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What is going to finally take us out?

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GrayFoxPL said:
It's gonna be mad Lance Henriksen.
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The A2s always were a bit twitchy. That could never happen now with his behavioral inhibitors. It is impossible for Lance to harm or by omission of action, allow to be harmed, a human being.
 
Sean! said:
Depressing thought for sure, but still interesting.

I think it will be cordyceps. A human strain will come around and spread to each country until the world is covered in fungus.
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Cordyceps is my worst fucking nightmare. Ughhhhhh.
On the bright side, it'll try to keep us alive so it can reproduce.
 
bytesized said:
I knew that video but is there any reason to believe humans could suffer from this?
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No, none at all. It's just a "what if this could mutate to infect humans?" scenario. About as likely as an alien invasion.

That parasite that makes you into a crazy cat lady is almost as bad, though. =<
 
ThoseDeafMutes said:
Global thermonuclear war will cause the collapse of modern society, and the secondary climatic effects will kill many people from famines etc, but will not even be even remotely close to an extinction event.
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surely there are enough nuclear weapons on the earth to destroy zee world

if not i shall become the courier in NV
 
Tashbrooke said:
surely there are enough nuclear weapons on the earth to destroy zee world

if not i shall become the courier in NV
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Not really. Well, maybe if they were spaced out evenly and were ground bursts... that would increase the amount of radiation anyway. Maybe with all bombs being salted bombs?

Remember that most nukes are aimed to cities and other strategic targets, and quite many are fired in the same place just to be sure. And quite many places won't get a single nuke fired at them.

The explosions themselves wouldn't be THAT dangerous. Earth has quite a lot of (ground) surface area. Radiation and the nuclear winter that would follow would be issues, but life can probably adapt to higher backround radiation.


EDIT personally, i think the AI scenario is bullshit. We can just pull the damn plug, everyone knows not to connect the AI to internet or to anything important until they're sure it is no danger.
 
a virus.

no zombies or mutations or anything. a virus that just kills.

it will be a sad death.

still betting on nukes
 
Tashbrooke said:
surely there are enough nuclear weapons on the earth to destroy zee world

if not i shall become the courier in NV
Click to expand...

If specifically targeted at population centres for maximum casualties, the combined arsenals of the entire world might get a couple billion. Realistically, a certain percentage of bombs will "fizzle" and fail to get good yield, and many important targets are military, not civilian in nature. Super-important targets that are surrounded by some missile defense have extra warheads thrown at them to ensure that at least one detonation occurs, and many military bases (especially enemy silos, airbases and naval bases) are not near major urban centers or prime agricultural land. Some warheads will get destroyed on the ground, in the air, or when the ships carrying them are sunk. And most warheads are sub-Megatonne yield (I believe 475kt is the most common for USA?).

Since most nuclear strategy is aimed at disabling enemy launch sites, critical industrial centres and military assets, the actual casualties could be as few as hundreds of millions from primary effects. This is likely to bring on substantial short term climate change that will ruin crops in many areas, and the collapse of the global economy and loss of all the high tech industries will mean the carrying capacity of the world will sharply decline until society can be rebuilt (which will take a long time). You're looking at starvation killing many times more people than the bombs did from blast and radiation.
 
ThoseDeafMutes said:
Since most nuclear strategy is aimed at disabling enemy launch sites, critical industrial centres and military assets, the actual casualties could be as few as hundreds of millions from primary effects. This is likely to bring on substantial short term climate change that will ruin crops in many areas, and the collapse of the global economy and loss of all the high tech industries will mean the carrying capacity of the world will sharply decline until society can be rebuilt (which will take a long time). You're looking at starvation killing many times more people than the bombs did from blast and radiation.
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THIS is the biggest problem. It is possible humankind can never rise again. Without advanced technology, reclaiming resources (read: ores, minerals) from cities etc is not easy, and nearly everything easily mineable has been mined out already.
Not saying it is impossible, just difficult.

Which is why i think humankind should get to other planets and stars ASAP, guarantee our survival, make sure there are high-tech-base humans left in case of a global war or other catastrophe.
 
Squirrels.

I did a little research a while back and apparently there are about 3 squirrels for every one person in the U.S.

Think about it!
 
Kill us all completely? Or just destroy the majority of us? Because the later will probably happen through military/nuclear warfare and it's subsequent effects.
 
To wipe out humans completely you are going to need a global extinction event devastating enough to the global ecosystem that even anyone holed up in a shelter is going to emerge into an inhospitable environment years or even decades later.

That will require a large asteroid impact, sustained super-volcano activity, or being hit square on with a gamma ray burst. Disease, nukes, or most solar flares wouldn't cut it, as you'd still have pockets of humanity surviving.

A runaway greenhouse effect would do it too (turning the planet into something akin to Venus), but you'd hope there was enough visibility and action to avoid that (even on our present course, this wouldn't be in our near future).
 
A big ass Meteor. Like it has already happened.

Edit

Or a gigantic wave of stellar radiation which would kill basically everything.
 
I believe the human race will have means of relocation before any cataclysmic events on Earth. I really don't think the human race will ever die out, only evolve to something else after a long time.
 
Ryaaan14 said:
I believe the human race will have means of relocation before any cataclysmic events on Earth. I really don't think the human race will ever die out, only evolve to something else after a long time.
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To where? With what?
We don't know where the hell most asteroids are... And we have even less alternate places to go. Mars would be ok after terraforming it but that process takes a long time, 500-5000 years depending how you do it (and it's all theoretical). Slower than light interstellar travel requires ENORMOUS amounts of energy (if you want to do it in reasonable time, say 100 years to Alpha Centauri), much easier and cheaper to simply deflect asteroids.
Deflecting a nuclear war or other catastrophe is more difficult but those are unlikely to cause extincton of humankind. Of course afterwards there might not ever be as advanced civilization as ours is currently...
 
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