How will Humanity die? it's not what we would expect.

[immortalfrieza]

Some points about this.

The ecological death of the Earth will happen far, far sooner than the point the Sun hits the red giant stage. Realistically, there's about a billion years between now and the time the Sun's luminosity increases to the point Earth goes the way of Venus. The worse news is, there won't be any planets in the Sun's habitable zone -- Mars never will be habitable again, even in the habitable zone as it grows outward -- for a few billion years, until the Sun expands to the point Titan enters it.

Silver lining there, is Titan is quite similar to a frozen, primordial, Earth. So, chances are at the point the Sun approaches and enters the red giant stage, it'll more likely than not be quite habitable. Next best bets after that are Ganymede and Europa, being they're also proven to contain ample water.

Artificial, orbital, habitats are really the only way to go.

In all likelihood, if whatever humanity is at that point is still around even 1 million years from now we'll have terraformed and colonized every planet in the solar system and then some. By 1 billion years I wouldn't be surprised if we terraformed and colonized half the Milky Way galaxy. That's the nice thing about terraforming, once it becomes possible for humanity to live on other planets it'll become virtually impossible for humanity to ever go extinct by any means.

On topic, the only thing that would truly kill off humanity is something that renders the Earth uninhabitable to all life in the space of a few days. If we even have a few decades we'll find a way around whatever it is that's trying to kill us off and a lot of motivation to do it. Hell, the only reason we haven't actually gotten off our butts and solved climate change is because we've still got quite a long time before it hits truly dangerous levels. Humanity is too lazy as a whole to do anything about anything until it's too big a problem we can't ignore it anymore, but once that happens we fix the problem in a snap. If something is an immediate concern we do something about it, but if it can be handled later, most of us won't bother until it reaches the point of being an immediate concern.

 

[CriticalGaming]

Oh this is a fun game. Let's play!

1. Nuclear War; China and Russia

Judging by how much they are struggling just to get Ukraine back, and will likely fail at that, I doubt Russia is much of a problem here. The people aren't brainwashed and will likely rebel against Putin if he tries this seriously.

China wouldn't nuke it's biggest customer that's just bad business.

North Korea, might accidentally nuke themselves, or worse yet end up nuking a nearby neighbor out of incompetence. Which is a problem, but not a world ending one.

2. Climate Change;

So this comes in two parts. Some degree of climate change is natural for the planet itself and we can't do shit about it. I'm personally on the side of MOST of climate changes effects are a natural occurrence of the planet itself based of several billion years worth of warming and cooling cycles, even if you factor out the early years of hot molten cooldown time. Secondly if they want to push climate policies to make the world a "better" place, then I'm all for forcing these big companies to lower their foot print, unfortunately that will come at the cost of the consumer which means we are going to be fucked by it. So maybe this will lead to riots but they'd have to occur in such a massive global scale for change to actually occur. Not gonna end the world.

3. Asteroid strike

Yeah maybe. SpaceX is cool, but if the asteroid is big enough to be global extinction then I don't think some little rockets are going to do shit about it. This WILL end the world, but highly unlikely anytime soon.

4. Disease

I hope it's zombies tbh.

5. Chemical Weapons of War

Zombie missiles?

6. Armed conventional conflict that kills every single person:

Don't think this is possible. Enough people would ban together to stop this even if it meant killing every aggressor involved.

7. AI:

Might end up being more capable than some random country and it would be far more coordinated. But I don't think it would ever happen as a self aware AI would require people to maintain parts, servers, power plants, manufacturing etc. A self aware AI knows it would doom itself if it doomed us.

Slavery maybe?

1. Alien invasion by an alien race

As opposed to the Alien invasion the USA is facing. Got the clarification. Yes this would certainly wipe us out. Any civilization advanced enough to travel the stars would be capable of wiping us out before we could even respond. There will be no Independence Day as no human spirit could fight back against an advanced foe.

However if the invasion was accidental, for example a species capable of surviving on an asteroid and impacting earth, then we might be able to beat it. Like Venom.

2. The sun dying/expanding due to humanity not doing anything to get to another viable solar system for a long time.

This will happen eventually. The sun will expand and melt the planet and we all die. But this is like billions of years away and we'll probably be dead anyway from other bullshit tbh.

Yellowstone; it's literally a supervolcano that will black out the sun

Okay this is fun. I study earthquakes and volcanos because that part of geology has fascinated me since I was a kid, so I love watching documentaries and streamed college courses on these things.

So Yellowstone likely wont even come close to wiping out the world even if it exploded the most it possible could explode. The USA would be absolutely fucked, butt the rest of the world would have ample time to prepare and use systems to prepare for the growing of crops and such in artificial environments like Greenhouses or labs and such. Even in places in the USA to escape the downwind flow of the ash cloud would be uncomfortable but mostly okay.

Thing biggest problems to arise from a Yellowstone eruption outside of the immediate effects of losing four states, would be mechanical. As ash would fuck up absolutely everything that runs a compression motor pretty much everywhere in North America. Additionally millions of builds would face roof collapse from ash as the weight of ash barely 1inch thick can be enough to crumble a roof in on itself. People would not be able to stop this as it would happen far too quickly to sweep the roof. Not to mention that you would not be able to go outside because breathing in ash of any kind will cut up your lungs, then it would mix with your mucus fluids and become cement in your chest, killing you dead.

Yellowstone would absolutely be a global disaster, killing crops, causing mass starvation, but it would not wipe out the world entirely.

Speaking of volcanos and climate change. Did you know the Tonga volcano that erupted on December 20th of last year was powerful enough that geologist think it changed the climate this year by up to .1 degrees? Fucking crazy. Check out the satellite video of the eruption, insane! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_...0 December 2021, an,later, on 15 January 2022.

 

[CriticalGaming]

No, actually

Yeah Yellowstone is a misunderstood threat. A lot of people think it's a global timebomb, and in some ways it is, but not really an extinction level event .

 

[Eacaraxe]

Yellowstone would absolutely be a global disaster, killing crops, causing mass starvation, but it would not wipe out the world entirely.

The scenario isn't dangerous for what its immediate, short-, or intermediate-term direct effects would be, it's dangerous for its secondary and tertiary consequences.

Look, we're almost three years out from Covid. In terms of presenting a danger to society itself, Covid was barely a blip on the radar. Yet, because of it -- or more specifically, how poor the response to it was -- we're on the precipice of global food and energy shortages, a second Great Depression, and in almost all certainty a major global military conflict within a decade (hell, on the last case we're already there). Economic, food, and energy instability means social unreast, which means political instability, et cetera. This really should go without saying.

It's the same reason an X-class CME hitting Earth would completely bugger global civilization and threaten a mass die-off, even if the flare itself would scarcely be dangerous at all.

 

[CriticalGaming]

The scenario isn't dangerous for what its immediate, short-, or intermediate-term direct effects would be, it's dangerous for its secondary and tertiary consequences.

Look, we're almost three years out from Covid. In terms of presenting a danger to society itself, Covid was barely a blip on the radar. Yet, because of it -- or more specifically, how poor the response to it was -- we're on the precipice of global food and energy shortages, a second Great Depression, and in almost all certainty a major global military conflict within a decade (hell, on the last case we're already there). Economic, food, and energy instability means social unreast, which means political instability, et cetera. This really should go without saying.

It's the same reason an X-class CME hitting Earth would completely bugger global civilization and threaten a mass die-off, even if the flare itself would scarcely be dangerous at all.

Well talking about destroying civilization versus extinction are too completely different things. Would Volcano fuck up civilization? In the USA absolutely. The rest of the world.....I dunno, maybe? Depends on the level of climate changes and how fast they occur. A Volcanic climate change would take years and years to really affect the the planet because you get a global warming first, then as those aerosols fall out of the atmosphere the particles left will do the opposite and block the sun's heat turning it around into a global cooling.

Poorer areas in Europe and Asia will have problems. But humanity as a species can be incredibly resistant and actually really poor areas will adapt a lot faster than you think. Places like poor farmlands in China will figure shit out and adapt, tribal nations in Africa will also find alternative animals and food sources without much comparative trouble. The higher end places and cities might collapse as they are ill equipped to handle long term supply disruption.

So modern civilization could absolutely get wiped out. However that's not extinction which is the argument here.

In relation to COVID, a lot of the media was nonsense and it caused a lot of non-belief, as well as over-reaction. But COVID was an invisible thing, something abstract to most people. A Yellowstone event is undeniable, because you'll see and feel the effects of it happening almost immediately. There wont be crazy people on twitter going, "Yellowstone's a myth, it can't explode!" Because there will be lots of video and satellite proof of the event happening. People will be able to watch their doom and their lives collapse right before their very eyes.

It would be singlehandedly the most terrifying thing anyone on Earth would ever see.