Contents
- skynet
- Super Covid
- nuclear annihilation
- ecosystem collapse
- The biggest danger: Everything going wrong at once
Especially if you follow the news, you may sometimes find yourself wondering when and how the world will end. With the global pandemic still fresh on everyone’s minds, these thoughts don’t seem as crazy as they might have thought a few years ago. Whether it is the Sun running out of fuel in the distant future, exploding and swelling to the point of burning the Earth, or our average lifespan of one million years, as most mammals live (most mammalian species last for about a million years, which is a third of humanity’s life cycle). Let it be a slow extinction towards the end, we can be sure that one day humanity will disappear.
But most of these doomsday scenarios will happen millions, if not billions, of years in the future, which means we don’t need to worry about it right now. Many other apocalyptic scenarios are also works of fiction; While an asteroid impact certainly has the potential to kill us all, the odds of that happening are actually pretty slim. On the other hand, people like Oxford professor and philosopher Toby Ord think there is a 1 in 6 chance of the human race going extinct in the next century. This means we may have to deal with the end of the world.
In this article, we examine doomsday scenarios that could conceivably occur in our lifetime…
skynet
Most conversations about artificial intelligence (AI) focus on the economy and the possibility of machines taking all our jobs, and that means we’re not focusing on the right threat: the superintelligence that will bring about our demise. According to a paper published by the Global Challenges Foundation, there’s a frighteningly high 1 in 10 chance that in the next century, AI will make the classic science fiction calculation that humans are the problem and decide to wipe us all out. A 10% chance may seem low, but it means we’re much more likely to be hunted to extinction by robots than to be blasted by an asteroid.
Super Covid
Everyone probably remembers the global epidemic. As the human race deals with this emergency, we have learned clearly how vulnerable we are to a somewhat new virus. The Global Challenges Foundation’s report estimates there is a 5% chance of the human race being wiped out due to a future pandemic. The good news is that such a deadly virus is much more likely to kill only half of us and leave the rest in relative peace, like the Black Death of the 14th century.
nuclear annihilation
The idea of a war storm full of nuclear weapons ending and then the Earth remaining in an eternal Nuclear Winter may seem a bit strange now, but the probability of this scenario occurring within the next 100 years is stated to be 5%. As humanity, we have the firepower to melt the world several times over, and if you are not among the people lost in the first attack, you will be very likely to die from radiation poisoning or simple starvation and deprivation after a while, when the nuclear disaster stops.
ecosystem collapse
The terms “climate change” and “ecosystem collapse” certainly sound like long-term events. These disasters seem to concern not us, but our children, grandchildren and even subsequent generations. But signs of a general collapse of our natural environment are already visible: from declining honey bee populations that threaten our ability to grow food to fears of a “Sixth Extinction” that could completely wipe out the food chain. In short, the possibility that humanity will lose its ability to feed itself is very real, and could happen within our lifetime.
The biggest danger: Everything going wrong at once
Many experts think we will end up with a combination of catastrophes rather than a single dramatic event. So, while our technological and industrial base is shaken by a limited nuclear war that kills tens of millions of people and disrupts global agriculture and trade, the emergence of a pandemic striking a weakened humanity could have an impact we cannot compensate for. This could be a series of relatively slow-moving mini-catastrophes that simply erode our ability to cope until we reach the point of extinction, and the odds of this happening are seen as depressingly high.
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