What's Your Apocalypse Theory

[verdant monkai]

I reckon it will be a comet that turns the earth into a wasteland. I don't think there's much we could do about a big ass comet.

Russia and America are too pussy to launch nukes. War has changed despite what fallout will have you believe, now we just use heat seeking missiles to shoot non white ak47 wielding natives. Super powers would never go to war as their weapons are too powerful.

 

[kommando367]

1. Most Likely - Blown the fuck up

2. Ragnarok. Just sit on a roof with a Barrett M82, a .308 rifle, and a mountain of ammo. Mostly likely They wouldn't make it this far south anyway.

 

[Vendor-Lazarus]

Most likely scenario, hmmm.
War has indeed changed, and the attitude towards nukes as well. Unlikely.
We possess lasers, nukes, etc and the ability to launch them into space against rocks or even aliens. Unlikely.
Zombies...nooo. Very unlikely.
Virus and Germs. Ever evolving yet also locked into that escalating war. Possibly.
Climate change. No, humanity would adapt. Unlikely.

My bet would be a Grey Goo or Science Gone Wrong scenario.
It's more likely than our sun emitting a massive coronal mass ejection or being hit by a gamma burst from a distant pulsar.
Depending on the time frame involved of course.

What I would like to survive?
Nuclear war or Zombies.
Living free on your terms and facing off against adversity every day.
Sign me up. I know I have what it takes to survive and rebuild.

 

[Akytalusia]

1.
the entire population of earth will clearly and simultaneously hear the word 'die' in their head in their own voice.
initially most people will believe it to be an unusual personal event.
then people will realize they weren't the only ones who heard it.
then people will realize everyone else on earth heard it, at the same time.
then people will begin to hypothesize what the event meant.
some people will kill themselves, believing it for the most part to be a command from above.
some people will kill their families before killing themselves, believing the same thing very strongly.
some people will want to kill themselves, because they believe this thing, but will not be able to and feel ashamed for the rest of their lives.
some people will acknowledge only that they have no idea what the event meant, and will wonder why everyone around them is killing themselves and each other.
some people will revel in the new world's decreased population of god fearing folk.
and at least one person will know the truth.

2.
the joke is that everyone survives the apocalypse. death is an illusion. you've always been alive and you always will be. the apocalypse is naught but a newgame+.

 

[Zen Bard]

1) A small terrorist organization getting a hold some sort of biological weapon and unleashing it in select locations around the world. But because they're fanatics and not scientists, they'll fail to realize how quickly the virus spreads and that it affects everyone, not just "infidels" and "unbelievers".

Never underestimate a small minded minority's ability to fuck things up for the rest of us.

2) The Rapture. With those pious, pretentious religious fanatics gone, we could finally have a little FUN!

 

[Pseudonym]

1) I expect Russia and America to start throwing nukes at eachother at some point. Should that not happen there is always the chance of one of those two countries falling apart and several smaller states gaining control of part of their arsenal instead. Then there are the 7-9 other countries that currently have nukes, nobody at anywhere near the insane firepower Russia and America have but that is still a danger and the various countries that likely have the knowledge and means to make nukes if they wanted to. All we need is one president or army leader with a following insane enough to start firing nukes. I do hope it doesn't happen.

2) Well, I'd like to survive any apocalypse when it does happen. I think surviving a nuclear war wouldn't be that bad. It would hopefully be over quickly and if I am lucky enough to be in a country that can maintain its neutrality there might be some civilization left in that place when the participants in the war have mostly died.

Captcha: "I'm yours"

Who are you again?

 

[Frankster]

I think humanity will self destroy itself over the next few centuries as resources and fresh water supplies continue to dwindle and climate change continues to be felt, particularly in 3rd world countries, leading to all sorts of crises and increased warfare and misery. Eventually this all bites 1st world countries in the ass, who up to now have been cushioned from the very worst effects whilst reaping all the profits. Ultimately the human race and the planet can only produce so much energy and resources, and we have pretty much hit that limit already and demand more then what we can supply whilst simultaneously crapping up the planet we live on to further make it volatile.

There is a naive belief that this will be averted (i've seen this expressed by a LOT of escapists) by some radical technological breakthrough or that we humans will simply "adapt" cos rawr! we are humans! And we are too mighty and divinely made to be bought low by our fuckups. To me that's just wishful thinking and really placing all your eggs in a fictional basket by assuming something is gonna come along that is magically gonna fix the situation. As much as I'd love that to be true+humanity makes it into space, atm I don't see that happening anymore then serious space exploration, there's a good chance our species is going to die on this rock and be buried under forces we cannot control but arrogantly believed we could adapt to because we were somehow exceptional and special, our remains to be found millennia later by a new evolved race on earth or aliens, to be a galactic footnote in some distant museum as they tell fascinated alien schoolchildren of a cautionary tale of this foolish race from a planet called earth that saw disasters coming but always assumed something would come along to save them and so never bothered to actually take the necessary steps to save themselves.

If me and my friends somehow do survive the extinction event, it would probably be by some passing alien ship deciding to kidnap some humans as pets or curiosities before the race dies completely.

 

[Godhead]

Something big hitting us from space.

We don't have the budget or equipment to monitor the sky and at the rate we're going we're never getting off'a this dirt ball.

There are actually projects that monitor the sky for asteroids and comets, especially Near Earth Objects (NEO) in the Near Earth Object Program and the JPL Sentry Program.

OT: All of the farm animals rise up against their human overlords, and it will be us that are led to the slaughterhouse.

Or Nuclear fun times.

 

[zumbledum]

i will go with a super virus bred from our over reliance on anti biotics , forcing them to out evolve us. just for the irony factor.

as to surviving an apocalypse well lets face it its a toss up between zombies or a strange plague that kills every single male on the planet except me and a few of my friends.

 

[renegade7]

Fiction loves apocalypse. Fallout is entirely based on it and most of us adore the feel of emptiness and despair of a dead world. So let's talk about two things when cooking up an Apocalypse Theory.

1. What do you think is the most likely extinction event humanity will face.

At this point, the only way to eradicate humanity entirely as a species would be to physically render the Earth incapable of supporting human life. Removing all of the oxygen in the atmosphere, making it radioactive, increasing its temperature past the point where we can survive, or physically destroying it would be really the only possibilities. Even then, the first two could feasibly be survivable using something like the Vaults in Fallout. A gamma ray burst is the only feasible contender but unlike the popular narrative we'd have years, possibly decades of warning.

We now that in about 500 million to a billion years the Sun will become so hot as to make the Earth uninhabitable by humans. If we're still around by then, my guess is that we'd have found someplace else to live.

Scenarios like asteroid impacts, catastrophic global warming (particularly by "clathrate gun", if it turns out that's possible, as it would be more sudden), nuclear war, global pandemic, or coronal mass ejection would be extremely disruptive to the stability of civilization, but hardly a risk of causing humanity's extinction.

 

[likalaruku]

I agree with this TV series I saw years ago on either Discovery or National Geographic about the sun getting hotter & hotter, the plants catching on fire, the water drying up, people living below ground on a diet consisting entirely of canned goods, bottled water, beef jerky, & stale ramen.

 

[spartan231490]

Extinction event? Or do you mean an event that would bring down society as we know it and leave humans to attempt to survive on their own devices? Because they're very different. The most likely extinction event for the human race is a large astronomical body hitting the Earth. It's going to happen eventually, and we're not equipped to deal with it. The most likely near-extinction event is a super-sized solar flare/coronal mass ejection on the scale of the carrington event. Again, it's inevitable that one will hit us, and the more dependent we get on technology the worse it will be. As we are now, it would completely destroy our civilization, billions would die. Coincidentally, I think a massive solar flare is also probably the one I would most want to survive.

 

[Barbas]

Calculating probable cause. . . . .

Spoiler

Prognosis:

Spoiler

What? You said Fallout. Me love me a bit a' some Fallout. I don't want to survive that, though.

 

[Tiger King]

For the traditional apocalypse I would pick big meteor from space smacking into us. It's supposed to have happened a few times already so I would go with that.

Some people might say nuclear war, but there have been quite a few instances where computers have malfunctioned and the guy in charge of pushing the red button has been ordered to push it, only for the soldier to wait/refuse and thus giving technicians time to discover the flaw.

If I could survive an apocalypse I would choose....all of earths resources are gone and what is left of humanity flee earth in cool spaceships in order to find a new home, where upon what is left of us would party it up and have awesome adventures. I would also be in charge of selecting who would be coming

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

1. What do you think is the most likely extinction event humanity will face.

Slow grinding degradation into permanent war over resources as food and water become harder and harder to find/grow. Nothing flashy, just slow depressing grind into dust.

2. What apocalyptic event would you like to survive?

The magic apocalypse. Magic, dragons, orcs, etc return, technology starts to backfire. Yeah, losing videogames and the internet will be a huge blow to me, but hey, I'll focus on learning to shoot fireballs and heal people instead, that'll be fun.

 

[FirstNameLastName]

I'd say weapons of mass destruction. There are people alive today who witnessed the first atomic bomb, and technology hasn't exactly halted yet, so what kind of weapon do you think our children's children will wield? Personally, I think technology will reach a point where nuclear weapons are so advanced and so easy to make that they are no longer hard to acquire, just like ever other piece of technology over human history, leaving far more fingers on the buttons.

Eh, I'll surely be dead and buried by then, so that's the future's problem.

1. I saw this archived interview once, I believe it was John Lennon, where the question was "What do you think the apocalypse will be like?" and his response was roughly "What makes you think we're not already living in a post-apocalyptic world?"
And that's always stuck with me. I know that America walked away from WW2 roughly unharmed compared to the rest of the world, but the 70+ years since then haven't exactly been great.
One could make the argument that the apocalypse already happened and the world is still piecing everything back together.

Wow. Makes sense though, if you look at the state Europe was in after the war... England 'won', but was totally messed up, Germany... Was a pile of rubble, the surrounding countries had been hit pretty hard too...

It took England more than 20 years to recover in any sense from the war...
So it makes sense someone like John Lennon might say that...

Not really. Saying this is/was a post-apocalyptic world after WW2 is stretching it a lot. While I'm aware it was all very tragic and took a toll on those involved, it's not really apocalypse material. People have always suffered in the aftermath of war.

 

[Queen Michael]

1. My plans for Thursday.

2. My plans for Thursday.

If the rest of you want to survive too, you might want to stay away from Klondike bars for a week or so.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Gamma Ray burst... What? I didn't say it'd be an interesting way to go.

These seem to happen all the time and yet none have been near enough to do anything to us...oh well, each passing second is one second closer to us potentially being stricken. Have we even found a means of detecting whether or not a Gamma Burst has hit us in the past though?

Something big hitting us from space.

We don't have the budget or equipment to monitor the sky and at the rate we're going we're never getting off'a this dirt ball.

This seems to be the most likely. We might be able to detect something absolutely massive but I don't know if we'd be able to pool our resources to knock it off course. Besides, there are smaller things that could absolutely ruin us that we wouldn't be able to detect in time. At this very moment, someone could have JUST NOW noticed a hunk of space-rock the size of...I dunno...Washington DC on a course that'll have it impact us in a week. Not exactly enough time to do much about it.

---

I'm personally shit-scared but also really curious to see the effects of the super-volcano in Washington State erupt. I live in freaking Georgia which is incredibly far from the thing but the effects of the event will still be felt where I am on the country. It wouldn't cause human extinction but it would still be a cataclysmic event as far as this part of the world is concerned. I also have recurring dreams about landmarks and my general area being bombed mercilessly. Sometimes the bombs were only powerful enough to take out The Washington Monument. Sometimes I was close enough to watch a nuke bloom into an orange death-blossom.