20 Ways The World Could End 362
kevlar wrote to us with the online version of Discover's 20 Ways the World Could End. Ranging from Asteriod Impacts to Mini Black Holes, it's all sorts of fun potential disasters.
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20 Ways The World Could End
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"A car is just a big purse on wheels." -- Johanna Reynolds
What ever happened to alt.destroy.the.earth? (Score:2)
Most of this article centers around the end of humans/life not the big ball that we call the earth. Black holes are nice but how do you make one in a reasonable amount of time to crack open beer and watch the fun from alpha centari? That's what I want to know.
Ahhhhh...... memories.
Re:They forgot a scary one... (Score:2)
BBC SciTech: Supervolcanos [bbc.co.uk]
These "supervolcanos" occur more frequently than "Flood-basalt volcanism".
A couple of other possibilities:
The solar system could pass through a cloud of cosmic dust. This was once suggested as a cause of ice ages, now considered unlikely.
There are vast quantities of the greenhouse gas methane locked up in a hydrated form on the sea floor. If the sea warmed and/or sea levels decreased (lowering the pressure) the methane could be released leading to a runaway greenhouse effect.
M$ could win the antitrust case. They proceed to completely take over the software industry and the internet. Soon all the world's banking, trade, communications and government services are running on on one big monolithic system. Then, one day, all the screens turn blue.
Re:The Earth wouldn't even flinch (Score:2)
Re:Elect Algore (Score:2)
It was called 'Survivor'. :D
Re:Armageddon and Fiction (Score:2)
I disagree. I think Asimov decided to explore robot sci-fi from a non-technical position on purpose, instead exploring the nature of human & robot social interaction. Bicentennial man is easily his best story demonstrating this. Others include robot-as-pathos (Bard) and the blurring between robots and humans (Segregationist).
He also explored the Frankenstein complex in short stories like Thou Art Mindful Of Him.
Sure, some of Asimov's stories were supposed to be fun (the Powell & Donovan series) and some were meant to ask "what if" (the Calvin series). I think this demonstrated that Asimov was trying hard to explore robots from all angles: social, economic, pathological, psychological. One of my favourite Asimov short stories revolves around the idea of a robot growing tired with life (and I won't give the name to avoid spoiling it).
Asimov wasn't cyberpunk like Gibson, but I don't think it's at all fair to say Asimov never developed a "serious understanding". He mightn't have developed a technical understanding, that I will admit, but I think Asimov had one of the most serious understandings of the human/robot relationship of any sci-fi author, living or dead.
I also like David Brin! His short stories are much better than his novels. Brin is very much like Asimov in that respect.
Re:Armageddon and Fiction (Score:2)
You yourself say "the most technical thing..." and this I think proves my point. Asimov didn't go the terrible route some authors travel where they try and explain the technology in terrible excruciating detail: Arthur C. Clarke does this all the time and I personally can't stand it.
Asimov instead gave pseudo-science answers like "positrons" then hastily moved on. Clearly the pseudo-science was irrelevant to the story. I think Asimov was far more interested in ethical and social problems like interpreting the three laws and imagining the various ways humans/robots would interact.
Too many sci-fi authors spend time talking about the science. I find it far more interesting when the author says "this science exists which can do this, I'm not going to explain how it does this, but I will try and find out how it would change us for better or for worse". This is what I enjoy. Asimov's short story Election is a perfect example of this.
I'm not hero-worshipping Asimov. I just think that he has a damn good ratio of hits to misses.
You're so right! I hate long-winded sci-fi novels. They are almost without exception boring. Michael Crichton has to be the worst offender IMO, but there are so many others competing for the title.
Re:Armageddon and Fiction (Score:2)
Um, robots didn't take over in the Foundation series. In fact, if you only count the original Foundation series (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, 2nd Foundation) then there weren't any robots at all. In the extra books (Foundation's Edge, Prelude to Foundation, Foundation and Earth) that were written so long after Foundation became popular, then at best you can say robots were guiding humanity. In the end the power that takes over the Galactic Empire is decidingly non-robotic!
17 -- Mass Insanity (Score:2)
Here is the proof:
1) The Backstreet Boys
2) N' Sync
3) Britney Spears
4) George Bush
Surviving MC-Hammer (Score:2)
You are right!
I am still amazed that we survived MC-Hammer.
Even more mazed that he still is alive.
To add to your list:
1) Mr T
2) Boy George
3) Newt Gingrich
4) The entire cast of 90210
5) Vanilla Ice
And #1 is... (Score:2)
Let's Face it - The Earth Could Survive a Lot (Score:3)
A kiler event needs only to happen to this volume.
Even an asteroid the size of mars would leave a chunk of rock of the right size, but nobody would be living there.
READ MEMEPOOL! (Score:3)
This story was posted there [memepool.com] last Thursday.
They forgot a scary one... (Score:3)
http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/frequent_qu
Re:they missed one (Score:5)
Twenty-one #654995387: Slashdotters invent an infinite number of doomsday scenarios, all numbered "21". Having an infinite number of scenarios, the probability of "the twenty-one event" occuring becomes infinite. Like Wile E. Coyote's looking down and causing gravity to take effect, the realization of the certainty of a twenty-one event causes one to occur.
Twenty-one #655835601: The infinite density of the #21 causes all ideas to collapse into it, turning the rest of the world into a place just as mindless as slashdot.
Twenty-one #659995379: Just because.
Re:hmm (Score:2)
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Fire and Ice (Score:2)
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Had to be said.
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Here's more they forgot (Score:3)
Solar evolution
The sun is slowly growing hotter, and in about a billion years will be hot enough to start a runaway greenhouse effect on the Earth. The stratosphere will also become moist with water vapour. The water in the stratosphere will be broken up by solar radiation, and the hydrogen will be lost to space.
Close passage of another star
Stars pass by each other all the time, but usually the distances are so great that it doesn't matter. But there is a small chance that a star will pass so close to the sun that it affects the orbits of the inner solar system and the Earth could be ejected from the solar system. Interestingly, this scenario will actually allow life - but not human life - to survive on the Earth longest. The oceans will freeze over but not freeze solid because of the Earth's internal heat. Life could continue around the deep ocean vents for many bilions of years. Earth would also have a small chance of being captured into a stable habitable orbit around the interloper star.
Supernova
A really close supernova (30 light years or closer) would have a similar effect to that described for gamma-ray bursts. The nearest star to Earth that will go supernova is Canopus, about 150 light years away, and that star is due to explode sometime in the next 5 million years.
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Re:Well... (Score:2)
-B
they missed one (Score:2)
Blasphemy! False Prophet! (Score:2)
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Whose Line? (Score:2)
It is truly mind-boggling to see how statistics are misused in everyday life (and not to mention the computer industry). After all, 47% of all statistics are fabricated. But really, the statistics were used completely out of context and with no basis given - there's no way to tell under what circumstances the data is valid, and even how reputable a source (NASA or his mother?) the data came from. In other words, his entire factual basis feels ungrounded.
If anyone's interested in this sort of statistical man-handling, there's an awesome book by John Allen Paulos Innumeracy : Matehematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences [amazon.com] dedicated to the topic. For those of you who don't know him, Paulos is a rather eloquent and humorous writer and mathematician.
On the complete other hand, some of what was said in the article was indeed quite interesting, it's just that for me it was overshadowed by his random "facts". Oh well. It was a fun read though.
Re:Someone wakes up and realizes it was just a dre (Score:2)
Someone wakes up and realizes it was just a dream? (Score:4)
Well, let's first assume that we do actually exist in a physical world (paradoxes to follow). So now we've got a kickass hugely powerful computer, that say, Linus Torvalds (or any other brilliant mind for that matter), has downloaded himself into.
Let's even say that he has the resources and capability to increase the power of this computer on his own, given enough time. Computer controlled chip fab, plenty of electricity/power, lotsa sand lying around with which to manufacture silicon, etc.
Now, Linus is trapped in this computer with nothing to do, right? Well, almost nothing. Assuming that this machine is infinitely powerful and infinitely expandable, why not start creating one's one little world within the machine? We could create little 'bots' to run around inside the system and interact with each other. We could make some bots weak (worms/flys/bugs in general) and some very strong and crafty (humans/cockroaches).
Now Linus is the only one who has access to his own machine and he's got 30,000 years to tool around with it. So now we've got a simulated earth sitting in some data center somewhere. But of course, Linus isn't the only one doing this.
Bill Joy has built his own little world somewhere in what we would call Alpha Centauri. All these little worlds are connected together via the Internet, but security protocols make it extrememly difficult for one 'bot' to travel between worlds, i.e. rocketship to Alpha Centauri.
But then Linus says something that pisses Bill Joy off in the Diety Daily Herald. Bill then just sends some nanobots two blocks over (we're all really living in Silicon Valley, just don't know it) and turns Linus's data center into primordial goo.
And thus we have the end of existance as we know it.
Infringement? (Score:2)
You can't escape some of these (Score:2)
The Terminator Seeds (Score:2)
My favorite quote from them is from Phil Angel, their director of corporate communications: "Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job."
Here's [purefood.org] a great paranoid website tracking the antics of this company and their money-over-lives attitude. Granted, it is off an organic foods website, but the articles they link to are all for real.
Great, just great (Score:2)
Wonderful. I go and read this just as I was about to go to bed (given that it's midnight European time).
Wonderful...sweet dreams... :-/
Mommy, can you leave the light on?
cya
Ethelred
Asimov's take on Armageddon (Score:2)
A Choice of Catastrophes: The Disasters That Threaten Our World [amazon.com]
Re:Doomsday Argument (Score:4)
Here are a few examples to demonstrate this:
1) If the first human knew Bayes's theorem (i.e., he was Bayes
2) Using the Doomesday Argument, for a population that doubles every generation (i.e. exponential growth), each generation will always contain more individuals than all previous generations combined. Thus, each generation will conclude that it is probably one of the last.
Rather than use the "urn" analogy, a dice analogy would be more appropriate. Imagine that each generation rolls 5 dice. Certain combinations result in extinction (these combinations do not change, but the number of deadly combinations is unknown). You look at the previous record of dice rolls, and see that humanity has not yet been wiped out, but that 40% of all possible combinations have been rolled. The fact that a deadly combination has not yet been rolled makes it less likely that the next roll will be deadly.
This is what happens when you try to use statistics without thinking... As Mark Twain said, "There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics." (He was actually quoting Benjamin Disraeli, but whatever.)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Good novel coverage of possible disasters (Score:2)
A lot of the entries on the list have been well covered by good authors in the field of 'hard' science fiction (as opposed to 'soft' sci-fi like Star Schleck Technobabble). Their novels are amazingly informed and informative as to what could happen.
Okay, everybody eventually takes a shot at explaining the Tunguska meteor, from Doctor Who at the 'soft' end to Larry Niven at the 'hard physcis' end, you name it. (Ironically, it's never actually a simple meteor; it's always Something Else.) So I won't go there.
Gamma-ray bursts are interesting. Greg Bear did some similar stuff in Diaspora, which should be interesting to /. readers anyhow.
Re:YAWN (Score:2)
Oh really? You have the information on what causes those immense gamma-ray bursts, the likelihood of a superflare, and know that the vacuum isn't going to collapse? Wow, I wish you'd share with us, there's probably some serious scientific knowledge trapped in your head that nobody else knows.
Oh.... you just DECIDED those events are unlikely, and decided to act as if your assumption was the truth. The fact is, things like those currently fall into the area of "unknown probability". Sure, maybe they seem less likely because they haven't occured around here before, but how do we know that's not like someone rolling a die 10 times and getting a six each time, and thus concluding that any other number is unlikely? We could be lucky that things occured as they did, and a return to the more likely event is around the corner.
There's no use in worrying about them, as we can't affect them, but that's not reason to assume they're not going to happen. Wait a second, there's something on the news about an unusual flare on the sun...
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20 reasons? Roll a d20! (Score:2)
DM: And then suddenly the world of Almathia was destroyed by...
(roll d20... 18.)
DM: Alien Invasion!
Player: Aww, geez! Oh well, time to roll up another character...
Re:Someone wakes up and realizes it was just a dre (Score:3)
Re:Inevitable destruction? (Score:5)
No, But if we patented "1 click" world distruction then the world would be safe for at least 5 to 7
years while the legal battle ensued.
Re:17 -- Mass Insanity (Score:2)
Remember:
1) Micheal Jackson
2) MC Hammer
3) Tiffany
4) Ronald Reagan
We survived that, we'll get through this!
Re:Whose Line? (Score:2)
Re:Well... (Score:3)
Re:Someone wakes up and realizes it was just a dre (Score:5)
number 11. (Score:2)
Re:Your sig (Score:2)
They forgot to mention... (Score:5)
Starting with discover.com ... ;)
Re:but how will the universe end? (Score:2)
Fortunaley, no. The universe is expanding. I saw a science documentary (Space 2000 I believe) that said the universe was not only expanding (which we knew for ages), but the recently (~ late 1990s) we finally deteremined the rate was accelerating [nasa.gov]. Others say the rate of expansion is constant.
In either case, the universe will eventually expand out into the void, which you can read one transcript of on pbs/a&g t; [pbs.org]
Re:READ MEMEPOOL! (Score:2)
Mass Insanity most likely (Score:2)
These are the people we hear about on the news who hang themselves, go on shooting sprees, kill their family then themselves, etc. While the clueless media focuses on video game violence and how many "subversive" books he or she owned.
I don't know when its going to reach critical mass, but considering that universal healthcare in the US is largely cosidered a joke, toss in the stresses of overpopulation, and the taboo on mental illness is as strong as its ever been I have a good feeling where its going to start.
Yes, Insanity. Its real. (Score:2)
Time for insanity? How does this even remotely make sense? Mental illness makes one less functional and in a competitive environment (starving to death as you put it) they will be the first victims to dire circumstances.
Unhappiness and major depression have little in common. Happiness can be affected by a variety of factors and neither state (happy vs. sad) lasts for very long. A person with major depression is stuck in a state of despair and hopelessness for weeks or months at a time. 90% of suicides are from mentally ill persons, which should show you the severity and sheer torture of this condition. Now toss in the generalized anxiety and bipolar disease and you have quite a number of people, mostly untreated, with serious problems that don't need to be trivialized by people like you. In fact bipolars have the highest mortality rate of any disease, it eventually forces you to take your own life by your own hand, just like depression.
Surely no one defends the practices of big business especially in the third world, but there's a reason why anti-anxiety drugs are the most prescribed drugs in the US. Because there are a great many people suffering from anxiety, panic attacks, etc. None of these things should be taken lightly.
The profit margin is especially high in the US because of the politicians here are very easily bought and breaks on prescription medicines are rare for non-senior citizens and universal healthcare will probably never happen.
Anti-depressants do not make you happy, if they did they'd be used in recreational ways. When was the last time you saw someone selling Prozac or Paxil at a rave? They simply don't just put you in la-la land like ecstacy, they treat a serious mental disorder. They help balance serotonin levels to keep people non-depressed and functional.
I can see you're upset about sleeping sickness, but the problem lies not with mental illness being a myth for fattened westerners, but with how the pharamcutical industry operates and the politics of the nations of the people who get this disease.
Re:Well... (Score:2)
As for "crackheads," keep your stereotypical views, rehab may not be perfect but there are many people who need it yet can't afford it. What if one of your friends make a few mistkes in his life and tried to get into rehab but was turned down because of lack of insurance. How about physical or mental illness then, dont you think a responsible government has the responsibiloity to help those who can't help themselves?
The flat tax is propaganda sold to those who aren't much interested in poltics but want simple, easy to understand solutions that really just help people like Steve Forbes.
Re:Yes, Insanity. Its real. (Score:2)
As far as publicity stopping production, I've never heard of it. Look how badly valium was abused not so long ago and its still around so are lots of other downers.
Like I said, it isn't about feeling good its about being stable and functional. Heaven forbid a patient feels good once in a while and then we have the ignorant assuming he or she is tripping and having a good time. Do some research into popular SSRI's and how many people take anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs and you'll be sadly surprised. Start at depression.com and work your way from there.
As for western nations, who knows why its more highly reported. Remember that report last year from the department of health, we have millions of undiagnosed sufferers. Third world nations barely have the healthcare and documentation to give decent records on physical illness let alone psychological. Whatever it is, it isn't about a lifestyle of abusing pills and being high all the time. Trust me its a lot cheaper to buy pot or ecstacy than deal with pharmacuticals for any possible high or low you can get off them.
Whether or not this will be the slow and painful end to the human race is academic, but it is a definate possibility. Who knows, I lean towards a more "what we don't know about the world has a good chance of killing us without even a warning" the same way Dinosaurs couldn't comprehend astrophysics.
wonderfull. (Score:2)
If anyone needs me, I'll be under my bed.
Hopfully, the radiation from my cell phone will kill me off first.
Re:Armageddon and Fiction (Score:2)
In Greg Egan's Diaspora a gamma ray burst from two colliding stars destroys all biological life on earth. Luckily the post humans have already uploaded themselves to firmware by then and spread out into the universe to figure out why the heck it happened.
Number 21 (Score:2)
Re:No more Bouillabaisse! (Score:2)
Elect Algore (Score:2)
living on leaves and tree bark. Think about it! No controling legal athority could tell you which tree to hug.
The Earth wouldn't even flinch (Score:3)
Other than those black hole arguments, particle accelerator mishaps, and whatever would eat away at the planet, I'm sure the Earth will keep on doing what it does best... spin around in circles around the sun and be a mother to her children...
Since we're at the top of the chain, we're also the most likely to go out if any of these disasters were to occur. Life would repeat itself starting with the smallest surviving bacteria and work all the way up to a species like... us.
But I always had this thought, "What if we're not the first human-type generation."
Dislaimer: I'm obviously no scientist, but I just want to share a thought.
How does our technology stack up to determine the life of our planet or even our universe? I can see estimates (ie. Earth is 4 billion years old), but nothing that will determine that the Eart IS 4 billion years old.
So here's my idea... the human-type generation
We are not the first to roam this planet successfully. We are not the last to die here either. Instead, maybe billions upon billions of years ago, we did exist on this planet. And we eventually did kill ourselves off through technology or maybe some natural disaster.
In turn, Earth eventually heals itself and here we are again. When humans die off. The Earth would do the same thing again.
Space travel would save us, right? Who knows, maybe the last human-type are the aliens we think that are out there.
Of course, this is all an idea. And I'm sure it's not the first time it's been thought of. If you're still scratching your head... don't worry, I tried reading this again, I couldn't make sense of it either... Have a great day :)
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Neafevoc
Inevitable destruction? (Score:5)
Re:Inevitable destruction? (Score:2)
No, But if we patented "1 click" world distruction then the world would be safe for at least 5 to 7 years while the legal battle ensued.
You cant patent that. There is prior art. You know, the Big Red Button. Only one click necessary.
/Dervak
Of course we're in a simulation! :) (Score:2)
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Re:Doomsday Argument (Score:2)
In the shooting room experiment we are to imagine a room of infinite capacity. First a batch of ten people are led into this room. A pair of dice is thrown in front of their eyes. If a double six comes up they are all shot. Otherwise they leave the room safely and a new batch, this one containing a hundred people, is thrust in. The process continues, with each consecutive batch ten times larger than the previous one, until there is a double six; whereupon the people in the room at that time are shot and the experiment ends.
Suppose you have been thrust into the room. You are asked to estimate the odds of leaving safely. One the one hand, since whether you will leave or not will be determined by the throw of a fair pair of dice, it seems that you have a 35/36 chance of exiting alive. On the other hand, 90% of all people who are in your situation will be shot, so it seems you have only a 10% chance of exiting alive. That is the paradox.
The connection to the DA is obvious. Except for the fact that each consecutive batch in the shooting room is postulated to be ten times bigger than its predecessor (which corresponds to an indefinite exponential population growth in the case of the DA), the two situations are structurally very similar.
I think the key idea is that given that I exist at this point in time, the probability that I survive is independent of what came before, 35/36 - in fact, the probability that each subsequent generation survives may be higher since it is more difficult for a catastrophy to wipe out a larger than smaller number of people (barring weapons of mass destruction).
"William S. Burrows"??? (Score:2)
Try William S. Burroughs instead.
Re:Well... (Score:2)
I'm from Minnesota. If Jesse Fricking Ventura can put the smackdown on two entrenched good ol' boys like Skippy and Norm, Ralph Nader should have no problem winning this one.
I'm voting Nader for sure. I absolutely could not look myself in the eye if I voted for either of those two walking penises.
rant! (Score:2)
In fact, with us gone, nature might get a second lease on life.
Second lease at what?!!! This reflects a bizare combination of arrogance and self loathing. Man can not really undo life on earth. If you accept that life evolved from some tarry mass, you must predict its rise in any event. To look at the removal of man as anything positive shows an utter disregard and hatred for you fellow man. Save yourself! Get out and do something!
ballsy logic (Score:4)
The odds of being one of the people to witness doomsday are highest when there is the largest number of witnesses around so now is not such an improbable.
Actually, there will be no human witnesses to human extinction. Think about it. Well, never mind, I'll just explain. The highest chance of extinction occurs with the lowest number living, and no human will see the last die.
17 Mass insanity
My bet's on this one! You saw it here first. 1840 was the end of the world, we are all just living a dream (20 has occured?) Someone, pinch me.
Re:Thanks (Score:2)
Humor is quite appropriate for this article. Although we can affect things like global warming and biotech meltdown, for most of these events, it's not like the end of the world is the kinda thing we can do much about.
Rule 10: You take life too seriously.`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
The collapse of the net. (Score:2)
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Distastes (Score:2)
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Re: (Score:2)
Insanity? come off it (Score:2)
First of all, to shamelessly quote the anthropologist A. I. Hallowell (note 1), It is normal to share the delusions traditionally accepted by one's society. Abnormality involves the development of of a delusional system the culture does not sanction. Consider, for example, the many Americans who saw nothing wrong with Titanic getting all those Oscars, or the many Britons who consider broad beans to be food.
Next off, a few tidbits from the article:
By 2020, depression will likely be the second leading cause of death and lost productivity, right behind cardiovascular disease.
Cardiovascular disease? that disease the affects people who get too much to eat? Surely, in most of the world, there is no time for insanity - most of one's daily activities surround not starving to death (note 2)
Gregory Stock ... believes medical science will soon allow people to live to be 200 or older ... One possible solution-- promoting a certain kind of mental well-being with psychoactive drugs such as Prozac-- heads into uncharted waters
Sorry, that's just too good. In an age when no drug company in the whole world is willing to make, let alone research drugs to treat sleeping sickness, a massive killer in many tropical countries, because the profit margin is too low (read: not enough rich people get bitten by tsetse flies)(note 3), and zillions of dollars are poured into treating diseases that claim people who have money to burn on cigarettes, over-processed foods, and a sedentary life! And here we're positing that in a mere twenty or thirty years, most of the earth's population will be blowing obscene sums on drugs to treat unhappiness! Arhgh!
notes
1 - This is not a made up guy, or quotation, but notice this - his name can be further abbreviated to A.I. Hal. Spooky or what?
2 - I'm just one a them socialist Canadians, I can't help it
3 - don't read this one if you're queasy, but... The current treatment for sleeping sickness is so caustic that you have to inject it from a glass syringe - it will eat right through a plastic one. The effects of injecting it intravenously are what one might expect. And no company will put any money into researching a better treatment.
hmm.... (Score:2)
sounds a bit like Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy to me....
Re:Armageddon and Fiction (Score:2)
I pulling for... (Score:2)
I think a virus will pop up, worse than ebola, that will have people spewing a variety of putrid liquids out of holes they never thought they had, all the while convulsing and suffering some severe delerium. Within hours, you make a loud death rattle and THWACK! your dead.
This message brought to you by the one of the most successful species that has ever lived, homo erectus, 6,000,000,000 strong and growing, the vast majority of whom couldn't conceive of an ecological balance if one fell off a shelf at wal mart and smacked them on the head.
Way #21: (Score:2)
Doomsday Argument (Score:3)
"Imagine that two big urns are put in front of you, and you know that one of them contains ten balls and the other a million, but you are ignorant as to which is which. You know the balls in each urn are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 ... etc. Now you take a ball at random from the left urn, and it is number 7. Clearly, this is a strong indication that that urn contains only ten balls. If originally the odds were fifty-fifty, a swift application of Bayes' theorem gives you the posterior probability that the left urn is the one with only ten balls. (pposterior (L=10) = 0.999990). But now consider the case where instead of the urns you have two possible human races, and instead of balls you have individuals, ranked according to birth order. As a matter of fact, you happen to find that your rank is about sixty billion. Now, say Carter and Leslie, we should reason in the same way as we did with the urns. That you should have a rank of sixty billion or so is much more likely if only 100 billion persons will ever have lived than if there will be many trillion persons. Therefore, by Bayes' theorem, you should update your beliefs about humankind's prospects and realize that an impending doomsday is much more probable than you have hitherto thought."
Re:Of course we're in a simulation! :) (Score:3)
Then we have superstring theory suggesting 11-dimensional space that appears to be 4-dimensional, with everything else "folding" into obscurity at any scale capable of observation. Sounds almost like an object-oriented system to me.
Re:Inevitable destruction? (Score:2)
HAHAHAHA
That's a really good one, I'll have to remember it.
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Step by step refutation and analysis of all 20. (Score:3)
1. Asteroid impact. Wholly plausible, although it must be said that it should be possible to divert it with a chain of precisely launched nuclear warheads detonated as closely as possible to it [the heat from the radiation pressure would cause massive ejecta from the surface, and newtons second law would tend to do the rest, (unless it is mushy or claylike and easily broken into pieces, in which case further blasts could be placed in it's wake to fragment it as much as possible to maximize surface area resistance and encourage burning up in the atmosphere. Block out the sun for a while, but advanced civilization would manage to survive]
2. Once again, plausible, but also notably more speculative. There have been no observed gamma-ray bursts you could call in any way close, they -may- only have tended to happen in a far younger universe. Then again, we've had a devil of a time really triangulating them with all that much accuracy... it's an unknown, put possible. The complete damage of all unshielded electrons equipment would be devastating, [as well as lot's of cancer, etc]
3. Well, I guess the spectrum is not a perfect reasoned to silly, as this is far more implausible [and based wholly on unconfirmed speculation and hypothesis of a fundamental cosmological nature... This one should have come just before divine intervention, to make the ideology spectrum smooth
4. Rogue black holes. Yep, could happen. We'd know about it for a few decades a head of time, hopefully would provide a sufficient rallying cry to learn to live comfortably and self sustainably in space.
5. A conceivable threat, but the likeliness is indeterminate. Most amusing is that the science quoted in the end referring to the existence of strong evidence that the major element in previous world climate change is caused by variations in the sun's output tends to strongly run head-on into the presumptions assumed in #9:"Global warming", but hey.. Who said an article about science in the mainstream media should concern itself with self-consistency
6. I'd never heard of this one before! Interesting. Certainly, geomagnitism provides most of our shielding from energetic particles from the sun... It's happened before without causing huge problems in the fossil record, though. It would probably just cause, at worst, a sharp upswing in mutations and cancer. [Which is -good- for animals, where it is a question of evolution and adaptation. It's only bad where the death of an individual counts, which only applies to people, anyway]
7. A risk. It would devastate world agricultural production! As to whether or not we are "due for one", I couldn't say... but I can't deny that current man has a lot of hubris in fearing himself more them the vagaries of nature. Worst case, much of human population dies, high tech nations sustain a limited population via technologically produced foods. Certainly would be a field day for Darwin. Most amusing is the fact pointed out that 95% of all species were wiped out, [nothing like the most liberal figures of mankinds current impact], and guess what, the ecology rebounded just fine.
8. That would suck for many people. Random deaths. Still, probably wouldn't kill more then 90%, leaving more then enough gene pool to repopulate and rebuild. Plus, advanced quarantining, national emergency... Many may survive in private enclaves, quarantining against all outsiders until the problem is dealt with [say, effective testing, triage, "tuberculosis colonies", etc.]
9. First of she states the earth is getting warmer as a given [before even bringing in the necessary authority of science to bolster her argument]. Many climatologists and geophysicists don't believe there is sufficient evidence to claim that. [Recent ocean readings via satellite actually showed the earth cooling slightly]. Others conclude that the earth does seem to be warming slightly, but that it is correlated most directly to the output of the sun [see #5]. The venus argument is just silly, the earths liquid oceans provide an excellent heat pump, via convection of water vapor in the atmosphere, to radiate a lot of energy into space. Of course, it's still possible, in the sense that anything is possible.
10. Now this isn't even real science anymore, but is beginning to descend into classic left-wing polemic. People forget that evolution has always been all about the most successful [and, it has often turned out, the most complicated and therefore adaptable] of species winning out, creating new playing fields of competition. Mankind is a part of nature! We are the [thus far] height of natures expression on earth. Yes, we are outcompeting other less adaptive DNA in the struggle for resources. It's still -nothing- like the 95% extinction mentioned above. [[Or the almost -complete- extinction of all life that happened with cyanobateria evolved the nasty and horrible ecologically evil habit of pumping out vast amounts of poisonous pollution as a result of a new trick they learned for obtaining energy, causing the greatest percentage wise extinction in of life's history... In case you don't get it, they produced -oxygen-! [Which outcompeted earlier, less successful DNA that was chemotropic, and allowed a whole new plane of competition [free oxygen allowed more complex, more active animals, as oxydation is a significant part of our power source]]]
11. Oh god, the descent into leftist fear-mongering and neo-ludditism reaches new heights/depths. Genetic engineering could never hurt the environment; ultimately it could only help it by introducing more expressive traits to me commingled in the great evolutionary dance. Humanity has been practicing genetic engineering to a limited extant for millinea. [Animal husbandry, agricultural breeding]. Now we can be more precise about it. Argh. Modern ludditism so annoys me.
12. This one is actually perhaps possible as to the mini black hole, although a strong argument can be made that it would spontaneously evaporate into hawking radiation as it would have so little mass that just a few virtual particle interactions would decimate it. [Not enough statistical likelihood to stand on it's own, quantum wise, if you want a loose and innacurate metaphor]. The notion of strangelets and a phase change in the ether is as well an unknown, but a complete and wholly speculative one, based on [albeit interesting] theories with no demonstrative evidence to back them up whatsoever. Argumentum ad ignorantiam is logically worthless.
13. Nanotech disaster. F*ck fire or ice, that's the way I would want to go!... to have gotten so close to true near-total dominance over nature, with a promise of easy off-planet and even interstellar expansion of human life and thought... Surely worth the risk, which could be wholly eliminate by intelligent initial deployment in the beginning, and by design of countermeasures [nano-tech immune systems] after it becomes widely disseminated.
14. Oh yikes. I'm not even going to bother with this one. The output from a good volcano is far less then the toxins of most industrial output. And there is a straw man in arguing that cancer rates are bad for the environment. Mutation and a bit of extra death of animals is no big deal, part of natures old plan. Only in humans does cancer really matter in the slightest, which sort of defeats the loosely implicit notion of ecological catastrophe... Ah well, even the reporter admits that this is not an accepted or plausible theory of in real deemed risk in scientific circles.
15. Yeah, a real worry, but it certainly wouldn't wipe out humanity. Lots of people would survive. Wouldn't be nearly as bad as a small-to-medium sized asteroid strike, and advanced non-sentient life has survived that in the past, I'm sure we'd make it through. [It might take a century or two to be building scanning-tunneling-microscopes, though]
16. Heh, if we're outcompeted, I don't see that as disaster. Besides, those robots are likely to be a synthesis of downloaded human minds, with extensions. And besides, I really don't think such intelligent beings would see any need to wipe us all out. At worst, they might forcibly download all of our pertinent structure [mind and DNA] into nanocomputers, and put us in something like the Matrix [with the full option of exiting at any time, of course, and join the real world of human progress.]
17. This reporter, and much of what she implicitly dumps in from traditional media bias makes me wonder...
18. All I can say is, if our culture was outcompeted and replaced by a more advanced one, -why would that be a bad thing-? That's Darwin, people! I'd be happy to learn.
19. I'm not gonna touch this one with a ten-foot inverted religious implement.
20. I'm not gonna even bother to touch this one either, with a ten volume set of postmodern philosophy. [Actually, it does interest me a little. It has sometimes amused me to realize that it is possible that we are all genetic life that has evolved in a complex alien uber-computer, created by beings far more advanced then us... Our lives are only so painfull because invisible cameras follow us around, and the multitasking awareness of our pathetic tragedy gets good ratings on transcendental cable tv, and helps sell alien soap...]
--
man sig
Re:Armageddon and Fiction (Score:2)
Doctor Strangelove: How I learned to stop worrying, start living, and love The Bomb.
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Foundation Robots (Score:2)
I might have forgotten some details in the stuff Asimov wrote just before he died. These books weren't very memorable -- and didn't have strong continuity with his earlier books.
But you've reminded me of a far better example of benign robot takeover -- Ian Banks's stories about The Culture [phlebas.com]. Although, I'm not sure Banks thinks of it that way. I suspect he was just doing a cybernetic version of the Marxist Utopia -- a society that's evolved beyond any social institutions based on scarcity (money, government...). I'm not sure he realizes that he's created a world where robots (he calls them "drones") do everything that matters, and humans just putter along, trying not to get in the way.
Then there's Jack Williamson, who came up with a really scary concept: "humanoids" programmed to protect humans from physical harm at all costs. Result: civilization totally devoid of risk, and thus of all activities that humans actually enjoy. Unfortunately, he managed to rather beat the concept to death.
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Re:Armageddon and Fiction (Score:2)
If that's true, why are so many of the robot stories about pseudo-technical issues? He's famous for the "Laws of Robotics" that he invented mainly to indulge his love of cute little puzzles. And his "roboticists" regularly talked about the mathematical equations that supposedly drove his "positronic brains". (Asimov himself said that he had no idea why positrons made good brains.) The most technical thing I ever heard him say about his robots was that they were presumably driven by "some kind of computer" -- a statement which actually contradicts some of his stories!
I don't mean to run Asimov down. He wrote in an era when most SF was based on made-up "science" and wasn't full of references to the latest discoveries and inventions. I rather prefer that approach to stories that read like a rehashed Scientific American article, the way so many recent stories do. But let's not get all hero-worshipy. Asimov had his intellectual and creative limitations -- as do we all.
I also like David Brin! His short stories are much better than his novels. Brin is very much like Asimov in that respect.
I seem to recall enjoying all of Brin's short fiction. I often think the short story is where SF works best. Unfortunately, what the marketplace seems to want is thousand-page overplotted, overpopulated, underedited sagas, padded even further with half-baked rants on meaningless topics. Which is why such nonsense accounts for 90% of Brin's output.
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Re:Foundation Robots (Score:2)
If you did convince me that there were always were Robots in the Foundation series, you would probably deprive me of what enjoyment I still derive from the Foundation Trilogy -- it vacates the whole original premise.
But why am bothering with this argument. SF fans make the Pope look like an atheist!
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Soul Uploads (Score:2)
I seem to recall that Egan had most of humanity uploaded before the Big Disaster, leaving a few holdouts in an uneasy truce with the uploadees. (Egan invented interesting names for all the various social groups, but I forget them now.) The most interesting part is when the uploadees try to persuade the last holdouts to give up their physical bodies rather than be killed in the Burst. Most of what I like about this novel is little ethical issues like this.
One thing that disappoints me is that Egan, even though he puts a lot of imagination into imagining life-as-software, never really deals with practical implications. Imagine a society where you could create duplicates of yourself at will. Or merge yourself (or bits of yourself) with other people to create composite individuals. You'd probably end up with a society in which there were few or no "individuals" in our sense of the word. Gibson hints at this sort of thing in Neuromancer, when he mentions that one of the AI characters is "just a kind of subroutine" of a larger personality.
Instead, Egan uploadees never duplicate themselves except to expedite interstellar travel, and always feel obliged to merge with themselves (and only themselves) at the earliest opportunity. I suppose you need to assume that kind of convention in order to have a coherent novel -- but it's still implausible.
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Armageddon and Fiction (Score:4)
6 Reversal of Earth's magnetic field
Poul Anderson wrote a story on this theme. The name escapes me.
8 Global epidemics
The novel Earth Abides and the BBC TV series Survivors [free-online.co.uk] (no cash prizes).
9 Global warming
Everything recent by Bruce Sterling [slashdot.org], but especially Heavy Weather
10 Ecosystem collapse
A real popular category: Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, Wylie's The End of the Dream, and Streiber & Kunetka's Nature's End (not reflective of Streiber's recent UFO obsessions). There are many others, of course -- most of them pretty bad.
I'm fond of Spinrad's Riding the Torch, although this is more about the kind of humanity that ecodisaster might produce, not about the disaster itself.
11 Biotech disaster
The Death of Grass [freeserve.co.uk] falls into this category, even though the technology Christopher warns about (traditional agriculture! it seems that most of our food crops are related to ordinary grass, and thus subject to the same diseases) is pretty primitive.
13 Nanotechnology disaster
A secondary theme in Stephenson's The Crystal Age.
15 Global war
I'm tempted to say that this theme died with the Cold War. But at least one writer (Eric Harry [eharry.com]) seems to be making a living off the idea that It Could Still Happen. And of course, all the talentless technothriller authors manage to find minor countries (Argentina will rise again!) capable of setting off the Holocaust.
If there was ever a movie for Slashdotters, it's Doctor Strangelove. ("You can't condemn a system because of one little error!") The interesting thing about this movie is that it started out as an adaptation of a serious technothriller, Red Alert. But Kubrick found that he couldn't write about Armageddon without making jokes!
The movie Fail-Safe is worth mentioning, mainly because it's about a nuclear near-war triggered by technological failure. A good movie, but unfortunately based on a very bad book that happened to be a conspicuous rip-off of Red Alert. So Kubrick's lawyers kept it from getting a proper release.
16 Robots take over
David Brin has done some good stuff on this theme (an author I used to enjoy, before I realized that everything he writes is a sort of novelized flame war). Gregory Benford's Galatic Center series has some good points, but is hampered by an absence of focus -- and Benford's regretable tendency to read like a creative writing assignment.
It's interesting that the doyen of Robot SF never developed this theme. But maybe not suprising -- Asimov never really developed any serious understanding of computing, cypernetics, or robotics. His robot stories are really a combination of old-fashioned handwaving (can "don't kill people" really be made into a mathematical principle?) and social comentary (notice the stories where robots are addressed as "boy"!).
18 Alien invasion
Certainly more crap in this category than any other. V and Independence Day tell us that aliens will invade us to steal resources like minerals and water -- things they can obtain from solar and planetary rings and halos with much less trouble. Fortunately, Mars is uninhabited -- imagine the lawsuits if it weren't!
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Did anybody wonder... (Score:2)
Of course, since the site is /.ed, I might have missed the "Hail of Bullets Raining From The Sky" scenario...
Re:Doomsday Argument (Score:2)
"...and in other statistical news, scientists have discovered that 99.9% of lost things are found in the last place searched..."
Stay Puff Marshmallow Man (Score:5)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:This is the way the world ends (Score:2)
Re:Doomsday Argument (Score:2)
There's nothing random about your selection of individuals; and, since we have only one example of the 'intelligent species' urn, there's not much evidence that any probabilistic models make sense.
Greater minds than I, notably Carl Sagan, have based survival calculations on other, more predictable criteria. I kept wondering whether the Discover article was an April Fool's joke.
#16 will happen. (Score:5)
Unless one (or more) of the other things happens first, I believe #16 ("Robots take over") will definitely occur. And I'm firmly on the side of "next stage in evolution" rather than "end of humanity."
Ray Kurzweil has written a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines [penguinputnam.com]. In it, he basically predicts that human kind will be supplanted by its own creations. This will not be a takeover of the kind depicted in Terminator or The Matrix, but a slow merging of the two "species" and an eventual complete transformation of the very definition of "human" and "life."
This is happening already. Consider the term "brain-dead." When it was still novel, people distinguished "brain-dead" from "dead," but I'm pretty sure there are many people now who basically equate the two (maybe not doctors, for whom it's probably a clinical term). At one time, a beating heart indicated life, and a lack thereof, death. Now, the death of the brain is the "real" death. This is a subtle modern shift in what it means to be "alive." I suspect that as the function of parts of the brain get figured out by scientists, a new term-- "mind-death"-- will appear.
I don't know if I agree with all of Kurzweil's reasoning, but I fully believe in the conclusion. In fact, I cannot see how it could possibly end otherwise. However, I don't see it as a hostile takeover, but an enhancement of everything that makes us who we are: an expanding of our abilities. It won't limit us, or de-humanize us, or destroy any part of us--it will allow us to be what we want to be, more than ever before.
Okay, I sound like I'm evangelizing now, and I'm drifting off-topic. I recommend the book. It's got some very interesting ideas.
Re:Someone wakes up and realizes it was just a dre (Score:2)
eudas
the last 3 minutes (Score:2)
I think Paul Davies is an excellent science writer and and this book is one of his best.
Re:Let's Face it - The Earth Could Survive a Lot (Score:2)
Wonder why (Score:2)
Unlike passing black holes or vacuum changes, asteroid impacts are known proven events. All of the nuclear weapons ever built don't hold a candle to the power of such an event. Has everybody already forgotten the comet impact on Jupiter a few years ago? If that had hit us we'd all be toast.
The next asteroid strike is coming, it is just a matter of when. If I remember correctly there was an asteroid in the 1930's that passed earth well within the orbit of the moon. I don't find this a difficult scenario to believe at all.
Super Mario Brother 2 (Score:5)
See, Super Mario Brothers 2 didn't suck, it was really a end-of-world prophecy.
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Re:Doomsday Argument (Score:3)
BTW, my qualifications consist of a relatively brief study of Bayes' Theorem in a stat course. If someone has more knowledge on this and would care to offer an explanation, please do. But "two researchers offer a solution and don't explain why my argument is invalid" doesn't cut it. It's the same (almost) argument that our teacher used when explaining when you could/couldn't apply the theorem, so I am pretty sure it's correct.
The end of the world... who knows? (Score:2)
the end is near [ridiculopathy.com]
Discovery Version of the Doomsday Argument (Score:2)
Something like one fifth of all the people who have ever lived are alive today. The odds of being one of the people to witness doomsday are highest when there is the largest number of witnesses around- so now is not such an improbable time.
That doesn't sound right to me: The likelihood that someone witnesses Doomsday does not increase with the size of the earth's population. If and when it finally hits, odds are that everyone will notice. IMHO, this implies that the number of potential witnesses does not have any influence on the likelihood of Doomsday happening. Or am I completely on the wrong track here?
As an aside: Am I really the only person who doesn't see the end of mankind as synonymous with the end of the world. In fact, with us gone, nature might get a second lease on life. Or is that a case of 'If earth spins on, and there is noone here to watch it, does it still spin?'?
Take care and don't get extinct without me...
2020: The Gigalapse AKA Oops (Score:2)
Without the Net, civilization rapidly crumbled, especially due to the use of Windows: Bubble Version 20, which presupposed that the Net didn't really need to route around damage.
Noone really missed the humans, of course.
I'm not just talking about any old life (Score:2)
Imagine you're walking down a dark corridor, with no windows to look at and no means of determining how far you've come or how far you have yet to go. Periodically, a blinding flash fills the corridor, and you occasionally have the luck and the dexterity to cover your eyes when you do so. At other times, you fail, and the flash illuminates the blood vessels in your retinas, reflecting off the inside of your eyes and perceived by you as so many wriggling worms.
In your arrogance as a sentient human, you may interpret your fortune in avoiding pain as the sign that you possess the powers and privileges of a deity, and that you have dominion over those worms. In reality, both they and your divinity exist only in your mind.
It's a metaphor for our (human) existence on earth. Without us, no one would exist to see the light or the worms; for the former would fall on no one's eyes and the latter would not be imagined. We owe it to the corridor (earth) and the worms (morality) to walk through that corridor. Even if it is dark and we are without sunglasses.
Is this like "Fifty Ways to Leave your Lover?" (Score:4)
The problem's all inside your head, she said to me
If you want to turn your planet into piles of debris
Then you should buy yourself a copy of "Discovery"
There must be...twenty ways the world could end.
She said I really do not want to panic you,
as I know that these scenarios probably won't come true
and I really doubt, that you'd sleep better if you knew,
There must be twenty ways the world could end.
Twenty ways the world could end.
Just hit a black hole, Joel. Watch the world go insane, Lane.
Make a bunch of gray goo, Lou. Just listen to me.
Have a nuclear war, Moore. See the vaccuum fall flat, Matt.
Dioxins from PVC, Lee, will set yourself free.
She said I normally don't tell my good friends this,
but if the ozone layer goes you will be burned into a crisp.
I said, that's great to hear, and would you please explain again about the twenty ways...
She said, since Brandon Carter says we're gonna fry,
Why should I waste my time explaining all the ways that you could die?
But I kept bugging her, until she told me with a sigh
There must be twenty ways the world could end.
Twenty ways the world could end.
Have a comet impact, Jack. Get a burst of gamma ray, Jay.
Catch a bad pathogen, Len. And listen to me.
Flood-basalt vulcanism, Chisolm. Wake up from existence, Vincent.
Get killed by for E.T., Lee, and set yourself free.
-foobar jones
(Sorry, I couldn't think of a name to rhyme with "Divine Intervention.")