How/When Do You Think the World Will End?
 

Simple enough, how and when do you think good old mother Earth will become no more?

And for the threads sake lets keep the answers somewhat realistic.

(Now for those of you who have different definitions of the world ending: For all intensive purposes it will be when the Earth will be mostly wiped out, meaning the majority of people are no longer here, and there is no real form of government.)

(Hopefully this idea has not been taken)

Overpopulation leads to mass riots and geurrila warfare, the government are forced to take excessive action against their citizens and are turned upon, FIRE, THUNDER, EARTHQUAKES!

MASS HYSTERIA!

Leading to a massive use of force and a subjugation of rebel cells unless they agree to eke out a meager existence in government controlled enclaves. Total population devastation in the region of 80% and destruction of a huge amount of resources leading to hundreds of years of slow reclamation of destroyed land by a tiny workforce.

This sounds so fun, I can't wait!!!

Why did you remove the best bit?

You only need to read that once to remember ;D.

I think we will all kill eachother in one big war.
Well, someone will have to kill me, I won't kill anyone.
Or something like an atomic bomb.
It won't be romantic and it won't look nice and flashy from space.

Sorry ;D.

GB: Sounds like a solid theory. When exactly will this be happening?

Yesterday, haven't you noticed? ;D.

Could very well happen very soon.

I know, not really looking forward to that...

I think overpopulation is much less of an immediate threat. What I do think is an immediate threat is a nuclear world war. If anything will be the end of humans, it will be the instantaneous decimation of millions (billions, depending on how many bombs are dropped) of humans followed by a nuclear winter, sure to wipe out anyone remaining in the wake. I think if such a thing doesn't happen in the next century, we will have moved beyond it and it would no longer be a threat.

I'm afraid we will have then invented something even more terrifying

Richard Simmons? :eek:

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Listening to: Psysex - [Come In Peace CD1 #05] High Times [foobar2000 v1.0.3]

Dude, I'm from the Netherlands.
I didn't know who Richard Simmons was until you made me google.
How could you! ;D.

Judgement day. God will destroy what he created.

I've always been afraid it would be nuclear war. I think it's horrible and terrifying that people are in control of devices which can each wipe out tens of thousands of people just like that.

I'm afraid that one day, someone's going to launch a nuclear attack, then the retaliation (out of fear or whatever else) is going to be more nuclear attacks. Then we're all going to blow each other up.

Atheist in the house represent!

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Listening to: Orpheus Chamber Orchestra - [Complete Beethoven Edition Vol. 3: Orchestral Works CD1 #03] Poco Adagio [foobar2000 v1.0.3]

I notice so far all the answers have been about humanity going extinct, not the world ending.

As far as the world ending I guess I'll probably go with the prevailing wisdom that billions of years from now the sun will begin to expand into a red giant, eventual reaching a size which engulfs the earth. This will be long after humanity has gone extinct though.

I'm no astrophycicist - not even sure I spelled that right - but I once read that as stars reach the end of their lifecycles and become black holes, they swallow all else matter in the universe, which is sort of predictable. You would think that might happen. However, this article also claimed that even the super-black holes of the distant future can't contain all their mass/energy and that minute stray particles will escape it. Over trillions and trillions of years, this radiation would escape into the true nothing and loosely form atoms greater than the size of the current universe (don't ask me), but these too would eventually disintegrate or disperse and the universe would eventually be a featureless, infinite void ..

My father believes that after something like this, events that lead to big bang(s) will recur. Perhaps he's right? Noone knows :)

So yeah, kind of missed that part of the first post, non?

I guess so. :o:

Still doesn't make much sense to me though. Why not call it the end of the human race or something, instead of referring to it as something it isn't?

Our star isn't massive enough to become a black hole. It will expand at the end of its life (and engulf earth), but eventually it will retract and become a white dwarf, smaller in diameter than the current sun.

I didn't actually mean that it's the fate of every star to become a black hole at the end of it's life, even if my post may seem to suggest that. Our star will become part of a black hole when it's mass is one day swallowed up by one.

Oh, yeah, I'm no astrophysicist either, but I don't think we know enough about black holes to say with confidence that everything will eventually converge into one superdupermassive black hole (singularity) at some point in the very distant future. I mean, if I understand what you're saying correctly, you're repeating the theory known as the Big Crunch which predicts that everything in the universe will eventually stop expanding and begin contracting.

Ehr, no .. I never wrote that everything will converge in one superduper black hole :p:

Note that "holes" is plural, although yes, I see .. there's an it there instead of them at the end of the sentence. Sigh :rolleyes:

Point taken, but for the threads sake it sounds 10x better if the title is WORLD ENDING! Anyways if there is no more people to verify the worlds existence we may as well call it over since we would have no way of knowing.

Because this thread title is snappier and encompasses at least one way of viewing the sentence you're taking issue with.

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Listening to: RushEsque2 [foobar2000 v1.0.3]

Well in that case, here's what I think: we'll keep evolving until we are no longer human, at which point the world will cease to exist because there will be no more people. ;)

That's a potentially interesting discussion on speciation and taxonomy :D

If I remember correctly, Willi Hennig, the father of modern cladistics, suggested that a species goes extinct (changes) when it has diverged into two species that are sexually isolated from eachother. At that point in time, as if that could happen in one recognizable moment, the parent species is considered gone and two new species have appeared. From some points of view, it makes a lot of sense, but alas not always and becomes horribly impractical in practice as taxonomic relationships are probed, tested, reviewed and changed over time.

Divergence of the human species is a possibility though. Perhaps we'll one day genetically design humans which are sexually isolated from us "naturals", but are still able to successfully have sexually viable offspring with eachother. Or perhaps we'll colonize a distant planet, but then a catastrophy isolates a colony for many hundreds of thousands of years so that they evolve differently from other humans. ;)

Have you ever heard of the book Man After Man? It's pretty much about that exact thing. It's an illustrated future history of the human race that starts with some groups of humans being genetically engineered for various reasons and then throughout the ages follows the evolution of these divergent human species. Kind of an interesting cross between science fiction and evolutionary biology and definitely worth checking out if you find that kind of speculation as fascinating as I do.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...anafterman.jpg

I'm bored, and will construct a theoretical scenario for the end of our world (as we know it) on this planet.

• In the same way that old "future" movies got prediction [unfashionably] wrong, the argument about world-wide nuclear war proves to be a gross miscalculation, seeing as civilized countries with nuclear weapons didn't suddenly all decide to bomb each other in a futile attempt at... saving themselves.... by eradicating everyone they depend on economically. Instead, driven by greed and a desire for bank notes as an alternative to any representation of real worth as nations, they formed a new United Nations which was composed of all countries with nukes or any significant military force. They way they did this was to accuse any other country in the process of developing nuclear material (or other potential weapons of mass destruction) of being "terrorists", thus gaining approval of the rest of the allies [who were equally threatened by being shown up by the underdogs], to destroy the stability of these countries and create dependency without the ability to resist on an impacting scale.
• With all outside threats dissolved, this new union of profitable/powerful nations had no one to distrust. Eventually, suspicions turned inward. Union nations became increasingly scrutinized, because all of them assumed someone wanted to be on the top of the totem pole, and innocent actions were viewed as disguised treachery. So there was a treaty to disarm themselves of nukes and other weapons of mass destruction. But unfortunately, there were several nations who would not agree to do so. The rest of The Union knew this was a sign of intent to dominate (and rightly so) and these nations were then cast in a light much the same as the light cast on the nations already taken out. It worked before, and it worked again.
• Nations that refused to disarm were attacked and defeated by the rest of The Union. Nuclear stockpiles were all depleted. Man felt that the great human triumph was at hand. But growing suspicions about the technology advantages and lesser weapon advantages of other nations painted the picture that they were too unbalanced to maintain a state of equality across nations. Nukes were gone, but there still remained advantages, should war break out in The Union.
• A treaty to disarm nations of missiles, missile defense systems, aircraft, aircraft carriers, and all other technologically advanced systems of warfare was created. Any nation that refused to comply would be treated as terrorists, and dealt with by The Union. Unfortunately, there were nations in The Union that would not comply. They were overpowered and disarmed by the rest of the allies in The Union and their power dissolved.
• By this time, the technology and defense capability of nations were reverted to earlier ages. To defend your country would mean you did so with rifles and, most likely, your life. For a long time, The Union was at peace, but secret manufacturing processes were revealed by spies and The Union discovered that several nations were trying to advance their capabilities, should something happen.
• The last treaty was proposed, which would destroy all weapons completely. The few remaining Union nations that agreed naturally overtook the nations that didn't (before signing the treaty) and eventually, there were no weapons apart from what knives you found, or what knives you could make. What stones you could throw.

• The decline of technology brought humanity back to the stone ages. Government dissolved, and the remnants of civilization, the roads, the buildings, remained as headstones of our buried past. All our advances were a weapon against us. And although disease wiped most of the population out, due to the lack of medical treatment we once enjoyed, there were a few who survived in small tribes. And through the ages, stories of the old world became legends, then myths. Then after all the remnants were gone, the surviving population began to advance. And then... there was a very creative man... He changed their world. He invented a gun.

That's nice.

i honestly think the world will end when we (for lack of better terms) weaponize the planet and drive it into the sun to create another big bang and hopefully not fook it all up to hell again.

Cool, thanks for the book tip! I really need to read something else than Pratchett these days, so I'll try and keep this one in mind. :)