How Will The World End?, by BA

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How about it fellas and fellaesses? We're sitting on our nice, comfy chairs, when WHOOSH, all life on earth is taken out.

Question is, how will it happen? The winner gets bragging rights when it does.

Let me just elaborate on a couple of options for those that might not understand.


Supervolcano - Long story short, basically there's this big motherf**ker volcano in the sea somewhere, if it goes off, tsunami's will feck over a lot of places, and ash will block out the sun for a long time.

Aliens - If they're out there, and if they've got the tech to come here, then they've got the tech to get rid of us.

Overpopulation - Y'know, too many of us, not enough food, that sorta shebang.

Global warming - Everywhere gets wet, very wet.

AI - Actually a few respectable scientists knocking this one about. Apparently machines get smarter, then decide they're better off without humans, as they can maintain themselves. Terminator basically, and funnily enough not that hard to believe.

Sun dies - Gets cold, really cold.

Moon dies - Gets wet, really wet.



Tricky innit..?

Place your votes ladies.

 

I was looking for "Hillary gets elected president", but since it was missing I went with Asteroid or other big space **** hitting us

 

Well, some of these, we're done for sure. I picked death of sun, since that will surely happen some day and will surely wipe out life on earth. The others all may happen and, if they do, are likely but not certain to be uniformly fatal.

You left out Wrath of God, always a favorite around my part of the country.

 

I always find these things fascinating to ponder.

First: Man made disaster stuff (global warming, nuclear war, overpopulation): likely to decrease the overall population (and not only humans either) to varying degrees, but not nearly devastating enough to actually kill all life on earth, or be the end of the world, as you put it.

Disease: Interesting, but again unlikely to kill off all humans. Though viruses may mutate to suddenly become highly lethal to the general populous, there is a high probability of at least some humans being resistant to the disease. Also unlikely to reach the most isolated places, meaning that some people will never be infected by it. And even if it did kill all human life, that's hardly the end of the world, as most, if not all fauna will be unaffected by it.

AI: Again interesting, and possibly quite capable of genocide (they've got such shining examples in us for that too). Not quite as interesting as some of the other options, though.

Aliens: Could be.

Natural disasters (supervolcano, meteor, comet): Has happened before, and will happen again. But each time it happened, life persisted. So while it may kill off a good percentage of earth's life, I think it unlikely to exterminate humankind entirely, and certainly not be the end of the world. Although if something the size of Pluto were to drop from the Oort belt, it would probably be able to cause the end of the world. On the other hand, Jupiter has proven in the past to be quite the asteroid magnet, trapping them as moons, or swallowing them whole as they collide into Jupiter.

Death of the moon: I wonder what I'm to think of this. If I interprete this as something big (huge, actually) crashing into the moon, causing it to break into smaller pieces, this would likely have devastating effects on the earth as well. Big pieces of moon crashing down to earth would be bad enough, but the tides would cease to be as they now are as well, likely causing some form of ecological disaster.

Another option for the 'moon to die' might be that it will eventually crash into the earth. The moon loses energy as it rotates around the earth. This is already evinced in the fact that we're always looking at the same side of the moon, indicating that it has lost part of its rotational energy. Eventually, because the tidal forces which move the oceans up and down a few meters will cause the earth to lose its rotational energy, so that in the end the same side of the earth will always be facing the moon. Anyway, this might also be responsible for a degrading orbit of the moon around the earth, essentially bringing them closer together until one crashes into the other. (Disclaimer: I'm not entirely certain this is what happens/ will happen, but it's an interesting thing to think about, no?)

And finally, the one I think is most likely to kill everything on earth, or is at least the one most sure to kill everything on earth: Sun dieing. In fact, the end of the world, as Barmy seems to suggest, will not be very cold at all. No, not at all.

As the sun burns up its hydrogen, it will start to burn its helium, causing it to expand. It will actually expand so far that the earth's orbit will end up inside the outer atmosphere of the sun. Not cold at all, you might think. And you'd be right. Burnt to crisp is more like it. I believe we have about 5 billion years before this happens, though, so plenty of time for humanity to become extinct in more natural ways. Like evolution.

 

Err.. a lot of those will not be WHOOSH sorts of endings. The only one that I can see as being the end in one fell swoop is the asteroid collision and that only if it's big enough. Okay, maybe aliens as well but only if they come en mass. Most of the other scenarios will be very long and drawn out with the majority dying from the aftermath of the disaster, not the event itself.

 

A nuclear war (and the following nuclear winter) looks to me as the most plausible scenario. Overpopulation remains a bigger threat. Sometimes I wonder what the world would be if the Law of the Jungle still prevailed.

 

The world will be destroyed by law suits. The sheer weight of the paperwork from frivolous law suits will creat a black hole and we will all be sucked into the void.

 

Once again, I'm blown away by your powers of logical deduction. Thanks for pointing that out, I feel really, really silly now.

 

This one's not in the poll, but I vote for it!
Though I'm sure the many lawyers we have on SP will disagree with this particular theory

 

I vote for the sun, because I can't see any of the others being devastating enough to wipe out ALL life on earth. Even the big asteroid will leave something alive, I'm sure.

 

The Karate Kid is, as we all know, the greatest movie ever made. Some time, in the distant future, a movie will come along that is equally as fantastic as the Karate Kid (but will not, nor could not, surpass it). Two films of such unprecedented quality can not occupy the same track in the space-time continuum and thus, existence will cease to be and all life will be blinked out in an instant.

Barring that...geothermal catastrophe or nuclear holocaust seem the most likely to me, though hardly as tragic.

 

Supervolcano: This would have to be the master of all volcanos.
Alien invasion: They didn't do that in the last 4½ billion years, why now?
Asteroid or other big space **** hitting us: 'They' (=the eggheads) have all kinds of plans to prevent this from happening, mirrors and nuclear explosions to change the ****s course.
Nuclear War: There's nothing big enough to actually destroy everything, even with combined strength.
Overpopulation: Something radical will happen at some point, but we're not going to kill everyone.
Global Warming: Many people will die, but we'll adapt.
Artificial Intelligence: Maybe in a sci-fi book.
Sun dies: The only thing that could actually destroy the whole planet.
Moon dies: I don't see this happening for some reason.
Disease: Hey, we survived plague.

 

None of the above. Reason, I believe that Christ will return as things are at their worst and set things right.

 

First off...Earth *will* be destroyed when the Sun dies. I forget the number of years, but it will first become a Red Giant, which will get close enough to the Earth that our planet will be turned in to a state similar to Mercury. Eventually, the Sun will go boom and take everything with it... IIRC, we've still got several billion years before that happens.

I have a feeling that after several years of constant nuclear war, continual global warming, and other natural disasters, the world's population will pretty much be wiped out.

If the Supervolcano goes boom in Indonesia, that will cause massive tsunamis and major earthquakes. An earthquake large enough on one the tectonic plates could trigger several other earthquakes on the adjacent plates.

There are several scenarios that could end up killing us all... Just more of a reason to eat, drink, and be merry!

 

I prefer the 'with a whimper and not a bang' option. Human race ends by a slow transformation into something else. Not a transcendent transformation mumbo jumbo though. It all depends on what we think of as 'human' right now. I mean right at this very moment. We usually don't think of our predecessors, like Homo erectus as human, they were something else. Similar might be the fate of the present people...

But the death of this culture, I'd go for overpopulation and all that it brings.

 

I voted for asteroid.

BTW I think your choices were excellent Barmy, but you forgot about the "other" option. You always have to leave at least one option open because there are always at least one or two people who have radically different ideas. (Or logical but un-thought-of ideas.)

 

I always thought that the average nuclear superpower (read: US and Russia) had enough nukes stored up to wipe out life on earth 60times over or so. I guess, short of a Dr Strangelove situation, neither country are likely to use them, or at least not against each other or the entire rest of the world.

As for Asteroids - I really don't think we'd be capable of knocking one off course in time - I mean I don't really think we're that great at detecting them (I mean we find a few that might pass close, but they're usually the orbiting type and only get discovered cos they pass real close to us 1st), and given the state of recent moon explorations (or rather lack of them) coupled with general incompetence in space exploration I think we'd be pretty screwed *if* something big came at us. It's a pretty big if though.

Sun dying - I think they had an estimate in my paper the other day which iirc put it at around 5billion years or something - I might be way off with that figure, but either way I kind of think something will happen before then.

Aliens - naw, I doubt any would exist with both the technology to take us out *and* the inclination to do so - they would have wiped themselves out ages ago if it were the case. Plus life is pretty much an impossibility in my books.

AI - I don't think the human population is that advanced, or ever will be.

For me Ireckon it's a toss up between asteroids and the sun dying - the asteroids just gotta do it within the next few billion years or they miss out.

Love the thread Barmy!!

 

Scientists in a lab somewhere manage to create a minature black hole, can't cointain it, and it sucks the earth into it.

 

I’m a bit confused about the question. Is it “How Will The World End” as per the topic title, or “How will the human race end” as per the poll. Because the two are distinctly different.

If the former, then the sun dying is about the only way for it to happen, aside from a collision with an object much larger than an asteroid.

But even if the latter, then I doubt any of the other options would be catastrophic enough to wipe out all of the human race.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that God discovers that he doesn’t actually exist and thus he vanishes into nothingness, taking the world that he never created in the first place with him. (Go ahead and try to wrap your head around that one. )