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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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
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.
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'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.
"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
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
Starting with discover.com ... ;)
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
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 :)
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Neafevoc
If we patented these methods of world destruction, could the human race survive forever?
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.
"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."
Not to mention the fact that every irrational number can be expressed as an infinite sum of rational numbers. If I were designing such a system, I'd just set the thing to round everything off to the nearest multiple of Planck's constant, and obscure the exact values of numbers small enough to make this possibly noticeable by setting up a system that would make it impossible to measure multiple relevant properties of an object simultaneously. Now you don't really even need an FPU on your grand machine.
Then we have superstring theory suggesting 11-dimensional space that appears to be 4-dimensional, with everything else "folding" into obscurity at any scale capable of observation. Sounds almost like an object-oriented system to me.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
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...]
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man sig
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
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!
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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.
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.
See, Super Mario Brothers 2 didn't suck, it was really a end-of-world prophecy.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.")