We should be so lucky.
Well, I voted “Plague” - it could be a zombie plague.
Actually, I tried to vote for multiple things; I think it will be a death of a thousand cuts, rather than one spectacular thing.
A Malthusian Castastrophe. Whether it’s because of “peak oil,” “peak water,” or “peak whatever,” I don’t think population growth is sustainable, and we’ll be in for a “market correction” within a couple hundred years, if not 100.
No “heat death of the universe”?
Because if none of the others get us, that one will.
I picked industrial poisoning of the environment, as a singularity event, whether nano or AI, could be defined that way…
I was going to say Other: we evolve into another species. But I like this.
With apologies for not properly attributing Wikipedia, we’ll end up like this: evolve into a furry species resembling seals: though possibly still able to walk upright (it is not explicitly mentioned, but it is stated that they occasionally catch land animals), they have a snout with teeth adapted for catching fish, a streamlined skull and flipper-like hands with rudimentary fingers (described as “nubbins”).
We evolve into cockroaches?
I voted “Asteroid”. I don’t think we can do ourselves in. There are simply too many of us. We can certainly kill off large portions of the population and make things unpleasant for those remaining, but I don’t think we can destroy society. I also don’t think we’re going to evolve ourselves out of existence. Perhaps in quite a few million years that might happen, but before then we’re gonna get whacked with a big chunk of rock. It’s happened before and it will happen again, and I don’t think there’s anything we’re going to be able to do about it when it does.
Technological Singularity and we all become Blue Pills in red jello-filled sacks that leech our bodies’ electrical current!
(Copyright The Matrix™, 1999)
We’ll go post-physical. Pure thought.
Apathy.
If the impending doom is fast, we will give up, and if the impending doom is slow and maybe preventable, we’ll talk ourselves to death.
I’m with the natural calamity crowd. I don’t think we’ll ever have the means to do ourselves in with a singular catastrophic event. And I just don’t see a Hugo Drax amassing the resources necessary to kill us off by design.
So it’s the umpteen trillion to one asteroid shot. Or supermassive solar flare.
Pure thought? Human thought can be many things, but it will never be pure.
By fire. Or ice.
We get distracted by superstimuli, nobody reproduces.
Dammit. I was going to say that.
I guess I’ll hold with those who favor fire.
Voted “Other”
Greed + shortsightedness + stupidity = KAPUT.
Just in case God exists, I voted “Rapture”.
So what if it seems like a longshot, I may be correct, then you’d look a bit of a fool wouldn’t you?
Like…puppies?
I went for the asteroid thing. Those things seem to be whizzing all over the damn place, and they’ve hit us before. I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll do ourselves in.
Puppies are pretty cute, but they’re not designed to be optimally cute. It’s the difference between eating an actual sugar cane and eating a candy bar.