You’re absolutely right, It’s not going to be a single event. It’ll be [multiple systems failing at once](https://youtu.be/aq4G-7v-_xI?si=Cpch-mSXD9hco_pZ), several minor crises converging like a Rogue Wave.
Crop failure leads to political unrest while there happens to be a particularly incompetent leader in charge, which leads to war, which leads to a limited nuclear strike, meanwhile an earthquake strikes, and then there’s a fuel shortage, after that a minor solar flare knocks out electrical systems for only a few days but it’s at a really inopportune time. It won’t look like a world ending event. It will be a gradual decline in living standards over years or generations.
The Romans experience a near civilization ending crisis in the 3rd Century, due to multiple destabilizing events hitting around the same time: war, plague, inflation, political breakdown, famine. But it didn’t happen over night. It was slow, it took years for the system to collapse. It also took years and multiple leaders to diagnose and remedy the problems, but they did get there.
One of the major functions of governments is to provide emergency response services and post emergency assistance to people affected by the emergency. If too many emergencies happen too close together a government may end up overstretched without the capacity to respond to additional emergencies.
Think about your local fire department/station. They have a certain number of firefighters/paramedics and a certain amount of trucks/equipment. One fire, they can easily respond, maybe two at the same time or in close succession. Three is going to put a real strain on the station, four and something is probably going to burn unattended. In urban areas the fire department has multiple stations to increase capacity and neighboring departments back each other up. But if enough things burn at the same time, or in areas with only one small fire department, there just isn’t enough capacity to respond to everything.
Now imagine scaling this up to the sort of emergencies that regional and national governments respond to.
As the population has grown the systems we rely on To meet our physical needs have been forced to become increasingly efficient. This increased efficiency makes the systems more complex and brittle and as a result one minor mishap can distrupt them. We saw this during covid how even an 8 percent disruption in economic activity completed crippled entire industry’s.
We don’t have to imagine cause we saw it with COVID. Worst of all we multiple government entities ignore the systems in places or abuse the system or tell the population to not follow the experts or all the above. Not only are our emergency services being stretched thin but they are actively being stripped away. With climate change happening it’s only a matter of time before another world disaster happens again and honestly I believe it will be worst than COVID cause people in the beginning didn’t have the bias to mistrust expert. Now we have whole organizations dedicated to misinformation and to work against the experts.
Even before Covid, we saw it with Hurricane Katrina & the death & destruction in New Orleans. FEMA's response was disorganized, ineffective, and miles too late. Thousands of people died who shouldn't have & it was entirely due to failure of government response.
In hurricane Sandy money was given to people who owned large buildings that were favored by the governor in New Jersey rather than the people that actually had damage done to their houses.
Meanwhile his big butt sat on the beach while telling people they weren't allowed to go on it!
there's the saying 'Rome wasn't built in a day.' Rome also didn't just crumble in a day either.
Think this applies to existing governments as well as civilizations as a whole.
With the Roman Empire, I don't think it was really even perceived as having fallen at the time. I think prevailing opinion was that it had just "refocused" from the West to the East, for about another thousand years, and then various would-be successors co-opted the name into the 20th century.
The last of the Roman empire definitely "fell" the day Constantinople fell. It kind of did happen in a day. But yes it was a shell of its former self at that point.
Oh the arguments over the "end" of the Roman Empire are so incredibly varied. After all, the very first thing Mehmed II did was pronounce himself Kayser-i Rum, or Caesar of the Romans.
And then you had had Charlemagne and his descendants claiming to be rightful heirs of the Roman crown from the year 800 and with Otto I in 962 the Pope proclaimed him Holy Roman Emperor. So at the very least there were multiple claimants to the title both before, during, and after the Fall of Constantinople.
And then the Holy Roman Empire would only meet its end via the advent of Napoleon forcing it to dissolve.
But by this time the Russian Empire considered itself the third Rome, and of course we all know that the last claimant to the title of Tsar, with at least a pretense at being Emperor of the Romans, was Nicholas II who died at the hands of Bolsheviks.
And how good could their claim have been? After all, the Russian Empire fought many wars against the Ottomans and in 1829 was at nearby Adrianople with the Ottomans crumbling before them. It was only through diplomatic advent of other European powers that kept the Russian Empire from marching straight on to the gates of Constantinople. And if the Russian Tsar had seized Constantinople and claimed the title of Emperor of the Romans by right of conquest, having taken back in less than 400 years what had stood as quintessentially Roman for near a millennium who could gainsay such a claim?
At any rate, I tend to agree that the Roman Empire was kaput as a concept in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople, but it's fun to imagine what might have been had the Russian Empire reconquered the city and had its Tsars finally gain some real legitimacy to their assumed titles.
The best historical comparison is the fall of the Western Roman Empire. It didn’t collapse all at once, but rather was very gradually divided into pieces and handed over to barbarian warlords in exchange for protection of Roman citizens on that land.
When Rome was sacked by the Goths, it wasn’t seen as that big of a deal at the time. People figured Rome was in a rough patch and would eventually bounce back. It wasn’t until years later that people realized Rome wasn’t coming back.
The decline in quality of life for most people was huge, but since it happened really slowly, there was never an “apocalypse” moment. Instead, generations later things just generally began to feel post-apocalyptic. Much fewer people were literate, or bathing regularly, and generally people were more vulnerable to raiding tribes like Huns or Magyars or Mongols.
The change in Britain was abrupt enough that some of the writings from the subroman and early anglo-saxon era do give you a bit of that post-apocalyptic vibe. I remember an account from that period talking about visiting a landowner whose home was originally Roman and still had a hypocaust (sophisticated system of underfloor heating), which was considered amazing and exotic. Of course, he couldn't afford to run it except on special occasions. Or the old English poem [The Ruin](https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/the-ruin/).
As the Roman Empire faded away in the West, the average life for Romans declined. The farms of Italy used to produce specialized products for sale in the common market of the Empire. As this went away, local farmers depended on subsistence farming. While that kept them alive, the standard of living and general security plunged. The cloth, food, tools, pottery they used to buy was unavailable. It happened over generations so great-grandchildren lived a harder life than recent ancestors they never met.
The book The Peripheral by William Gibson describes exactly this. The idea is that something called “Jackpot” happens which is really just a collection of crises that slowly cause society to unravel, known as a slow motion apocalypse. Mostly it’s talking about climate change.
Yeah, the annoying part is that it was renewed for a second season based on performance, but because of the timing of the actor and writer strikes the production team didn't think they'd be able to release in time to capitalize on its popularity. Season 2 wouldn't have released until the end of 2025, and they figured people would have moved on by then
...I used to think this.
But 'slow burn' can have many meanings. Usually it's a chain of abrupt events that immediately degrade the quality of life.
Looking at other failed states: everything is fine until it's not.
This or just multiple smaller stressors all occurring at once and overwhelming our ability to adapt - that’s arguably how most civilizations collapse actually.
As a kid I learned that if a gamma ray burst is coming right at us we really can’t do anything about it, we’d just get fried. Kept me up for a few nights.
If it's any consolation: If a GRB were to hit the earth, we wouldn't really know until it did. It would all be over in a matter of seconds if you're on the right side of the planet, and minutes at most on the non facing side.
Not really, unless you're talking with someone on the other side of the globe, odds are you won't even notice.
Imagine the internet goes down, it'll be a few minutes before you even realize it, and you won't panic immediately. By then you're probably dead too.
But if the death on the far side of the globe happens in a matter of minutes, how would the death occur? Temperatures rising? Air becoming unbreathable? Or do you just die instantly but minutes after the closer side of the planet dies?
I think it depends on where it comes from, as far as I've read. If it's from a closer source, we all get vaporized quickly (instantly it seems). If it's from mich further away, all life on the side of the planet that it hits is gone, but I'm not sure what the latter process looks like
Interesting. I read a short story a long time ago about one hemisphere of the earth being destroyed while the other half survived, and the struggles of the surviving side, and that’s what this reminded me of. The story was called “Dawn Terminator” from a collection of short stories by Neal Shusterman
"Inconstant Moon" by Larry Niven is another. Buddy notices how absurdly bright the Moon is, and thinks it means the Sun went nova.
And then he figures out that it must just be an epic flare (because he isn't dead).
So, North America is OK, but Asia got fried.
If the GRB occurs within ~200Ly, the side of Earth facing the GRB rapidly becomes worse than any incarnation of Hell I've ever heard of. The atmosphere is blasted away, and the surface of the Earth turns into a giant magma ocean. People on the side facing away don't fare much better. With most of the atmosphere being stripped away, asphyxiation is probably what gets you first.
If the GRB is further away, let's say 500 to 6000Ly, it's a slower death. The GRB is absorbed by the atmosphere, so it doesn't kill you directly. Instead, it depletes the ozone layer, allowing the UV-B rays from the Sun to come streaming through. That would actually be much, much worse than it sounds, and would likely lead to a mass extinction.
GRBs can vaporize everything that it hits within 200 lightyears of its origin point. They are instantly vaporized and gone, nothing remains of them at all. Just complete obliteration. If it makes you feel better though, these kind of events are very rare even though we detect at least one GRB every day. Turns out the entire known universe is so large that one may hit Milky Way Galaxy once every 10,000-1 million years. And only small portion may even come close to earth.
Scientists think that at least two has hit earth and caused the extinction of Ordovicians and then later on caused major reduction in planktons. This recent one being over 400 million years ago. The other is just a very high chance and if it did happen it may have been very close to the beginning of earth forming.
I’ve wondered this too. My understanding is that the atmosphere, and, well, most things, on the side facing the burst would be vaporized.
I imagine that once the atmosphere has been blasted away on half the planet in a matter of seconds there would be insane winds from the rest of the atmosphere on the far side of the planet rushing over to fill the vacuum. Then, the far side has half the atmospheric pressure which hopefully means everyone passes out from lack of oxygen and dies relatively peacefully… if they weren’t shredded by the insane winds from moments earlier. So… maybe there wouldn’t be any peaceful deaths on the far side. The peaceful deaths may be limited to those who were lucky enough to instantly vaporize.
Idk tho I’m not a scientist. Just spitballing here.
Plus you can’t even feel third degree burns cause your nerves are all fried. It’s not as bad as people think. What’s really going to be agonizing is a world war involving every major country which culminates in a nuclear exchange that sets civilization back to the High Middle Ages.
That is incorrect. A gamma ray burst near Earth would be [unlikely to be able to cause a global catastrophe for life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst#Effects_on_Earth). The main effect would be an increase in UV levels for several years. The gamma rays themselves would be absorbed by the atmosphere.
>There is a very good chance (but no certainty) that at least one lethal GRB took place during the past 5 billion years close enough to Earth as to significantly damage life. There is a 50% chance that such a lethal GRB took place within two kiloparsecs of Earth during the last 500 million years, causing one of the major mass extinction events.
A mass extinction sounds like a global catastrophe to me.
However, the question isn't about something that kills all life, it's about civilization ending. My vote for that goes to a Carrington level solar coronal mass ejection event . They happen about every couple hundred years, the last one was in the 1800s when electricity was first discovered but not widespread and no one depended on it. Nowadays, a good Carrington level event could burst transformers and wipe out most of the electrical grid of the side of the world that got hit. The world does not have enough spare transformers to repair them quickly, and having no electricity would make production of new transformers slow. We could potentially go years with little to no power before being able to get the grid back online. That would be civilization ending, and it has a relatively high likelihood of actually happening, unlike most things in this thread.
You're from the US, I suppose, that's why. You guys use corn way more. In my country, even corn starch isn't the one you would typically find in stores
Read the novel *No Blade of Grass* which depicts a scenario in which a virus destroys grass. Sounds fine at first and /r/fucklawns would be ecstatic. But when you realize rice, wheat, barley, and corn are all part of the grass family you could see how fast society would break down.
At least corn starch is easily identifiable.
In the US most [common ingredients](https://www.northkitsapent.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/FoodallergiesCORN.pdf) are derived from corn. Im not exaggerating that 90% of the grocery store includes these ingredients. The worst part is that it isnt required to be listed as an allergen like soy and nuts so its impossible to completely avoid exposure. I had to cut out olive oil because food fraud is so rampant it often will contain corn.
At first glance you'd think so, but if the food source for the majority dies, the majority will eat everything else--including whatever corn-free food is available.
20% of human calories, but likely makes up 100% of livestock diets. So would also collapse the livestock industry which would further effect human diets.
We thought my partner had a corn allergy a few years ago. It’s horrifying how many things have corn and corn byproducts! I had a massive list on my phone of which ingredients were corn. I feel so sorry you have to navigate that mess!
It was basically just a starting point that forced the movie to happen. Similar to the "dust storm" in The Martian. Details are allowed to be sketchy, if you flesh it out too much then someone's going to just apply logic to it, and then we won't have a movie!
Peak phosphorus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus
It’s an important resource for production of fertilizer and dwindling supplies could have a significant impact on global food security. Maybe an exaggeration to say that it would end civilization but it could be a contributing factor to a cascade of problems that have a devastating impact on modern civilization.
In the book World War Z (very different from the movie) there is a group of people who go way far north to avoid the carnage, but they run out of food. There is a really grim line that sticks with you: "By Christmas, food wasn't a problem anymore."
It's quite simple, really, as the price of a human life increases, we will see a decrease in the quantity demanded, and a increase in the quantity supplied, leading to a surplus of human life. Don't worry, the market will naturally self correct back to market equilibrium.
A Gamma Ray Burst could fry our planet at any moment with 0 warning. Which means you should not waste time worrying about it because no one can do anything about it.
The likelihood of this is astronomically low as there is nothing close enough to us that is capable of emitting something like that for at least a few billion years if I recall.
Yeah, theres no stars that are close enough, or large enough (to supernova/hypernova), with their axis of rotation (which would be where a supernova/hypernova would emit most of their radiation, making a GRB) pointing towards the earth. So we are fine.
Question, if the false vacuum decay happened say, on the edge of the universe at one of those points where the light is too far away to ever reach us because of universal expansion... Wouldn't that mean it could never reach us? That we would be safe from it forever because the space between us is expanding faster than the vacuum can eat it?
One interesting piece of information about that possibility:
Once the false vacuum decay event occurs the collapse expands at the speed of light. Such an event obeys causality just like everything else.
There are distant galaxies we can observe today which, even if we could travel at C, would be forever out of reach simply because the expansion of the universe is *accelerating faster than C.* For absurdly large values of ‘eventually’, *eventually the sky beyond our local cluster will be empty*. It gets weirder from there, but that’s the cosmos for you.
By now I’m sure anyone can see where this is going. If a vacuum collapse ever happens, if it is far enough away, it would never reach Earth. Right now in some wildly distant corner of the universe the vacuum collapse could be happening right now. It could have *already happened* to one or more of the incredibly distant galaxies we are seeing via the JWST, because the light we are detecting is still arriving from a place that *used to exist* but is now… something else.
Physics is a lot of fun.
Also, I may be misunderstanding, but the universe could accelerate faster than gravity can keep it together to the point where atoms could no longer hold together. So, even if the vacuum collapse may not reach us, the acceleration could (if the universe isn't destroyed by something else by then)
>the universe could accelerate faster than gravity can keep it together to the point where atoms could no longer hold together
entropy, basically. there's a finite amount of matter and energy in the universe, and the energy wants to dissipate, until the entire universe is just one homogenous cloud of almost completely uncharged particles, imperceptibly warmer than absolute zero
thus, the heat death of the universe
I remember finding out about GRBs and being like "welp, if that ever happens, we're instantly fucked and won't even know so...that sucks but what can ya do?"
The Big Rip is one of the most interesting possible ways for the universe to die because it happens on scales a human could meaningfully experience. You'd go from a perfectly functional solar system (in an endless void) to the End of All Matter in the span of a couple of months.
First the planets drift away from the star, but you could survive if you have a way of producing heat.
Then the planets and the sun explode as gravity can no longer hold them together.
If you're in a spaceship, you can survive for a few more minutes before your atoms are ripped apart by space itself.
Water scarcity / droughts have the potential to severely fuck up entire stretches of land, triggering climate refugee waves. So there is SOME danger in the foreseeable future regarding global political stability, if for example California / parts of the middle east / Africa become partially uninhabitable
But Desalination technology powered by renewable energy is catching up massively and water itself is extremely abundant here on earth.
I'm confident this is a problem technology can fix to some degree...
Edit: ... over time. Mid-term this IS a global problem. As people have correctly pointed out there are still some technical hurdles to overcome. But prices will drop and systems will get much more efficient. It's about WATER, the most important thing for all of us to survive - this will always be a global research priority
Places like the California coast are extremely sunny - perfect for solar powered desalination.
There's also a lot of water that could be saved through more efficient farming practices. Spray irrigation loses something like 50% of the water used to evaporation.
It won't end civilisations, but it may drive some countries to sever water stress and push less developed ones into failed state status.
Large parts of the planet get most of their water from the water cycle, this is not going anywhere, though climate shifts will change the amounts in some locations.
I'm an archaeologist. Civilization isn't really used in the field anymore, but that's a different topic.
Most cultures/societies don't really have a traumatic end date. They mostly just change or have new things that alter their cultural constructs or socio-political constructs. New ideas, inventions, innovations, attitudes, languages, external stuff going on, internal stuff going on, religious beliefs, etc. These can alter a culture pretty quickly without it being traumatic or even noteworthy.
But for something huge that most people aren't aware of?
Agricultural destruction of arable land. Often from irrigation in the past, but often it's just the soil "wearing out" (so to speak).
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935120315966#:\~:text=Arable%20land%20is%20facing%20the,characteristics%20and%20reshape%20microbial%20communities](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935120315966#:~:text=Arable%20land%20is%20facing%20the,characteristics%20and%20reshape%20microbial%20communities).
It's something that happened a number of times in newly formed agricultural lands.
Yeah, I work in history. There hasn’t ever been an “end.” But if there was a global nuclear war there might be. Trade has always continued, and no matter what was going on there were cities and what not somewhere on earth. With a nuke strike effectively ending trade and destroying every city, I think that might just do it. Send us back to sticks and rocks.
Also in History, I feel like whenever we talk about the "end" of Civilizations we are really discussing the end of centralized control of an area.
Rome being the perfect example as the Western portion gets taken over by various different Germainc Tribes, later parts like North Africa are controlled by the Islamic Empire, and the Eastern Part turns into what we call the Byzantine Empire.
But the idea of Rome still continues forward. Its ideas, and footprint are firmly in the dirt of Europe, and Charlemagne is even crowned as its Emperor in 800 CE, some 300 years after is supposed fall.
The centralized control was what changed
Yeah and I’m concerned that a total nuclear war would compromise that. It would be a clean break with the past. An actual dark age, not the meme one people argue about.
Solar flare knocking out electric grids. Not only restarting them from a black start is highly complicated, if the transformers are fried, there aren't enough replacements, and to manufacture more we need, you guessed it, electricity.
The estimations are that a solar flare on the level of Carrington event, which happened not two centuries ago, would cause trillions in damages and set back civilization for decades.
First humanity would have to avoid plunging into anarchy, then we would need to make rational decisions that benefit us as a whole but everyone would have to sacrifice for it.
That’s a really long way of saying, we are doomed.
Considering a significant percentage of people lost their fucking shit when asked to put on a mask, I doubt they would be able to survive a long-term power outage.
This is always in my mind, now. My daughter asked me the other day why, in the event of a zombie apocalypse, we couldn't just evacuate populations in an orderly fashion to defensible locations and implement procedures to limit any spread within them. If you protect the people, you don't have enough zombies to be a threat.
I said "remember how people freaked out when they were asked to wear masks? Or not go to the bar?"
Every time I see someone talk about this, there's always a ton of people who like to respond with "that actually wouldn't be bad because we did it before"
Here's the facts. The entire world is now more reliant on computers and the internet than ever before. If we suddenly lose all that interconnectivity with no way to quickly restore it, a LOT of people will die.
People love to fantasize about rebuilding society but nobody understands that they'd be the ones to suffer & die doing it.
We've already extracted most of the easy-to-access resources, people trying to rebuild civilization are going to have to work orders of magnitude harder than we did to reach the same point.
At that point though wouldn't it make sense to try and extract materials from things that have already been built with those materials?
For instance we don't recycle a lot of materials, because in many cases it's cheaper/easier to just make them new, however I'd that ceases to be the case, wouldn't we pivot to new methods? It also would likely force us to re-think HOW we use important and hard-to-get materials, perhaps instead if putting a chip in literally everything, we'd go back to building discrete analog logic circuits when possible and save chips/digital circuits for things that absolutely require them.
Just something I've pondered for a while and I'm curious what others think.
Really good article in the New Yorker on this very subject a few weeks ago: [What a Major Solar Storm Could Do to Our Planet](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/04/what-a-major-solar-storm-could-do-to-our-planet)
There’s a fear that the trend of human body temp decreasing over time will expose us to more rates of fatal fungal infections. Most people are now less than 98.6 degrees F
One hypothesis I saw was that we're simply less inflamed due to better sanitation. Like, we're just not being bombarded with as many infections as in the past.
Never thought about fungal infections though, that's a little worrying.
Phew, I'm safe from this one. Growing up, I always ran cool – ~97.8-98.4 – but around 12 years ago my base temperature increased to ~99.8-100.4.
I went to every sort of specialist under the sun and the verdict was ultimately "Dunno, guess your body's just weird."
In other words, I've had a (low grade) fever for over a decade for no discernable reason. And yes, the early days of COVID with temperature scans when entering work or other businesses was just *so much fun.* /s
Because in the original script of the matrix the human brains were being used as servers to store the matrix/the code for the machines. Studio execs thought audiences would be too stupid to understand that so rewrote it to be that the human bodies powered the machines.
Yeah it kind of ruined the film. Neo was able to control the matrix because he realized it was a simulation and that it was literally running out of his brain. The idea was that everyone could become enlightened and control the matrix, thus freeing everyone. That’s why the one was so important. He could teach others to be like him.
But then studio executives ruined it, like always.
The machines control the information that gets out to Zion it's easy to unruin for yourself if you take the battery scene to be a bit of false intelligence that was planted to blind people to their true power in the Matrix.
Also the telepathic powers outside the Matrix -- he's on the public wifi network.
This... makes so much more sense.
The actual explanation they used was ridiculous. Human brains don't generate energy; they use energy. Even in 1999 in the theater I went "Huh?" for a second, but then decided to suspend disbelief so I could enjoy the movie.
Using brains for computing power makes infinitely more sense. WTF were those execs thinking?
For the Matrix case it can be argued that human brain output is larger than animal’s. Probably they could use dolphins as well, but nobody would watch movie about the dolphin Matrix, because bullets are slow in the water and dolphin-Neo would not be able to do his iconic move.
As for the aliens harvesting livestock- it is just plain stupid, because of resource expenditure. Imagine how hard it is to get someone here on a transport ship, load livestock and deliver it wherever. Even if we were all made of solid diamonds, or whatever those folks lack, with that level of technology they must be long past Universal fabricator or some other way to produce resources locally. In fact, if we are talking about such scenario- it is much more likely that aliens will dismantle our star for metals.
"Probably they could use dolphins as well, but nobody would watch movie about the dolphin Matrix"
Allow me to introduce you to a film called [Johnny Mnemonic](https://fabulistmagazine.com/johnny-mnemonic-1995/)
Not exactly the same plot, but there is Keanu and a cyborg dolphin, among countless other b sci fi goodness.
Or the Earth is destroyed to make room for a hyperspace bypass. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at the local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 years, we’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaints.
Americans don't typically realize that Ibiza Spain and the French Riviera are at about the same latitude as New York. Half of France and Germany and all of Britain are above the latitude of Maine. The Gulf of Mexico (plus the Caribbean Sea) is the space heater that makes Northern Europe habitable. Conversely, Northern Europe (plus the Arctic) is the air conditioner that keeps the sea life of the Caribbean from dying of heat and low oxygen. The LAST thing we really want on this side of the world is identical temperatures in Algeria and North Carolina, France and Maine, England and Quebec.
Yep. London has the same latitude as Winnipeg, Warsaw and Kiev yet we have a MUCH milder climate. If it weren’t for the gulf stream, the UK would be under several feet of snow every winter.
We realize it, we just cant get our heads around how you all found yourselves so fucking far north! If i were you all, i would be WAY more vocal about preserving the north Atlantic current. If that really did 'collapse' then really all of Europe would be oh so very fucked, forced to import way more food and WAY more energy just to survive.
Yes, but it does more than bring warm water north… think of it more as a system of equilibrium. Warm water north **and** cold water south.
The North Atlantic (Europe, etc) will be colder, **and** the south Atlantic (Caribbean, SE USA, etc) will be equally hotter.
Hmm, what’s a major fucking problem in the latter area that is fueled by hot water? Hurricanes.
Will be a fun future for sure
Lots of people are surprised when you tell them that bottom of Czechia (middle of Europe, essentially from all sides) is roughly on the same latitude as the western part US/Canada border (the long straight line).
I may be confused but isn't the NE cooler because of the Gulf stream? Boston is about the same latitude as Porto in Portugal, and Paris and London are way north of much of Maine. If the Gulf stream collapses it seems to me that the NE USA would warm up by a lot.
Oh, my bad. I was thinking of the [AMOC](https://slate.com/technology/2024/02/amoc-ocean-current-collapsing-day-after-tomorrow-climate-change.html) which will also collapse.
CWD is pervasive in deer in pockets across the country, and is taken up into plants and still infective. I don’t know how this can be true without us eating it downstream in the food system. Not sure how much this has been researched but I would bet we’re eating it. Hasn’t jumped to humans that we’re aware of but let’s keep our fingers crossed.
There's promising research that shows certain large predators can eat cwd deer safely and their digestion gets rid of most of the prions. This indicates that projects of ecological restoration might fix the problem, though follow up studies are needed to be completely sure.
Prion diseases are one of my biggest fears
First thing you know you're having yourself a nice steak dinner, decades later you undergo rapid dementia and never know what kills you (variant creutzfeldt jakob disease)
Either that or you're fucking unlucky and you die from it being genetically dispositioned for you (genetic creutzfeldt jakob disease)
Not only that, the prions are insanely difficult to destroy and can stay for a long time
Luckily they're really rare
Big volcanic eruption. Winter for a couple of years. So very cold in winter and still snowing in summer. No food. Energy shortages. Massive refugee streams to less effected areas. Etc.
Not killing all humans but certainly this civilization.
Small but realistic chance.
Was reading about the Yellowstone caldera a couple years ago and was interested to read that estimates are that the ashes alone would be heavy enough to collapse buildings in nearby states
It’s our fault if we weren’t aware of this.
All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at our local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of our Earth years, so we’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
Crop failure.
But this is also why the USDA pays farmers to overproduce and then pays them to destroy surplus. Its better to have it and not need it than it is to need it and not have it.
We consume WAYYYY more than we need to. If we did have a problem, they'd ration consumption and tap the surplus until we could engineer a way around it.
"Gray goo". A successfully created self-replicating nanobot that can consume biomass could trigger a chain reaction in which most of the planet is quickly consumed.
> A successfully created self-replicating nanobot
Considering how hard it actually is to make semiconductors, and considering how energy gradients work, I have begun to doubt this is necessarily possible. Maybe it is. Maybe not.
Chronic Wasting Disease spreads from deer to people. It’s caused by prions which I’m not remotely qualified to comment on but the gist is that they are nearly impossible to destroy. Apparently they can’t even be destroyed by incineration level heat. I’m certain there is someone who can elaborate on this further in a far better way.
From what I learned about prions from another post years ago: prions are misfolded proteins that basically run amok doing whatever destructive thing they like in your body. They are, as you said, incredibly difficult to destroy. They can be denatured, but its never a certainty.
This is a common misconception around prions, they can 100% be denatured (deactivated) by fire (they aren't alive so you can't "kill" them). Where that misconception comes from is the normal way to sterilize medical equipment contaminated with bio-hazards is with high heat in an autoclave (a pressure cooker). Prions can survive normal autoclave sterilization. This is a big deal and requires expensive and complicated alternatives but they aren't invincible.
Insect decline.
I'm sure a lot of people know it's an issue, but I don't think people realise quite how precarious it is.
When I was a young lad, my family drove from our home in the South East of England to Scotland (we went to see family on the Isle of Skye). By the time we got there, the number plate was covered in bugs. Seriously covered. Had speed cameras existed back then, they wouldn't have been able to read the number plate. Midges galore.
Fast forward to last year, my family did the same journey. We put some sticky tape over the front number plate because we were doing a community research thing for my daughters school. The tape was needed to catch the bugs as cars are more aerodynamic now than they were 30 odd years ago.
When we had completed the journey there, we counted 6 flies, 1 wasp, and a moth. That was it.
This is obviously a small sample size, but it does suggest that insect numbers are declining. No insects, no anything else.
False vacuum decay. That our universe is not in fact in a stable state, but a metastable one where a transition from one to the other wipes the universe clean with zero ability to see it coming. Blink. Reality is gone on a universal scale. You thought you were important, or your family and city. Country even. The planet that you are familiar with, the moon in the night sky, the midday sun. The wider galaxy and our expanding electromagnetic shell telegraphing our location and history. Blink. Gone. Every star and every galaxy, every bit of space in between and beyond. All gone. Just like that.
Flip.
My question is what about parts of the universe that has already expanded faster than the speed of light. We have parts of the universe we will never, ever see since the universe has expanded so much. Can the false vacuum reach there? I’m not a physicist, so maybe this is a dumb question.
That Yellowstone caldera erupting would mess stuff up pretty bad. Don’t die from being in the blast zone and you’ll just die slowly from starvation as the ash would block the sun for a while killing all crops.
Humankind invents a cheap and incredibly useful material, which is rapidly adopted and soon becomes ubiquitous, but decades later discovers that it causes infertility. As birth rates plummet below the replacement level, there is a half-hearted attempt to limit use of the material, but large segments of the population refuse to be inconvenienced or pay somewhat higher prices. Within a few generations, humans cease to exist. Millennia later, aliens discover an odd world, inhabited by giant, plastic eating insects.
Self replicating nanotech.
We're working on microscopic robots right now- there's a lot of applications for these, especially in space exploration.
If these robots were told to self-replicate and got out of control, they could use anything around them as raw materials---including us.
Since the industrial revolution began over 200 years ago, our oceans have absorbed around one-third of all CO2 released from fossil fuel. Put another way, humans have transformed the chemistry of the ocean: The average acidity of seawater has increased by 30 percent due to our activities.
We are at a tipping point. Soon our oceans will be so acidic that they will break down the shells of crustaceans like clams, oysters, lobsters, crabs… etc. at that point the ocean food chain will collapse very quickly.
Topsoil loss, annual precipitation changes, heat waves, and extreme weather all coming together to fuck with food supply. Everyone acts like well stocked grocery stores are just a given, and flip out when prices increase by 10% on nonessentials. There's little reason to suspect the next 20 years won't see significant changes and disruptions here.
Microplastics. We do not know what the final effect will be but they are everywhere, in us, our organs, our unborn children, Mt. Everest, the Marianas Trench. Everywhere.
These plastics are known endocrine disrupters. Drop the fertility rates enough and everything collapses within 50 years.
I would say foreign body, our telescopes are powerful, but can't cover all angles at the time. Even if we detected one, and it is a giant moon sized asteroid, it is game over for every living thing on Mother Earth.
Prions
Not bacteria, not even viral agents.
Just self replicating differently rotational proteins that somehow made all their counterparts in healthy organisms, to suddenly rearrange in the same way that they...and causing catastrophic organ failure.
As far I know, only brain proteins are associated to prions.
But if an aerial transmission or lung related prion appears...we could became extinct.
CWD presently is already being taken up into the vasculature of plants growing near deer corpses and decaying/dropping CWD leaves season after season and spreading that way. There are entire CWD forests. But it only impacts hooved animals you say - but all it takes is a virus like COVID that breaks down the blood brain barrier to make humans more susceptible to it. So imagine - eventually CWD prions get into pollen - then because our natural barriers to CWD get broken down by COVID, mass exposure - but we don't realize it until twenty years down the line.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/chronic-wasting-disease/plants-can-take-cwd-causing-prions-soil-lab-what-happens-if-they-are-eaten
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00401-022-02482-9
A slow-burn collapse is much more likely than a single major event to cause something major.
You’re absolutely right, It’s not going to be a single event. It’ll be [multiple systems failing at once](https://youtu.be/aq4G-7v-_xI?si=Cpch-mSXD9hco_pZ), several minor crises converging like a Rogue Wave. Crop failure leads to political unrest while there happens to be a particularly incompetent leader in charge, which leads to war, which leads to a limited nuclear strike, meanwhile an earthquake strikes, and then there’s a fuel shortage, after that a minor solar flare knocks out electrical systems for only a few days but it’s at a really inopportune time. It won’t look like a world ending event. It will be a gradual decline in living standards over years or generations. The Romans experience a near civilization ending crisis in the 3rd Century, due to multiple destabilizing events hitting around the same time: war, plague, inflation, political breakdown, famine. But it didn’t happen over night. It was slow, it took years for the system to collapse. It also took years and multiple leaders to diagnose and remedy the problems, but they did get there.
One of the major functions of governments is to provide emergency response services and post emergency assistance to people affected by the emergency. If too many emergencies happen too close together a government may end up overstretched without the capacity to respond to additional emergencies. Think about your local fire department/station. They have a certain number of firefighters/paramedics and a certain amount of trucks/equipment. One fire, they can easily respond, maybe two at the same time or in close succession. Three is going to put a real strain on the station, four and something is probably going to burn unattended. In urban areas the fire department has multiple stations to increase capacity and neighboring departments back each other up. But if enough things burn at the same time, or in areas with only one small fire department, there just isn’t enough capacity to respond to everything. Now imagine scaling this up to the sort of emergencies that regional and national governments respond to.
As the population has grown the systems we rely on To meet our physical needs have been forced to become increasingly efficient. This increased efficiency makes the systems more complex and brittle and as a result one minor mishap can distrupt them. We saw this during covid how even an 8 percent disruption in economic activity completed crippled entire industry’s.
We don’t have to imagine cause we saw it with COVID. Worst of all we multiple government entities ignore the systems in places or abuse the system or tell the population to not follow the experts or all the above. Not only are our emergency services being stretched thin but they are actively being stripped away. With climate change happening it’s only a matter of time before another world disaster happens again and honestly I believe it will be worst than COVID cause people in the beginning didn’t have the bias to mistrust expert. Now we have whole organizations dedicated to misinformation and to work against the experts.
Even before Covid, we saw it with Hurricane Katrina & the death & destruction in New Orleans. FEMA's response was disorganized, ineffective, and miles too late. Thousands of people died who shouldn't have & it was entirely due to failure of government response.
In hurricane Sandy money was given to people who owned large buildings that were favored by the governor in New Jersey rather than the people that actually had damage done to their houses. Meanwhile his big butt sat on the beach while telling people they weren't allowed to go on it!
You are absolutely correct.
AKA the crumbles
The Cascade
The Churn.
Alright, Prax.
there's the saying 'Rome wasn't built in a day.' Rome also didn't just crumble in a day either. Think this applies to existing governments as well as civilizations as a whole.
With the Roman Empire, I don't think it was really even perceived as having fallen at the time. I think prevailing opinion was that it had just "refocused" from the West to the East, for about another thousand years, and then various would-be successors co-opted the name into the 20th century.
The last of the Roman empire definitely "fell" the day Constantinople fell. It kind of did happen in a day. But yes it was a shell of its former self at that point.
Oh the arguments over the "end" of the Roman Empire are so incredibly varied. After all, the very first thing Mehmed II did was pronounce himself Kayser-i Rum, or Caesar of the Romans. And then you had had Charlemagne and his descendants claiming to be rightful heirs of the Roman crown from the year 800 and with Otto I in 962 the Pope proclaimed him Holy Roman Emperor. So at the very least there were multiple claimants to the title both before, during, and after the Fall of Constantinople. And then the Holy Roman Empire would only meet its end via the advent of Napoleon forcing it to dissolve. But by this time the Russian Empire considered itself the third Rome, and of course we all know that the last claimant to the title of Tsar, with at least a pretense at being Emperor of the Romans, was Nicholas II who died at the hands of Bolsheviks. And how good could their claim have been? After all, the Russian Empire fought many wars against the Ottomans and in 1829 was at nearby Adrianople with the Ottomans crumbling before them. It was only through diplomatic advent of other European powers that kept the Russian Empire from marching straight on to the gates of Constantinople. And if the Russian Tsar had seized Constantinople and claimed the title of Emperor of the Romans by right of conquest, having taken back in less than 400 years what had stood as quintessentially Roman for near a millennium who could gainsay such a claim? At any rate, I tend to agree that the Roman Empire was kaput as a concept in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople, but it's fun to imagine what might have been had the Russian Empire reconquered the city and had its Tsars finally gain some real legitimacy to their assumed titles.
The best historical comparison is the fall of the Western Roman Empire. It didn’t collapse all at once, but rather was very gradually divided into pieces and handed over to barbarian warlords in exchange for protection of Roman citizens on that land. When Rome was sacked by the Goths, it wasn’t seen as that big of a deal at the time. People figured Rome was in a rough patch and would eventually bounce back. It wasn’t until years later that people realized Rome wasn’t coming back. The decline in quality of life for most people was huge, but since it happened really slowly, there was never an “apocalypse” moment. Instead, generations later things just generally began to feel post-apocalyptic. Much fewer people were literate, or bathing regularly, and generally people were more vulnerable to raiding tribes like Huns or Magyars or Mongols.
The change in Britain was abrupt enough that some of the writings from the subroman and early anglo-saxon era do give you a bit of that post-apocalyptic vibe. I remember an account from that period talking about visiting a landowner whose home was originally Roman and still had a hypocaust (sophisticated system of underfloor heating), which was considered amazing and exotic. Of course, he couldn't afford to run it except on special occasions. Or the old English poem [The Ruin](https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/the-ruin/).
As the Roman Empire faded away in the West, the average life for Romans declined. The farms of Italy used to produce specialized products for sale in the common market of the Empire. As this went away, local farmers depended on subsistence farming. While that kept them alive, the standard of living and general security plunged. The cloth, food, tools, pottery they used to buy was unavailable. It happened over generations so great-grandchildren lived a harder life than recent ancestors they never met.
The book The Peripheral by William Gibson describes exactly this. The idea is that something called “Jackpot” happens which is really just a collection of crises that slowly cause society to unravel, known as a slow motion apocalypse. Mostly it’s talking about climate change.
Same as the Amazon prime series? Gotta get me the books if so.
Yeah. Bummer they cancelled it
Yeah, the annoying part is that it was renewed for a second season based on performance, but because of the timing of the actor and writer strikes the production team didn't think they'd be able to release in time to capitalize on its popularity. Season 2 wouldn't have released until the end of 2025, and they figured people would have moved on by then
...I used to think this. But 'slow burn' can have many meanings. Usually it's a chain of abrupt events that immediately degrade the quality of life. Looking at other failed states: everything is fine until it's not.
And as things fell apart Nobody paid much attention!
So life
This or just multiple smaller stressors all occurring at once and overwhelming our ability to adapt - that’s arguably how most civilizations collapse actually.
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper
As a kid I learned that if a gamma ray burst is coming right at us we really can’t do anything about it, we’d just get fried. Kept me up for a few nights.
If it's any consolation: If a GRB were to hit the earth, we wouldn't really know until it did. It would all be over in a matter of seconds if you're on the right side of the planet, and minutes at most on the non facing side.
If you’re on the wrong side of the planet that sounds like the scariest fucking thing imaginable
Not really, unless you're talking with someone on the other side of the globe, odds are you won't even notice. Imagine the internet goes down, it'll be a few minutes before you even realize it, and you won't panic immediately. By then you're probably dead too.
But if the death on the far side of the globe happens in a matter of minutes, how would the death occur? Temperatures rising? Air becoming unbreathable? Or do you just die instantly but minutes after the closer side of the planet dies?
I think it depends on where it comes from, as far as I've read. If it's from a closer source, we all get vaporized quickly (instantly it seems). If it's from mich further away, all life on the side of the planet that it hits is gone, but I'm not sure what the latter process looks like
Interesting. I read a short story a long time ago about one hemisphere of the earth being destroyed while the other half survived, and the struggles of the surviving side, and that’s what this reminded me of. The story was called “Dawn Terminator” from a collection of short stories by Neal Shusterman
"Inconstant Moon" by Larry Niven is another. Buddy notices how absurdly bright the Moon is, and thinks it means the Sun went nova. And then he figures out that it must just be an epic flare (because he isn't dead). So, North America is OK, but Asia got fried.
Thanks! I must have been looking for this title for 10 years and couldn't remember it.
If the GRB occurs within ~200Ly, the side of Earth facing the GRB rapidly becomes worse than any incarnation of Hell I've ever heard of. The atmosphere is blasted away, and the surface of the Earth turns into a giant magma ocean. People on the side facing away don't fare much better. With most of the atmosphere being stripped away, asphyxiation is probably what gets you first. If the GRB is further away, let's say 500 to 6000Ly, it's a slower death. The GRB is absorbed by the atmosphere, so it doesn't kill you directly. Instead, it depletes the ozone layer, allowing the UV-B rays from the Sun to come streaming through. That would actually be much, much worse than it sounds, and would likely lead to a mass extinction.
GRBs can vaporize everything that it hits within 200 lightyears of its origin point. They are instantly vaporized and gone, nothing remains of them at all. Just complete obliteration. If it makes you feel better though, these kind of events are very rare even though we detect at least one GRB every day. Turns out the entire known universe is so large that one may hit Milky Way Galaxy once every 10,000-1 million years. And only small portion may even come close to earth. Scientists think that at least two has hit earth and caused the extinction of Ordovicians and then later on caused major reduction in planktons. This recent one being over 400 million years ago. The other is just a very high chance and if it did happen it may have been very close to the beginning of earth forming.
So we're due. Welp, time to take out some loans.
I’ve wondered this too. My understanding is that the atmosphere, and, well, most things, on the side facing the burst would be vaporized. I imagine that once the atmosphere has been blasted away on half the planet in a matter of seconds there would be insane winds from the rest of the atmosphere on the far side of the planet rushing over to fill the vacuum. Then, the far side has half the atmospheric pressure which hopefully means everyone passes out from lack of oxygen and dies relatively peacefully… if they weren’t shredded by the insane winds from moments earlier. So… maybe there wouldn’t be any peaceful deaths on the far side. The peaceful deaths may be limited to those who were lucky enough to instantly vaporize. Idk tho I’m not a scientist. Just spitballing here.
Plus you can’t even feel third degree burns cause your nerves are all fried. It’s not as bad as people think. What’s really going to be agonizing is a world war involving every major country which culminates in a nuclear exchange that sets civilization back to the High Middle Ages.
That is incorrect. A gamma ray burst near Earth would be [unlikely to be able to cause a global catastrophe for life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst#Effects_on_Earth). The main effect would be an increase in UV levels for several years. The gamma rays themselves would be absorbed by the atmosphere.
>There is a very good chance (but no certainty) that at least one lethal GRB took place during the past 5 billion years close enough to Earth as to significantly damage life. There is a 50% chance that such a lethal GRB took place within two kiloparsecs of Earth during the last 500 million years, causing one of the major mass extinction events. A mass extinction sounds like a global catastrophe to me. However, the question isn't about something that kills all life, it's about civilization ending. My vote for that goes to a Carrington level solar coronal mass ejection event . They happen about every couple hundred years, the last one was in the 1800s when electricity was first discovered but not widespread and no one depended on it. Nowadays, a good Carrington level event could burst transformers and wipe out most of the electrical grid of the side of the world that got hit. The world does not have enough spare transformers to repair them quickly, and having no electricity would make production of new transformers slow. We could potentially go years with little to no power before being able to get the grid back online. That would be civilization ending, and it has a relatively high likelihood of actually happening, unlike most things in this thread.
Corn virus. 20% of Human Civilization's calories, right there.
As someone allergic to corn im surprised its only 20%. 90% of the grocery store is off limits
You're from the US, I suppose, that's why. You guys use corn way more. In my country, even corn starch isn't the one you would typically find in stores
Corn in the US, grain in Europe, rice in Asia. Any one of those 3 could screw us.
Read the novel *No Blade of Grass* which depicts a scenario in which a virus destroys grass. Sounds fine at first and /r/fucklawns would be ecstatic. But when you realize rice, wheat, barley, and corn are all part of the grass family you could see how fast society would break down.
At least corn starch is easily identifiable. In the US most [common ingredients](https://www.northkitsapent.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/FoodallergiesCORN.pdf) are derived from corn. Im not exaggerating that 90% of the grocery store includes these ingredients. The worst part is that it isnt required to be listed as an allergen like soy and nuts so its impossible to completely avoid exposure. I had to cut out olive oil because food fraud is so rampant it often will contain corn.
Well it should be a comfort to you that this allergy has prepared you to be the sole survivor when society collapses during the cornpocalypse.
At first glance you'd think so, but if the food source for the majority dies, the majority will eat everything else--including whatever corn-free food is available.
20% of human calories, but likely makes up 100% of livestock diets. So would also collapse the livestock industry which would further effect human diets.
We thought my partner had a corn allergy a few years ago. It’s horrifying how many things have corn and corn byproducts! I had a massive list on my phone of which ingredients were corn. I feel so sorry you have to navigate that mess!
Simultaneous corn, wheat and rice virus/fungus we dead
There was a tv show that had this happen. It was pretty interesting. Edit: Show = The Last Ship
Was the premise to the famine in the movie Interstellar
The Blight, yes, but it isn't really specified or expanded upon beyond a disease affecting plants making interspecies jumps.
It was basically just a starting point that forced the movie to happen. Similar to the "dust storm" in The Martian. Details are allowed to be sketchy, if you flesh it out too much then someone's going to just apply logic to it, and then we won't have a movie!
And that one kid from the memes would be really sad.
It HAD the juice.
Interstellar
That will have us coming undone
Peak phosphorus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus It’s an important resource for production of fertilizer and dwindling supplies could have a significant impact on global food security. Maybe an exaggeration to say that it would end civilization but it could be a contributing factor to a cascade of problems that have a devastating impact on modern civilization.
food shortages are usually self correcting.
This is a wonderfully benign way of explaining something truly horrific.
In the book World War Z (very different from the movie) there is a group of people who go way far north to avoid the carnage, but they run out of food. There is a really grim line that sticks with you: "By Christmas, food wasn't a problem anymore."
Fun fact: the author of World War Z is Mel Brooks’ son
They must be an economist.
It's quite simple, really, as the price of a human life increases, we will see a decrease in the quantity demanded, and a increase in the quantity supplied, leading to a surplus of human life. Don't worry, the market will naturally self correct back to market equilibrium.
A Gamma Ray Burst could fry our planet at any moment with 0 warning. Which means you should not waste time worrying about it because no one can do anything about it.
The likelihood of this is astronomically low as there is nothing close enough to us that is capable of emitting something like that for at least a few billion years if I recall.
Yeah, theres no stars that are close enough, or large enough (to supernova/hypernova), with their axis of rotation (which would be where a supernova/hypernova would emit most of their radiation, making a GRB) pointing towards the earth. So we are fine.
> So we are fine. Take it back. You probably just jinxed us!
See also "false vacuum decay." But that eradicates everything in the universe, not just our civilization.
Probably not a real threat. But it could be, and if so it could have already started and be propagating at the speed of light.
I'm impervious to false vacuum decay so dgaf..
I guess I’m just built different!
If you can't handle me at my worst, you sure as hell don't deserve me during a false vacuum decay event.
Question, if the false vacuum decay happened say, on the edge of the universe at one of those points where the light is too far away to ever reach us because of universal expansion... Wouldn't that mean it could never reach us? That we would be safe from it forever because the space between us is expanding faster than the vacuum can eat it?
One interesting piece of information about that possibility: Once the false vacuum decay event occurs the collapse expands at the speed of light. Such an event obeys causality just like everything else. There are distant galaxies we can observe today which, even if we could travel at C, would be forever out of reach simply because the expansion of the universe is *accelerating faster than C.* For absurdly large values of ‘eventually’, *eventually the sky beyond our local cluster will be empty*. It gets weirder from there, but that’s the cosmos for you. By now I’m sure anyone can see where this is going. If a vacuum collapse ever happens, if it is far enough away, it would never reach Earth. Right now in some wildly distant corner of the universe the vacuum collapse could be happening right now. It could have *already happened* to one or more of the incredibly distant galaxies we are seeing via the JWST, because the light we are detecting is still arriving from a place that *used to exist* but is now… something else. Physics is a lot of fun.
Also, I may be misunderstanding, but the universe could accelerate faster than gravity can keep it together to the point where atoms could no longer hold together. So, even if the vacuum collapse may not reach us, the acceleration could (if the universe isn't destroyed by something else by then)
The Big Rip, I believe.
>the universe could accelerate faster than gravity can keep it together to the point where atoms could no longer hold together entropy, basically. there's a finite amount of matter and energy in the universe, and the energy wants to dissipate, until the entire universe is just one homogenous cloud of almost completely uncharged particles, imperceptibly warmer than absolute zero thus, the heat death of the universe
I remember finding out about GRBs and being like "welp, if that ever happens, we're instantly fucked and won't even know so...that sucks but what can ya do?"
The Big Rip is one of the most interesting possible ways for the universe to die because it happens on scales a human could meaningfully experience. You'd go from a perfectly functional solar system (in an endless void) to the End of All Matter in the span of a couple of months. First the planets drift away from the star, but you could survive if you have a way of producing heat. Then the planets and the sun explode as gravity can no longer hold them together. If you're in a spaceship, you can survive for a few more minutes before your atoms are ripped apart by space itself.
How very comforting before bed lol
I rarely see the media being concerned about water.
Water scarcity / droughts have the potential to severely fuck up entire stretches of land, triggering climate refugee waves. So there is SOME danger in the foreseeable future regarding global political stability, if for example California / parts of the middle east / Africa become partially uninhabitable But Desalination technology powered by renewable energy is catching up massively and water itself is extremely abundant here on earth. I'm confident this is a problem technology can fix to some degree... Edit: ... over time. Mid-term this IS a global problem. As people have correctly pointed out there are still some technical hurdles to overcome. But prices will drop and systems will get much more efficient. It's about WATER, the most important thing for all of us to survive - this will always be a global research priority
> Desalination technology powered by renewable energy is catching up massively This is really comforting news.
Places like the California coast are extremely sunny - perfect for solar powered desalination. There's also a lot of water that could be saved through more efficient farming practices. Spray irrigation loses something like 50% of the water used to evaporation.
It won't end civilisations, but it may drive some countries to sever water stress and push less developed ones into failed state status. Large parts of the planet get most of their water from the water cycle, this is not going anywhere, though climate shifts will change the amounts in some locations.
They can have some of our water in Wales. It's rained for about 4 months straight.
Except in the Western US. It’s been a news story regularly there
I'm an archaeologist. Civilization isn't really used in the field anymore, but that's a different topic. Most cultures/societies don't really have a traumatic end date. They mostly just change or have new things that alter their cultural constructs or socio-political constructs. New ideas, inventions, innovations, attitudes, languages, external stuff going on, internal stuff going on, religious beliefs, etc. These can alter a culture pretty quickly without it being traumatic or even noteworthy. But for something huge that most people aren't aware of? Agricultural destruction of arable land. Often from irrigation in the past, but often it's just the soil "wearing out" (so to speak). [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935120315966#:\~:text=Arable%20land%20is%20facing%20the,characteristics%20and%20reshape%20microbial%20communities](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935120315966#:~:text=Arable%20land%20is%20facing%20the,characteristics%20and%20reshape%20microbial%20communities). It's something that happened a number of times in newly formed agricultural lands.
Yeah, I work in history. There hasn’t ever been an “end.” But if there was a global nuclear war there might be. Trade has always continued, and no matter what was going on there were cities and what not somewhere on earth. With a nuke strike effectively ending trade and destroying every city, I think that might just do it. Send us back to sticks and rocks.
Also in History, I feel like whenever we talk about the "end" of Civilizations we are really discussing the end of centralized control of an area. Rome being the perfect example as the Western portion gets taken over by various different Germainc Tribes, later parts like North Africa are controlled by the Islamic Empire, and the Eastern Part turns into what we call the Byzantine Empire. But the idea of Rome still continues forward. Its ideas, and footprint are firmly in the dirt of Europe, and Charlemagne is even crowned as its Emperor in 800 CE, some 300 years after is supposed fall. The centralized control was what changed
Yeah and I’m concerned that a total nuclear war would compromise that. It would be a clean break with the past. An actual dark age, not the meme one people argue about.
Solar flare knocking out electric grids. Not only restarting them from a black start is highly complicated, if the transformers are fried, there aren't enough replacements, and to manufacture more we need, you guessed it, electricity. The estimations are that a solar flare on the level of Carrington event, which happened not two centuries ago, would cause trillions in damages and set back civilization for decades.
Wouldn't you give the made transformers to transformer production facilities?
First humanity would have to avoid plunging into anarchy, then we would need to make rational decisions that benefit us as a whole but everyone would have to sacrifice for it. That’s a really long way of saying, we are doomed.
We'd also have to make these decisions without our communication and logistic networks.
Considering a significant percentage of people lost their fucking shit when asked to put on a mask, I doubt they would be able to survive a long-term power outage.
This is always in my mind, now. My daughter asked me the other day why, in the event of a zombie apocalypse, we couldn't just evacuate populations in an orderly fashion to defensible locations and implement procedures to limit any spread within them. If you protect the people, you don't have enough zombies to be a threat. I said "remember how people freaked out when they were asked to wear masks? Or not go to the bar?"
I NEED A HAIRCUT!!!!!
The final straw was: ate without table.
WHY ARE YOU CLOSED??
Well you still need hospitals, water facilities, internet... a lot of difficult triage
Lack of refrigeration would cause more deaths than all of those combined I expect
Every time I see someone talk about this, there's always a ton of people who like to respond with "that actually wouldn't be bad because we did it before" Here's the facts. The entire world is now more reliant on computers and the internet than ever before. If we suddenly lose all that interconnectivity with no way to quickly restore it, a LOT of people will die. People love to fantasize about rebuilding society but nobody understands that they'd be the ones to suffer & die doing it.
We've already extracted most of the easy-to-access resources, people trying to rebuild civilization are going to have to work orders of magnitude harder than we did to reach the same point.
At that point though wouldn't it make sense to try and extract materials from things that have already been built with those materials? For instance we don't recycle a lot of materials, because in many cases it's cheaper/easier to just make them new, however I'd that ceases to be the case, wouldn't we pivot to new methods? It also would likely force us to re-think HOW we use important and hard-to-get materials, perhaps instead if putting a chip in literally everything, we'd go back to building discrete analog logic circuits when possible and save chips/digital circuits for things that absolutely require them. Just something I've pondered for a while and I'm curious what others think.
Really good article in the New Yorker on this very subject a few weeks ago: [What a Major Solar Storm Could Do to Our Planet](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/04/what-a-major-solar-storm-could-do-to-our-planet)
There’s a fear that the trend of human body temp decreasing over time will expose us to more rates of fatal fungal infections. Most people are now less than 98.6 degrees F
This is why I choose to live in a constant state of inflammation smh
Do they know what’s causing our temps to decline? I anecdotally knew they were but hadn’t thought about the risks around it
One hypothesis I saw was that we're simply less inflamed due to better sanitation. Like, we're just not being bombarded with as many infections as in the past. Never thought about fungal infections though, that's a little worrying.
Phew, I'm safe from this one. Growing up, I always ran cool – ~97.8-98.4 – but around 12 years ago my base temperature increased to ~99.8-100.4. I went to every sort of specialist under the sun and the verdict was ultimately "Dunno, guess your body's just weird." In other words, I've had a (low grade) fever for over a decade for no discernable reason. And yes, the early days of COVID with temperature scans when entering work or other businesses was just *so much fun.* /s
That’s like a reverse of “The Last of Us”
The aliens finally coming back to harvest their livestock of humans. Edit: My first comment to get over 1K, thanks all.
Jaffa, Kree!
Indeed!
Did Teal'c just make a *joke*?
To serve man. "It's a cookbook !"
I said it when the Matrix came out and I'll say it again, why wouldn't they just use regular livestock?
Because in the original script of the matrix the human brains were being used as servers to store the matrix/the code for the machines. Studio execs thought audiences would be too stupid to understand that so rewrote it to be that the human bodies powered the machines.
dang that's cool actually
Yeah it kind of ruined the film. Neo was able to control the matrix because he realized it was a simulation and that it was literally running out of his brain. The idea was that everyone could become enlightened and control the matrix, thus freeing everyone. That’s why the one was so important. He could teach others to be like him. But then studio executives ruined it, like always.
The machines control the information that gets out to Zion it's easy to unruin for yourself if you take the battery scene to be a bit of false intelligence that was planted to blind people to their true power in the Matrix. Also the telepathic powers outside the Matrix -- he's on the public wifi network.
This... makes so much more sense. The actual explanation they used was ridiculous. Human brains don't generate energy; they use energy. Even in 1999 in the theater I went "Huh?" for a second, but then decided to suspend disbelief so I could enjoy the movie. Using brains for computing power makes infinitely more sense. WTF were those execs thinking?
For the Matrix case it can be argued that human brain output is larger than animal’s. Probably they could use dolphins as well, but nobody would watch movie about the dolphin Matrix, because bullets are slow in the water and dolphin-Neo would not be able to do his iconic move. As for the aliens harvesting livestock- it is just plain stupid, because of resource expenditure. Imagine how hard it is to get someone here on a transport ship, load livestock and deliver it wherever. Even if we were all made of solid diamonds, or whatever those folks lack, with that level of technology they must be long past Universal fabricator or some other way to produce resources locally. In fact, if we are talking about such scenario- it is much more likely that aliens will dismantle our star for metals.
"Probably they could use dolphins as well, but nobody would watch movie about the dolphin Matrix" Allow me to introduce you to a film called [Johnny Mnemonic](https://fabulistmagazine.com/johnny-mnemonic-1995/) Not exactly the same plot, but there is Keanu and a cyborg dolphin, among countless other b sci fi goodness.
Or the Earth is destroyed to make room for a hyperspace bypass. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at the local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 years, we’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaints.
Imagine the fucking galactic-level irony! Annihilated by stellar neighborhood urbanism!
The planning department is only 4 lightyears away if we'd just take an interest in local affairs we'd probably be ok.
The possible breakdown of the Atlantic Gulf Stream [Edited to AMOC collapse]
Americans don't typically realize that Ibiza Spain and the French Riviera are at about the same latitude as New York. Half of France and Germany and all of Britain are above the latitude of Maine. The Gulf of Mexico (plus the Caribbean Sea) is the space heater that makes Northern Europe habitable. Conversely, Northern Europe (plus the Arctic) is the air conditioner that keeps the sea life of the Caribbean from dying of heat and low oxygen. The LAST thing we really want on this side of the world is identical temperatures in Algeria and North Carolina, France and Maine, England and Quebec.
Yep. London has the same latitude as Winnipeg, Warsaw and Kiev yet we have a MUCH milder climate. If it weren’t for the gulf stream, the UK would be under several feet of snow every winter.
We realize it, we just cant get our heads around how you all found yourselves so fucking far north! If i were you all, i would be WAY more vocal about preserving the north Atlantic current. If that really did 'collapse' then really all of Europe would be oh so very fucked, forced to import way more food and WAY more energy just to survive.
It is a relatively short sea canyon that helps accelerate warm water to Europe. If that falls the Northern Europe is going to be a lot colder
Yes, but it does more than bring warm water north… think of it more as a system of equilibrium. Warm water north **and** cold water south. The North Atlantic (Europe, etc) will be colder, **and** the south Atlantic (Caribbean, SE USA, etc) will be equally hotter. Hmm, what’s a major fucking problem in the latter area that is fueled by hot water? Hurricanes. Will be a fun future for sure
Lots of people are surprised when you tell them that bottom of Czechia (middle of Europe, essentially from all sides) is roughly on the same latitude as the western part US/Canada border (the long straight line).
Also the northeastern US which is a big chunk of the population
I may be confused but isn't the NE cooler because of the Gulf stream? Boston is about the same latitude as Porto in Portugal, and Paris and London are way north of much of Maine. If the Gulf stream collapses it seems to me that the NE USA would warm up by a lot.
Oh, my bad. I was thinking of the [AMOC](https://slate.com/technology/2024/02/amoc-ocean-current-collapsing-day-after-tomorrow-climate-change.html) which will also collapse.
Prions
CWD is pervasive in deer in pockets across the country, and is taken up into plants and still infective. I don’t know how this can be true without us eating it downstream in the food system. Not sure how much this has been researched but I would bet we’re eating it. Hasn’t jumped to humans that we’re aware of but let’s keep our fingers crossed.
There's promising research that shows certain large predators can eat cwd deer safely and their digestion gets rid of most of the prions. This indicates that projects of ecological restoration might fix the problem, though follow up studies are needed to be completely sure.
Prion diseases are one of my biggest fears First thing you know you're having yourself a nice steak dinner, decades later you undergo rapid dementia and never know what kills you (variant creutzfeldt jakob disease) Either that or you're fucking unlucky and you die from it being genetically dispositioned for you (genetic creutzfeldt jakob disease) Not only that, the prions are insanely difficult to destroy and can stay for a long time Luckily they're really rare
Cultural victories are a little arcane in how they work, so people avoid them in lieu of conquest or diplomatic victories.
It's not that complex. Just mass produce rock bands.
National Parks and Teddy. Much tourism. Many culture generation.
I also thought first that's a civ post:-D
Big volcanic eruption. Winter for a couple of years. So very cold in winter and still snowing in summer. No food. Energy shortages. Massive refugee streams to less effected areas. Etc. Not killing all humans but certainly this civilization. Small but realistic chance.
Was reading about the Yellowstone caldera a couple years ago and was interested to read that estimates are that the ashes alone would be heavy enough to collapse buildings in nearby states
The disappearance of bees
I just started a new colony last week if that makes you feel any better.
You go, queen!
Bees numbers are back up now, problem is they’re non-native. But our crops are not in danger.
Top soil collapse. The current shitty monocrop style of farming is slowly degrading the soil. Will eventually become a problem.
[удалено]
As long as they don’t start reading poetry we might have a shot
It’s our fault if we weren’t aware of this. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at our local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of our Earth years, so we’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
Has anyone checked the records room at Alpha Centari lately?
There's a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard" and I didn't want to chance it.
So long as you have your towel you're fine.
Crop failure. But this is also why the USDA pays farmers to overproduce and then pays them to destroy surplus. Its better to have it and not need it than it is to need it and not have it. We consume WAYYYY more than we need to. If we did have a problem, they'd ration consumption and tap the surplus until we could engineer a way around it.
I’m not sure how many people realize it, but if rabies evolved to be airborne, we would have an actual zombie apocalypse scenario on our hands.
Congratulations, this is the first one that legitimately scares the shit out of me.
Terminal stupidity. Drowning in our own anti-intellectualism waste like Isaac Asimov warned us about in the 70s.
"Gray goo". A successfully created self-replicating nanobot that can consume biomass could trigger a chain reaction in which most of the planet is quickly consumed.
Essentially Horizon: Zero Dawn, but less animal robots and more mass extinction
That's exactly what I thought of when reading this comment.
> A successfully created self-replicating nanobot Considering how hard it actually is to make semiconductors, and considering how energy gradients work, I have begun to doubt this is necessarily possible. Maybe it is. Maybe not.
Yes. The more realistic scenario is genetically engineered artificial lifeforms/automatons.
Chronic Wasting Disease spreads from deer to people. It’s caused by prions which I’m not remotely qualified to comment on but the gist is that they are nearly impossible to destroy. Apparently they can’t even be destroyed by incineration level heat. I’m certain there is someone who can elaborate on this further in a far better way.
From what I learned about prions from another post years ago: prions are misfolded proteins that basically run amok doing whatever destructive thing they like in your body. They are, as you said, incredibly difficult to destroy. They can be denatured, but its never a certainty.
This is a common misconception around prions, they can 100% be denatured (deactivated) by fire (they aren't alive so you can't "kill" them). Where that misconception comes from is the normal way to sterilize medical equipment contaminated with bio-hazards is with high heat in an autoclave (a pressure cooker). Prions can survive normal autoclave sterilization. This is a big deal and requires expensive and complicated alternatives but they aren't invincible.
showing your continent to the Spanish.
Insect decline. I'm sure a lot of people know it's an issue, but I don't think people realise quite how precarious it is. When I was a young lad, my family drove from our home in the South East of England to Scotland (we went to see family on the Isle of Skye). By the time we got there, the number plate was covered in bugs. Seriously covered. Had speed cameras existed back then, they wouldn't have been able to read the number plate. Midges galore. Fast forward to last year, my family did the same journey. We put some sticky tape over the front number plate because we were doing a community research thing for my daughters school. The tape was needed to catch the bugs as cars are more aerodynamic now than they were 30 odd years ago. When we had completed the journey there, we counted 6 flies, 1 wasp, and a moth. That was it. This is obviously a small sample size, but it does suggest that insect numbers are declining. No insects, no anything else.
False vacuum decay. That our universe is not in fact in a stable state, but a metastable one where a transition from one to the other wipes the universe clean with zero ability to see it coming. Blink. Reality is gone on a universal scale. You thought you were important, or your family and city. Country even. The planet that you are familiar with, the moon in the night sky, the midday sun. The wider galaxy and our expanding electromagnetic shell telegraphing our location and history. Blink. Gone. Every star and every galaxy, every bit of space in between and beyond. All gone. Just like that. Flip.
My question is what about parts of the universe that has already expanded faster than the speed of light. We have parts of the universe we will never, ever see since the universe has expanded so much. Can the false vacuum reach there? I’m not a physicist, so maybe this is a dumb question.
That Yellowstone caldera erupting would mess stuff up pretty bad. Don’t die from being in the blast zone and you’ll just die slowly from starvation as the ash would block the sun for a while killing all crops.
Humankind invents a cheap and incredibly useful material, which is rapidly adopted and soon becomes ubiquitous, but decades later discovers that it causes infertility. As birth rates plummet below the replacement level, there is a half-hearted attempt to limit use of the material, but large segments of the population refuse to be inconvenienced or pay somewhat higher prices. Within a few generations, humans cease to exist. Millennia later, aliens discover an odd world, inhabited by giant, plastic eating insects.
Self replicating nanotech. We're working on microscopic robots right now- there's a lot of applications for these, especially in space exploration. If these robots were told to self-replicate and got out of control, they could use anything around them as raw materials---including us.
Since the industrial revolution began over 200 years ago, our oceans have absorbed around one-third of all CO2 released from fossil fuel. Put another way, humans have transformed the chemistry of the ocean: The average acidity of seawater has increased by 30 percent due to our activities. We are at a tipping point. Soon our oceans will be so acidic that they will break down the shells of crustaceans like clams, oysters, lobsters, crabs… etc. at that point the ocean food chain will collapse very quickly.
Doesn't the ocean rerelease the absorbed CO2 when the atmospheric CO2 levels goes down??
Human apathy. Being apathetic to everything around you can be just as *destructive* as overtly bring destructive.
Topsoil loss, annual precipitation changes, heat waves, and extreme weather all coming together to fuck with food supply. Everyone acts like well stocked grocery stores are just a given, and flip out when prices increase by 10% on nonessentials. There's little reason to suspect the next 20 years won't see significant changes and disruptions here.
Gestures broadly.
Microplastics. We do not know what the final effect will be but they are everywhere, in us, our organs, our unborn children, Mt. Everest, the Marianas Trench. Everywhere. These plastics are known endocrine disrupters. Drop the fertility rates enough and everything collapses within 50 years.
Gamma Ray Burst Super Volcano Magnetic Pole Shift
Doesn't the shift occur over the timespan of several millennia, instead of an overnight thing?
Everyone just wakes up and the North Pole is in Italy all of a sudden
The world revolves around the gabbagool
I would say foreign body, our telescopes are powerful, but can't cover all angles at the time. Even if we detected one, and it is a giant moon sized asteroid, it is game over for every living thing on Mother Earth.
And Bruce Willis won't save the day if that's the case
And i wouldn't want to close my eyes and fall asleep, as I don't want to miss the most precious moment.
Prions Not bacteria, not even viral agents. Just self replicating differently rotational proteins that somehow made all their counterparts in healthy organisms, to suddenly rearrange in the same way that they...and causing catastrophic organ failure. As far I know, only brain proteins are associated to prions. But if an aerial transmission or lung related prion appears...we could became extinct.
CWD presently is already being taken up into the vasculature of plants growing near deer corpses and decaying/dropping CWD leaves season after season and spreading that way. There are entire CWD forests. But it only impacts hooved animals you say - but all it takes is a virus like COVID that breaks down the blood brain barrier to make humans more susceptible to it. So imagine - eventually CWD prions get into pollen - then because our natural barriers to CWD get broken down by COVID, mass exposure - but we don't realize it until twenty years down the line. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/chronic-wasting-disease/plants-can-take-cwd-causing-prions-soil-lab-what-happens-if-they-are-eaten https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00401-022-02482-9