How would you foresee a modern apocalypse?

Sn1p3r187

Sn1p3r187

Carolinian Shaolin Monk
I see a modern version of civilization ending event being more akin to very violent climate change and resource wars that could cause a runaway greenhouse effect and send the remains of civilization underground or into space. The only nuclear war I see happening in this scenario is mostly a limited one inhibited to regions like India and Pakistan or most of Eastern Europe. Afterwards the rest of civilization fell to Biological weapons and strategic bombings on cities that took out and destroyed most of the leadership, infrastructure, economy, and industry. With no one there to start it back up again, no one bothered trying to rebuild what's been lost. So they moved on and started new societies. What do you think a modern apocalypse would look like?
 
Narrative in fiction dictate a beginning, middle and end. Reality doesn't necesarily play by that formula - have plants ended yet? Have earth ended yet? Sure, nothing lasts forever - but there is nothing that dictates that humanity must be crawling towards a narratively satisfying epic end, worthy of story-telling.

Personally, I think humanity is like a very resiliant mold. Look at our absolutely most disastrous war - the second world war - it did not even dent population growth on earth, we keep on growing exponentially. Throw all the diseases of this planet at us - the earth is not holding back - and we are still growing exponentially.
Give us starvation, give us heat and cold - and so far we grow exponentially.

Now, logic dictates that at some point, we will simply consume every last piece of energy on earth, but how many would we really have to be to get to that point? 100 billion? A trillion? 100 trillion? A fuckin quadrillion?
Okay, those numbers are way bigger than they seem, my point is -

imagine if 2015 is still only the infancy of our species. In the fossil record, certain species of vertebrate can span over several million years - not MANY millions, but say 3-5 million. H. sapiens has so far only existed for a quarter of one - and on top of that, we have almost blocked nature's effect on us, meaning that theoretically H. sapiens can persist unchanged for many, many millions of years. Theoretically. And then, why not?
Let's say we eat ourselves into a cataclysmic disaster - an apocallypse if you will - 99,9% die out (best case scenario!) - more food for survivors! Plus - now the world is like a gigantic Norway - a huge planet, tons of technological knowledge - but very few people to share the wealth between :D A huge wealth-per-capita

now imagine again that we are only in the infancy of our species, that we have tens of millions of years to keep going

Cataclysmic events may become episodic in our species' future :D The "big end of the world" we write about in our bibles and verses, it may end up becoming a kind of routine, happening every half a million years or so. Our species has allready "broken" many "rules", we are the anarchists of nature, and if - IF - we finally manage to get the hang of space travel, planet hopping, well - the universe would have "done it" then, creating us - now for never to get rid of us: EVER.

EVER.

When we have the ability to move from one world to another, we no longer have any reason to ever go extinct, at least not untill the universe itself unravels.

Our best hope is something that does not kill 99,9% of us - but 100%, well "best hope", depending on what you want for our future I guess.
 
Once totally conectivity is achieved with every person having his own VR-Communicaitn platform the human population will decline and die out do to everyone having either sex only over virtual reality machines or just watching porn all day.

Pretty much like the future as we predicted.
 
Crni Vuk said:
Once totally conectivity is achieved with every person having his own VR-Communicaitn platform the human population will decline and die out do to everyone having either sex only over virtual reality machines or just watching porn all day.

Pretty much like the future as we predicted.
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Woah, man... you can see the future?
 
Yes we can.


Live long enough and you can see too.


Also I think that people will eventually get bored of creating separate realities and will start altering this one.

Like a piece of software changing the hardware.
 
Hassknecht said:
The Technological Singularity would be my pick.
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This one is fine with me, let us leave behind all our frailties, limitations, egos, and everything else that makes us flawed, and truly become children of the stars.
I am curious if there would still be enough left of me to remember the wonder I sometimes feel when I look at creation around me.

Conservative politicians/Republicans/Corporate ceo's will probably hate this one, it will leave them without people to look down upon and who kiss their asses in the hope they can be one day be like them.
 
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Well, per definitionem we can't really know what the world after such a Singularity would look like. But I guess it's rather obvious that mankind as we know it wouldn't exist anymore, if only just because it's obsolete.
 
It is even questionable if the singularity could be achieved. I mean there might be limitations that we simply don't know about yet.
 
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Of course. That whole concept is not really scientific at all. More or less just a fun thought experiment.
 
Hassknecht said:
Of course. That whole concept is not really scientific at all. More or less just a fun thought experiment.
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It definitely keeps science fiction writers going.

Back to the subject; I definitely think several wars including resource wars about fuel and drinking water, and eventually to try to claim the last habitable spots on this planets by those nations that manage to hold on to technology while the rest of humanity regresses due to the loss of industry and limitations of fuel.

Perhaps a population might make it into space and establish colonies on the moon and other planets, but this population will definitely be very different from us baseline humans, perhaps barely having anything in common as they are the results of genetically and cybernetically modifying humans to be able to survive in space and on other planets.
Think the Omar from Deus Ex Invisible War.

Us baselines will become the obsolete model.
 
The only true end of the world is when the Sun turns into a Red Giant and consumes the planet.
 
Well true. But this is regarding civilization halting or ending events, not the end of the planet's life. I think the poles ice caps melting away would definitely affect the world in the worst way possible. It maybe a wake up call to pollution and if we keep going then maybe a runaway greenhouse effect will take hold.
 
I think a combination of the escalating race clashes, the growing conflicts in the middle east ushered by western hands and the climate changes will all explode sooner rather than later. I mean we are already beyond the point of prevention in terms of climae change, and in the US there is an entire political party running on a plataform of bigotry.
 
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