Primordial Black Hole just swinging through.
Either that or evolution. We’ll just change enough so that a modern day human could not reproduce with what we become in the future.
Some say fire; some ice.
It will certainly end when the sun turns into a red giant. Interstellar relocation is never going to be in the cards.
A killer asteroid is certainly possible, anything that we spot incoming that is big enough to destroy humanity is probably too large for us to do anything about.
A super germ could do the trick, but the hard would be to get something so infective that no isolated herd of humans remain and that none of us have an immunity.
Or if the religious are right, there will be an End of Days by divine intervention.
The robot-assisted dolphin uprising. They will come out of the seas to destroy us all. It will be a great mammal war. Brains versus thumbs.
When The Vogons destroy Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
Next Tuesday, September 17th, 2014. 9:01pm CST.
Oh. HOW, not when.
Quantum Field Fluctuation. I’ll be creating a new Universe on top of the existing one.
There seems to be some dispute as to whether it counts when we reach a point that we have evolved to be a species that could not reproduce with homo sapiens as they currently are constituted. I am going to therefore give two answers: one would be at that point of species divergence at some time in the future; the other, if we are including any lineage–whether directly genetic or even technological–which is seamlessly descended from ours, would be much further in the future, the aforementioned “heat-death of the universe”, or “big crunch” depending on the universe being open or closed. Guess that makes me an optimist.
Actually, I’m even more optimistic than that as I believe what we call the universe is only a “local” bubble of sorts. Therefore, we might be able to escape that and go on potentially infinitely. (Maybe entropy is still an issue on that wider scale: that is way beyond my pay grade to say.)
It is not obvious that an asteroid would end humanity. Even if it results in the demise of 99.999% of the human race, that still would leave 70,000 humans, which would be a sustainable population on the earth (700 tribes of a hundred, capable, to some extent, of connecting with each other).
“with a whimper” is the most likely. The “apocalypse” will take decades, we will not recognize it until it has nearly run its course. Then there will gradually become fewer and fewer ecosystems capable of supporting the last survivors, at least in the form that we would recognize. Perhaps the severe environment would lead to real adaptation, perhaps adaptation would lead to losing the ability of language, and thereby losing the gift of abstract reason. It will probably be Vonnegut’s Galapagos, minus the long blue tunnel.
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Post 14
The entirety of human existence will be turned into a reality show, and everyone forced to watch.
The existential boredom of watching oneself sitting down watching oneself sitting down watching oneself will kill even the most dedicated solipsist.
I agree with those who say we’ll evolve into something else. We’re already on the doorstep of human genetic engineering, and once the technology is perfected, no amount of legislation will be able to control it.
I, for one, welcome our new augment overlords.
Kudos on being able to design and propose one. I have no idea when we will have them, but I assume a 100 years is a roughly realistic timeline. By the end of this century global GDP should be several times larger while the technology is much better.
So I don’t know when we will do it, could be 40 years and it could be 400. But sooner or later I’m sure we will figure out how to divert them, even if as of 2013 we only have theoretical methods of doing so. Plus on a long enough timeline humans will likely colonize beyond the earth, so even if an asteroid does destroy the earth it will not destroy humanity.
Some say the world will end in fire.
Some say in ice.
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panache45]
I agree with those who say we’ll evolve into something else. We’re already on the doorstep of human genetic engineering, and once the technology is perfected, no amount of legislation will be able to control it.
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I tend to agree, but I wouldn’t call that “evolving”. At least not in the Darwinian sense, which is what that term has come to mean in biology.
But I guess if we take that term to loosely mean “change over time”, we can use it.
Your idea is my guess as well.
A vast number of planets are apparently a billion or more years older than ours, so why didn’t some of them evolve intelligent life before us, and fill all this galaxy’s ecological niches for advanced life forms long before we could fill those on this planet? It most plausibly is because they all came up with artificial birth control, which resulted in prolonged less than replacement fertility until some point where they were weak and few. At that point, the few remaining people would be vulnerable to new diseases and predators.
One thing that I haven’t thought through is what happens when you get down to so few people (1 million planet-wide?) that the medical-industrial birth control infrastructure breaks down. Perhaps we then go back to higher fertility until you again get enough people to support manufacturers of condoms, birth control pills, etc. So we bounce back and forth between few people and fewer. Environmentalists will love this! But, more likely, some sort of nanomanufacturing allows even a low population to keep on producing birth control.
If the end comes from sub-replacement fertility, it happens too quickly for people (or intelligent creatures elsewhere) to genetically evolve into having a higher birth rate. But what about cultural evolution? Won’t there always be religious groups who oppose birth control, and won’t they keep us from dying out? For a while, sure. But once you get down to low population densities combined with highly ideological societies, wars may get much worse, causing us eventually to get to the low number from which recovery is impossible due to lack of genetic diversity.
All a great mystery. Maybe advanced industrial civilization are long-lived, and we are just among the first in this galaxy. But it seems unlikely to me.
Because space is really, really big. A thousand previous spacefaring civilizations could easily overlook our local cluster.
Yes, unlikely.
Of course, even a very long-lived civilization by human standards could have been dead before we arose. And we are unable to read evidence of dead civilizations even in nearby systems.
Or, as I say, they could just be too far away for us to detect their current, thriving interstellar culture.
Japan has about 130 million people. Worst case scenario is that due to their low fertility rate (one of the lowest on earth) their population will decline to about 50 million by 2100. If that trend continues, I’m guessing 20 million by 2200, 8 million by 2300, 3 million by 2400, 1 million by 2600, etc. It will take centuries of those kinds of declines to see Japan’s population drop to 1 million, let alone the world’s.
But why do people stop having kids? My impression it is a mix of
- Life isn’t that great so people don’t want to expose their potential kids to a life of vulnerability and pain
- Kids are expensive
- Kids require a lot of attention and take away your freedom
As we become more advanced, those things should change for the better. Neuroscience will make life more enjoyable. GDP growth will make it easier to afford a kid. And robots can raise our kids for us. It’ll be great. We can sit around watching TV and eating junk food all day while robots raise our kids, but because of the gastrointestinal bypass and nano-nutritional bots predicted by Kurzweil, we will all be fit healthy and trim anyway.
I love the future.
Also about 70000 years ago the human race was down to about 10,000 people due to a supervolcano explosion, but the species survived. Besides, by the 23rd century or so genetic diversity will be meaningless since we will be able to clone people, engage in powerful genetic modifications, etc.
I do too, the only problem are the ones that do not prepare for any changes coming and then causing unnecessarily pain on many that will be affected by those changes, it is almost a law in history.
It has to be pointed out that even a comet or asteroid impact like the one that has been blamed on ending the dinosaurs is not likely to end humanity; sure, billions will die but until 2 or more big changes are going at the same time then I would worry about our extinction.
New research points to the impact as not being the definitive reason why the dinosaurs died, there was activity from super volcanoes going on also, the dinosaurs could had managed against one but not against 2 big events.