I’m going with the old standby. Texas size rock or falls out of the sky. Of course these days we’d know it was coming, so I suspect a largish portion of us would manage to kill off ourselves in some pretty interesting ways leading up to the big day.
I am…
A) …shocked that it took so long for someone to come up with this answer, and
B) …pissed that someone posted it before I did.
Yeah, Hal, she beat me to it, too. But at present rates, it looks like 2050 will roll around before that happens, which would probably leave China (one of the top countries in area, and top in population, and therefore probably highest score) the winner.
Quoth Cervaise:
Your timescale is a bit off. The initial blast will kill in microseconds or not at all, but it would only affect half the planet. Assuming that the star is reasonably equatorial, it’ll take in the vicinity of hours to days for the skies to darken over the rest of the planet, and months to years for things to die off from insufficient sunlight. Even at that, a few human survivors might be able to pull through on stockpiled food long enough to last until the air clears again. And if the star is at high declination, the other hemisphere might not be significantly affected at all.
Did you watch the national geographic special today? That was interesting, especially the UK physics experiment gone wrong that gives birth to a black hole.
That is an interesting website too.
If civ. does end it will be due to technology. Technological progress over the next 200 years will be insanely rapid and extreme, and the odds that technology does us in is much higher than a meteor hitting the earth or anything like that. Perhaps AI will take over the planet or destroy it.
In 500 years I’m sure we’ll have the technology to create water & fuel far more efficiently than we do now. This is similiar to the argument put forth by Malthus against overpopulation (he felt agricultural growth would be static in the future) which didn’t factor in the fact that technological progress would improve things like agriculture. The UK now has about 6x as many people as it did when Malthus made his predictions, and there is more food than ever there.
I don’t think it will end for an incomprehnsibly long period. I think our great8th-grandkids will be living in habitats around other stars and - if they cared to - could download Bach or Beatles or Newton’s Laws or the SDMB (Hi Sonny!) or GWB’s Speech before Congress outlining the Yellow Cake/ Nigeria/Iraq Connection – i.e. our civilization although mutated still exists.
I’ll play along and say if it does end I would expect some form of Technology to do the trick … not mentioned yet maybe nanobots either accidentally or madly. Maybe a 12 Monkeys style scenerio with a designer virus too.
I had in mind something like what silenus said…
I call it “Sociological Apocalypse,” aka the “Henhouse Scenario”—The progress of civilization and the spread of modern, “progressive” culture produces a population that’s thoroughly “domesticated,” a paragon of human advancement over bestial nature.
Sadly, such “sivilizing” also results in a coddled, oversocialized community that’s unable to bring itself to defend against any violent throwbacks with a modicum of willpower. (Imagine Genghis Khan in a village full of Eloi.) In the end, it just withers away in it’s pretty ideological purity, while the barbarians reinherit the Earth. Time left…a century or so. Give or take.
On the plus side, civilization will leave some lovely ruins for whatever rises up next.
:smack: Niger connection
Nah. We’ll have the robots do the fighting for us. You are onto something though as a handful of anti-semitic terrorists can send entire nations cowering.
