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This Is the Way the World Ends
Dave Knott writes "The CBC's weekly science radio show Quirks and Quarks this week features a countdown of the top ten planetary doomsday scenarios. Nine science professors and one science fiction author are asked to give (mostly) realistic hypotheses of the ways in which the planet Earth and its inhabitants can be destroyed. These possibilities for mankind's extinction include super-volcanoes, massive gamma ray bursts, and everybody's favorite, the killer asteroid. Perhaps the most terrifying prediction is the reversal of the Earth's magnetic field (combined with untimely solar activity), a periodic event which is currently 1/4 million years overdue."
not a single one of them even considered the possibility of streams getting crossed...for shame!
Monstar L
Wait till I find my r-37, space modulator.
I think I just cashed out all my cool points.
Hey, I finally have an excuse to not RTFA!
no interstellar bypass?
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
The Earth and it's inhabitants are killed by inbreeding, living in one mass trailer park and one massive tornado sweeping it clean.
This is obviously the real ending.
its ok Obama will save us
According to the International Earth-Destruction Advisory Board, the current "Earth-Destruction Alert Level" is "RED". Which means that the Earth has been destroyed.
A quote from the FAQ:
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Anyway, for you deluded fools who think the Earth is still around, take head of this warning:
Obviously it's a little out of date now, 'cause those rascals at CERN managed the job, but still...
I note that the fools from the article don't actually want to destroy the Earth (well maybe one or two of the scenarios might break it apart or something), otherwise they would have come up with some scenarios like:
(Quote and methods from How to destroy the Earth.)
Fools, I'll show them all!
I wank in the shower.
Paris Hilton decides she wants to take a vacation at the International Space Station, at which point nerds lose the will to live and there's nobody left to invent things that take peoples minds off of having sex which in turn causes our populations to spike followed by us consuming all of the earths vegetation and eventually turning to cannibalism and wiping ourselves out.
Meanwhile the ISS loses power and Paris turns into a popcicle, which is discovered by an alien probe millions of years from now sent to seed a now Mars-like earth with vegetation so they can migrate from their dying planet to a new home and the aliens attempt to clone the Paris-cicle using pieces of their DNA ultimately starting the cycle all over again.
After it all we never do find out how the earth ends, but at least we discover why Paris is so fucking weird.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Soylent Green?
People shouldn't still be anthropomorphizing natural phenomena.
Yeah, the universe hates that.
its ok Obama will save us
I'll take him over the one that can't pronounce nuclear.
Do the uranions go up out of these poles or down into them?
I need to know whether to invest in an extra heavy foil hat or lead boots.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Even the most retarded religious fundamentalist understands that dropping a nuclear bomb on someone who has one, or has a country which has one for a friend, isn't such a bright idea.
snip
Even actually been to the middle east ?
Some of the fundamentalists BELIEVE in their god. They don't care if they all die, so long as they go to heaven.
That's just neocon propaganda. In reality the governments of Iran and North Korea are made up of rational people who will always act in their countries' long term best interests despite their rhetoric. They are totally unlike the US government which will screw up and start wars because of the sort term interest of the ruling class and/or a miscalculation and plunge the world into chaos.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Your moms a wild conjecture. IN BED!
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
As for the Earth's magnetic field reversal, they have occured regularly and very often in the past, so the next one is overdue, period. Same as the Big One in California. It has nothing to do with people promising anything, it's just a matter of probabilities.
The problem with both of your statements (magnetic reversal and "the Big One") is that neither of them occurs with any sort of fixed regularity. Since there isn't any sort of schedule that they follow, neither of them is "overdue." BTW, just because you write a (pretty bad) science blog, it doesn't mean you actually understand anything about the sciences you try to write about.
And yet Madagascar will survive all attempts.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Or at least so the claim is...
We will never kill the earth, even in a worst case senario we'll be nowhere near as bad as some of the significant events of the past like asteroid hits and super volcanos.
Sounds like a challenge to me!
I would vote for the LHC, cuz I saw this totally scary video on Youtube that explained how the LHC was going to create a doorway for Satan. Seriously.
And hey, if you're going to include a science fiction, why not include a couple biblical/religious predictions? I for one, welcome our 6-winged Seraphim overlords...
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Looking at what we've done to this planet, I'm not so sure the survival of our species is in anyone else's interest.
Yes, why can't it be like, like, human beings are a planetary disease? Like the Earth's got German measles or facial herpes, right? And that's why all of the other planets give us such a wide berth. It's like, "Oh, don't go near Earth! It's got human beings on it, they're contagious!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I'd bet on the biosphere surviving. It might not survive in a state that we'd like but it would survive. fire off as many nukes as you like but come back in 10 million years and you'll find whatever the rats evolved into hunting each other through the forests of asia [...]
That, or they will have developed metal casings for their mutated remains, and roll about shrieking "Ex-ter-min-ate!"
I saw something like this on television once, so it must be true.