basalt vulcanism, Chisolm. Wake up from existence, Vincent.
Get killed by for E.T., Lee, and set yourself free.
-foobar jones
(Sorry, I couldn't think of a name to rhyme with "Divine Intervention.")
I don't know... that was a pretty lameass diss. You must have the intelligence of a jar of mayonaise. Jeez!
------ This is my sig.
8 out of the 20 ways listed have nature as the causal factor. Why do people believe that because our society is changing at such a pace that nature is doing the same?
What people don't know is that the RHIC has been generating 'strangelets' for years - They're the catalyst that allows for the creation of Oscar Meyer CheezDogs(TM) from a horrid amalgam of eyes, ears, feet, horns, and genitalia of a variety of farm animals. What struck me as particularly odd about this story is that I always thought a 'strangelet' was a turd with an unusual color. And don't forget the Vogon Constructor Fleet! I see that the author cleverly dodged a direct mention of that inevitable occurance in item 18. Personally, I can't wait to be demolished in favor of a Hyperspatial Bypass.
Men are either to be flattered and indulged or utterly destroyed - Nicolo Machiavelli