Serious Poll!!! How will the world end?

What will kill us?

  • Global Temperature Change

  • Global Virus

  • Meteor/Comet

  • Nuke ourselfs into Oblivion!!!

  • Atmospheric Change

  • ALIEN ATTACK!!!


Results are only viewable after voting.

AndroidVageta

Banned
Mar 22, 2008
2,421
0
0
How do you think the world will end? More specifically the human race. I think some of the top choices I think are:

Global weather change - Too hot all ice melts we flood, too cold Earth freezes over...

Global Virus
- Think airborne AIDS or something.

Meteor/bigass comet - Who knows what would happen...hit the Earth and cause the planet to explode? Cause the sky to black out?

We nuke our selfs - Simple enough, this is my biggest thought on what will happen most likely.

Atmospheric Changes
- Ozone layer dissipates, magnetic poles switch and cause some fucked up shit...

ALIEN ATTACK!!!
- The reptile race comes down and pwns us.

Anything else someone can think off? Thing that pretty much sums it up...
 
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theflyingpig

Banned
Mar 9, 2008
5,616
18
0
I want the world to end in a huge global war. Innocents being herded into death camps. Soldiers wiping out entire cities. Atrocities being committed by everyone. Magnificent. The suffering and death of mass slaughter excites me like nothing else. Everyone knows this.
 

BoomerD

No Lifer
Feb 26, 2006
66,355
14,763
146
I don't know, but I doubt any humans will be alive to see it.

The way we're fucking up the planet, humans (and most other life) will have died off long before "The End of the World" ever happens.
 

joesmoke

Diamond Member
Nov 2, 2007
5,420
2
0
a world war started over the unavailability of parking at Trader Joe's...
 

gimmewhitecastles

Golden Member
Mar 2, 2005
1,834
0
0
1. Unrealistic

2. Sun won't go supernova for what...another few million-billion years? We'd be gone by then...

3. Hogwash

4. Too far away

Hey man these are just options. Just as likely as your Alien attack scenario.

I'd also think the Black Hole option is not too far away either, once scientists work out the kinks in their Hardon Collider.
 
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Blackjack200

Lifer
May 28, 2007
15,995
1,688
126
I want the world to end in a huge global war. Innocents being herded into death camps. Soldiers wiping out entire cities. Atrocities being committed by everyone. Magnificent. The suffering and death of mass slaughter excites me like nothing else. Everyone knows this.

So you want the war in Afghanistan to expand? :awe:
 

AstroManLuca

Lifer
Jun 24, 2004
15,628
5
81
A lot of the things you listed would kill a lot of humans, but they wouldn't necessarily cause the extinction of the human species. Only thing I think could happen is a massive natural disaster or change that renders the Earth uninhabitable. Like the sun simply getting hotter (it will eventually) or a totally random thing like a massive asteroid impact or a nearby focused gamma ray burst that takes out our atmosphere.
 

Jeff7

Lifer
Jan 4, 2001
41,596
20
81
What kind of "world ending" are we talking about?
- Something that makes life terribly inconvenient and difficult for humans? (coronal mass ejection -> Destruction of all major power grids)
- Something that kills a lot of people? (full-scale nuclear war)
- Something that devastates the environment, wiping out numerous species, and collapsing the food chain? (Sarah Palin as president, or a large asteroid)
- Something that completely sterilizes the planet? (Sun entering its red giant phase)
- Something that blows up the planet? (Impact with another planet)

So to what level are we ending the world?


If you're just talking about wiping out our species completely, well, that'd probably take a cataclysmic event. I don't think that we'd be easy to exterminate. Sure you could kill off 99.9% of this species, but that still leaves quite a few to get their post-apocalyptic freak on.
 

SlitheryDee

Lifer
Feb 2, 2005
17,252
19
81
You mean how will humanity end? The world would do just fine without us.

I'm betting on our machines turning against us sometime in the next 1000 years or so.
 

BurnItDwn

Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
26,353
1,862
126
Gamma Ray burst .... thought that exploding supernova or hypernova within 6000 light years could cause tons of radiation to hit the surface, probably wouldn't kill everyone, but, if it killed everybody on the surface, it might have enough impact to destroy civilization. Looks like happens only a couple times per billion years, so not very likely humanity will survive long enough to experience this.

Massive volcanism, poisoning the atmosphere, and bringing about a "volcanic winter" which would result in a very large scale extinction. Most likely humanity would survive this as well, at least for a while, but eventually, I'm thinking the species may succumb. Looks like these happen a few times per billion years, so in reality, humanity will probably not survive long enough to experience this.

Asteroid impact, most experts currently think that the impact at the Chicxulub crater was the root cause of the dinosaur extinction 70ish million years ago. Could pretty much have the same impact as Massive volcanism. Looks like events on this scale are rare, Only one known impact of this scale. Most likely hundreds of millions of years until something like this hits the earth again.


Global Temperature Change and Atmospheric Change
This may result in many deaths, but I don't think it will be "enough" to destroy humanity. We can adapt and while many may not survive, it would take a LOT of temperature change to result in human Extinction.

Global Virus
This will always be a problem, but it seems like there are always at least some people who don't get infected no matter what the virus is. This is a horrible problem, but not an extinction event for humanity.

Alien Attack
Not very likely. I'm sure there is other intelligent life out there, but the universe is HUGE. How would they detect life on our planet? How would they get to our planet? Then, how do they effectivly fight against the earth and keep all their ships supplied? I know there is a LOT to learn about physics, and there may be some sort of way in which we could build ships that travel greater than the speed of light, but, that doesn't mean that there's infinite fuel or infinite supplies, etc.

Nuclear War
Countries who have the nukes are generally trying to slowly disarm them. I think it's likely that they will be used again in the future, but, hopefully not in a large scale manner, where hundreds or thousands of warheads are used. If a full blown nuclear holocaust were to take place. I don't think the initial blasts of heat and pressure would end the species. I also think that the radiation/fallout wouldn't be enough to wipe us out either. However, The nuclear winter that could, in theory, result, would have pretty much the same devastating effects that volcanic winter would have. And that might wind up slowly wiping out humanity.

I think the most likely "end" of our species is continued evolution, where "people" in 1 million years do not look like "people" today, but are instead a different species. I think the odds of a "world ender" type of extinction event are low in any given year, and so, chances are we'll probably last for millions, or perhaps even tens or hundreds of millions more years until eventually something catastrophic happens.
 

waggy

No Lifer
Dec 14, 2000
68,143
10
81
yeah the earth will be fien without us..in fact it would be better.

now there are a lot of ways that humanity can be cleaned out. from plagues, war, or just shit happens.

i suspect war will be the way though.
 

Miramonti

Lifer
Aug 26, 2000
28,653
100
106
I voted Meteor/Comet, which will result in Atmospheric Change, resulting in Global Temperature Change as well.
 

lord_emperor

Golden Member
Nov 4, 2009
1,380
1
0
It's statistically unlikely that all humans could be killed by anything, there's ~6 billion of us after all.

I expect we'll probably avoid an apocalyptic nuclear war, though I don't discount the possibility of regional nuclear exchanges.

In ~1000 years we'll have mostly replaced ourselves with AI and what is left of "humanity" we would not recognize as such.
 

Gooberlx2

Lifer
May 4, 2001
15,381
6
91
I'm gonna go with super-virus. Let's say Ebola mutates such that it's airborne and has a longer incubation and transmission period.

80% of the world dies. Even better if they also turn to zombies. Still not an extinction event. Short of us getting cooked by the Sun or the Earth breaking apart somehow, I think we'd survive almost anything
 
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