Lets Play A Game!!!

It is Friday the 13th, lets play a game! Choose your apocalypse.
With all the sci-fi and horror movies Hollywood puts out it really gets you thinking how the world will end. Between zombies (Florida bath salt epidemic), Mother Nature strikes back (recent constant natural disasters ), to alien invasions it gets me thinking not when but how. Pick an apocalypse and your theory on how the world will end!

 

I believe ot will be from our own technology. There are scientists working on Artificial intelligence, Amazon is going to be delivering packages with drones, goole has cars that drive by themselves. Never mind what the military has and is working on. Have they not seen Terminator? Just waiting for the release of the Skynet program that will control them all.

 

My tendency is to think that it will be a pandemic. Everyone is doing the Chicken Little dance over an EMP just as they did about an all out nuclear war in the last half of the 20th century. Personally, there is no profit in an EMP for China, Russia, or any other country that depends upon American consumerism. Maybe a rogue state who gets their hands on a nuke but the reality of them getting it into the atmosphere in a position to do globalized or even continental damage is improbable.

I do allow for the possibility...but I think that it's less likely than a bug of some sort.

That being said...biological power and the power to manipulate it is the scariest power on the planet. Isolation and waiting are the only real defenses against it.

When I first read THE STAND by Stephen King, I thought....yeah...this is it. Put all the Randall Flagg and Mother Abagail stuff aside. It is going to be some bio-nerd in a lab somewhere, thinking he has found a cure for cancer and while it does cure the cancer...it kills just about everyone else.

 

I was actually watching a show the othernight on Smallpox and how dangerous it was. They made a comment on hos in the wrong hands it could be genetically altered and can end humanity.....scary stuff

 

I don't know why, but this reminds me of the episode of the X Filies where Skully and her partner are being chased by drones and other tech because of an artificial intelligence.

 

I think war is another probable theory. With all the nuclear weapons out there, it's bound to cause chaos. What's more, we don't even know the full extent of all the technology that every government has.

Theoretically, they could bomb all the government and military installations in the world. Then no country will have a government. When that happens: complete chaos. Anarchy.

And that's a scary thought.

 

I think EMP caused by sun spot activity is an almost certainty to happen in the next hundred years. The thing is that this sort of thing might not be world wide. If the US was wiped out for several years as a major world power I'm not sure what the world would be like after several years with no balance between the east and the west. Conversely I'm not sure what would happen if China and most of eastern Russia was disabled by the same thing. In some ways a partial destruction of electronics might be worse that a global one.

 

How about that super volcano in the midwest that blew up and put the globe in nuclear winter for a couple of years ,
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-would-happen-if-yellowstone-supervolcano-erupted-2017-6

 

I don't think the human race will go out with a bang, probably more of a whimper...
We have polluted out oceans and contaminated our food chain. We have commercialised agriculture to the point where monoculture farmers are totally dependent on big business for seed, fertiliser and pesticides. There is a desperate and unsustainable race between productivity and population growth.
I predict a long and painful decline.

 

There was actually an eruption of a volcano in the 1800s that caused a year round winter.

Because of that, I can see it as a possibility.

 

There are times when I'm not sure that the human race isn't going to split into two or more separate species. Basically our current civilization seems to be mostly a breeding ground for the stupid and violent people while those with intelligence and morals are waning in numbers. If this continues eventually things will just crumble as the stupid violent majority kill the people that feed them and keep this world going.

H. G. Wells saw something like this and wrote about it in his book The Time Machine. He is mostly remembered for his Fiction but he was also a writer of world history and an observer of the cycles of civilizations.

 

A massive volcanic eruption on Antarctic .

Even a 10% melt/slippage into the southern ocean will raise global sea levels by about 5 meters and do it in hours.
The knock on effects will be devastating as 90% of the worlds population is coastal.
And the climate will adjust to a new normal.
50% of the worlds population will be dead in the first day and everything will go batshit crazy for the rest.

A 100% slippage will kill 90% in the first day alone.
It has happened before.