Thread: How will we end?

@XFlare
OT!

We're going to blow eachother up, or something biological.

Originally Posted by gr3

We're going to blow eachother up, or something biological.

this or a natural disaster ( meteorit or something like that )

i think it will be something that we all use will kill us..something that we think is safe and have been told is safe... like mobile phones, we will find out in 50 years if youve ever used one or been around one it will wipe everyone out with cancer or something stupid.... lol wont stop me using mine but i think thats how we'll go.... "puts on tinfoil hat"

we will end when we will get hit by a metheorit or biological bomb !

when someone turns of the computers.

It seems that way to me..My work place seems to comes to a stand still when ever the internet/computers stops working.

I think the sun will turn into a red giant and collapse into a supernova causing for a black hole to form and immediately consume all the planets including ours.

If you're referring specifically to the human race- we'll probably cause for science to be our own destruction. Our animal instincts will tell us we can control nature, even though we can't, and nature will annihilate us.

World War 3

Babies ...

Babies and more babies might very well spell doom within 100 years. There are going to be 10 billion people by 2050, 15 billion by the end of the century. This is already a fact, because the children born today will, due to the technological and medical advances that occur during their lifespan, enhance the average age of the human being by at least another 10 years. All these people need food, water, a roof above their head, streets for commuting and transportation, energy, space and a place to dump their waste. This means that less and less of the fertile and productive surface will be available for agriculture, let alone animals or plants that are not of economical interest to man, but are quite necessary for the balance that enables other crops, etc., to flourish and grow. All big cats are expected to be extinct by 2020, rhinos by 2040, elephants by 2050. By 2100, pretty much all bigger species, predators and prey alike are going to be extinct in the wild, because of their habitats being destroyed or reduced to small patches (leading to incests and diseases spreading quickly) or because they "compete" with man for the last remaining food resources, or simply because their migration paths are blocked by streets and settlements. The disruptions that this causes in the ecological balance of complex eco-systems can as of yet not be calculated or predicted. What we call natural catastrophes are often the consequences of actions whose consequences we did not foresee or not deem probable enough to care. For instance, desertification and floodings are often caused by cutting trees, intensive farming and the streamlining of rivers. This leads to erosion, decreasing levels of ground water, no more protection from wind or avalanches, and so on, and so on. While the natural disaster is not always a direct symptom of our greed and ignorance, the dimensions of the damages and loss of life are often significantly amplified by these sins of ours.

Although as humans, we hardly ever really worry about our genocide on species or the destruction of habitats, because there seems to be no direct monetary impact (other than on tourism), a large scale collapse of entire systems will also hit us in our pockets. The global gross domestic product (GDP) of all nations together, i.e. the sum of all products and services that money is paid for, is $53.6 trillion per annum. The sum of all that mother earth is doing for free, from fertilizing and watering plants to providing winds and warmth, ocean currents, etc., is approximately three times that sum -- and many of gaia's "products and services" would simply be impossible for us to reproduce even if we could cough up the financing for it.

In most countries, the fertile soil has already been damaged by 50 years of chemical treatment with fertilizers, gene-manipulated crops, pesticides and the like. Consequently, the agricultural production is expected to reach its peak point by mid century and to then decline or collapse due to overuse. Furthermore, the number of bees is dwindling at an alarming rate, which means that the fertilization of plants cannot longer be regarded as a given if the current trend continues for another 10 years. In March 2011, a conference in London (if I remember correctly) discussed the possibilities of feeding mankind with insects, because there is simply not enough space to grow the amount of food that will be necessary to feed enough cattle for protein supply, let alone dump or burn their excrements, because the conditions in meat factories cannot be "optimized" much further.

As of today, 40% of the world's population are under 25 years of age. This is also the group with the highest rate of unemployment and the least promising perspective for the future, which has already led to uprisings in the Arab world, but also causes expressions of desperation in the form of alcohol and drug abuse and crime as well as a general decline in moral and virtues and an increase in violence, accompanied by an increasing apathy towards the suffering of others. The anger and frustration of growing numbers of the population in all industrialized as well as underdeveloped countries is a barrel filled with powder that could explode either in social unrest and uproar, civil war, armed conflicts over deplenished resources or political extremism based on unrealistic promises. Furthermore, social stress and pressure will increase psychological problems and diseases, when more and more people have to live and work together in smaller and smaller spaces, more people compete for fewer job openings, and so on. Parallely, scientific and technological progress will render more and more simple, repetitive human labour obsolete, while at the same time public finances are stressed to the point of breaking by high unemployment rates and health costs for an aging population, leaving little room for education. Today, all nations' finances are based on employment, with the direct and indirect taxes on employment making up between 60%-75% of government budgets. Although economic and social experts preach since decades that a switch to an income/profit/wealth-oriented taxation system is indispensable to keep societies intact in the long run, political resistance of small interest groups (the 1% establishment and multi-national corporations) have so far blocked all attempts to implement or at least prepare even gradual changes over a longer transition period. All it would take for the global economy to collapse is creditors withdrawing their funds, especially the $1 trillion the Chinese hold in US debt -- and the Japanese might need their $800 billion back one day, too.

To maintain the public order, governments will be forced to restrict individual liberties, from the quantity of water per person per week to its uses, such as the number of showers a person is allowed to take. Other rules and regulations will increase the stress on the human psyche even further, from noise levels in smaller apartments to traffic or access to the few recreational spaces left. Japan is already developing and experimenting with various technologies to control the behaviour of its population. Implementing microchips into the brains of cockroaches, scientists have successfully steered them like remote-controlled toy cars and are now expanding the respective research to higher-developed animals. Alternative approaches include air-based agents (tranquilizing gases) as well as food and drink supplements. Where technological measures are not considered acceptable yet, stricter law enforcement, surveillance and control mechanisms are being developed with the same goal.

It has been proven that all the trillions of Dollars dedicated to humanitarian aid during the last 50 years have had little or no effect on the overall, average standard of living in most of the receiving countries, even when excluding the usual idiocies like corruption, rebellion and wars, due to too high a rate of reproduction. To say it drastically and with no intention of offense: governments and NGOs fed 10 children in 1960, who then produced 100 children, who now have 1000 hungry mouths to feed. The ugly truth is: humanitarian aid hardly ever achieves anything apart from prolonging the problem, only development aid (birth control, equal rights, legal frameworks, education, infrastructure) does. On the other hand, successful development means people discover new desires, which is simply more than the planet can handle: if the living standard in China or India was the same as in the US, there would not be enough oxygen in the atmosphere for breathing.

Besides, many natural resources (coal, gas, oil, wood, water, etc.) are about to or have already reached its peak point, meaning that there is less of it left than what has been used up. In 20 years, there will only be three countries left with oil reserves, and their exploitation will become more and more dangerous and expensive. In countries like México, where the political parties up to the president and cabinet, the large corporations, police and administrations all belong to, work for and with organized crime cartels, losing 40% of their national income in a country that is already about to disintegrate will be the final blow before the collapse. Russia's economy is dangerously depending on oil, too. Other countries that are not preparing for the time after their natural resources run out are going to face serious economical, financial and therefore social challenges as well.

Whether this leads to an armed conflict of global magnitude is not really relevant, because all the other trends are more than enough to cause very serious and potentially terminal problems. All it takes is that sweet little Maja doesn't fly flom flower to flower and tree to tree any more and we are doomed ...

By the way: none of this is a conspiracy or any other theory, it is happening right now and since decades -- and we know it since the Club of Rome published its first Limits to Growth in 1972. Whether we will ever be able to terraform planets in other solar systems is speculation or science fiction (given that space exploration and other scientific budgets are being cut back), but one thing is sure: we will not have those technologies in time if the current, very real trends are not turned around soon. Don't believe it? Look up the facts and figures and take a look at these world clocks, taking into consideration that some of them have already been outpaced by reality, i.e. they are more optimistic than the truth:

http://www.Poodwaddle.com/clocks2.htm
http://www.Poodwaddle.com/earthclock.swf
http://www.Poodwaddle.com/food.swf
http://www.Poodwaddle.com/worldclock2.swf
World population - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

At the end of the day, it does not even matter whether the last drop of oil, the last fish, the last tree will be gone ten years earlier or later. Fact is: we are living on a little ball in space, and that little ball is of finite dimensions and volume, ergo with finite resources. The whole mentality of ever more and bigger will hit a wall some day, assuming or pretending anything else is simply illogic, unplausible and therefore unreasonable. Wouldn't it be a good idea to implement the necessary changes while we can still do it gradually, instead of procrastinating until drastic measures become indispensable?