Poll of the Day > Which of these are humanities' greatest threats?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Hmmmm?

climate change/extinction event of wildlife

Of those, easily WW3. The only other one to come close would be a pandemic (because God knows we're too ignorant and stupid to follow public health advice), but the only disease to have had a 100% kill rate was rabies, and even that one we've had a few people survive it in the past decade with top of the line treatment.

BUMPED told me it was that new Superman.

Hillary's emails were on Hunter's laptop and they caused Pearl Harbor

The Rise of the Machines

"Global Warming will destroy the planet in 10 years" - Al Gore, 1970.

That's why I chose Global Warming.

Other humans

Metalsonic66 posted...

The Rise of the Machines

This is a close second Though, since humans would make the first one, I guess it still fits

nukes

Honestly, 10 years ago I would've laughed at the idea of WW3 and I still think it's a long ways off.

But tensions between countries seem worse than ever. The only thing that gives me a bit of hope is Russian's invasion of Ukraine being absolutely disastrous.

People are our greatest threat. Lack of respect for others and survival of the fittest-strongest is probably why we will mostly die out.

LinkPizza posted...

Other humans

This is a close second Though, since humans would make the first one, I guess it still fits

Everything on the list besides solar flares is pretty much "other humans" so I guess he wants us to pick which way we wipe ourselves out.

The likelyhood of a solar flare wiping out all life on this planet (and humans would be harder to extinguish then all life honestly at this point (even if we count as life, I mean all life that doesn't have a ton of technology to protect them/create a safe zone etc) before humanity un-lifes itself is very small.

I believe it will be WWIII but.......it's not the war people expect. It all starts with the great pizza wars of 2025, when people finally take side on the pineapple on pizza debate. It starts small, but eggs have become even more expensive rare, and so has flour, causing the cost of pizza to skyrocket. The debate over if pineapple belongs on pizza gets out of hand and spreads from city to city with mass rioting and looting and utter chaos, eventually the US falls into Anarchy and the government collapses. China takes this opportunity to invade, seeing the US as the last bastion on the planet that could prevent it's domination. Turns out that there were still nukes being manned in the US though and the pro-pineapple crazy people shoot them off, which causes both China and Russia to also do so, before you know it nobody in the world has pizza anymore, and before the end, humanity has become like locusts, eating everything they see (including each other), despoiling all the land and water sources and eventually creating an unsustainable life cycle that leads to even sea creatures becoming extinct.

All because of some heathens thinking pineapple on pizza is ok......sigh.

Social media

disney turning everyone into homosexual vegan drag queens

Humans.

chungus

StoutGamer posted...

"Global Warming will destroy the planet in 10 years" - Al Gore, 1970.

That's why I chose Global Warming.

maybe try accurately quoting people if you want a strong point

I chose global warming because it's the only viable option.

Greed

G) Other

- The Internet -

Other: "Humans"

Nightwind posted...

Other: "Humans"

Also this.

wolfy42 posted...

Everything on the list besides solar flares is pretty much "other humans" so I guess he wants us to pick which way we wipe ourselves out.

True But Im not sure of itll be any of those on the list All I can be sure of is humans are most likely humanities greatest threat

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/1/5/AAQwHjAAETWH.jpg

wolfy42 posted...

Everything on the list besides solar flares is pretty much "other humans" so I guess he wants us to pick which way we wipe ourselves out.

"Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice."

Overpopulation in general.

Unless population growth levels off, which it may or may not, limited resources and environmental decline will catch up with us in many ways including warming/wars/hunger/pandemics/etc.

captpackrat posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/1/5/AAQwHjAAETWH.jpg

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/5/7/AALnFuAAETWx.png

captpackrat posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/1/5/AAQwHjAAETWH.jpg

ahh, so all we gotta do is push the Earth out of the radius! That should be doable in a billion years

Itself and it's ignorant arrogance.

wpot posted...

Overpopulation in general.

Unless population growth levels off, which it may or may not, limited resources and environmental decline will catch up with us in many ways including warming/wars/hunger/pandemics/etc.

Growth levels are already leveling out some, I believe I dont think birth rates will keep going up like they have been At least, thats my best guess based on the changes happening (Changes in the US, at least)

Lil_Bit83 posted...

Itself and it's ignorant arrogance.

*its

Lokarin posted...

ahh, so all we gotta do is push the Earth out of the radius! That should be doable in a billion years

Doesn't really matter, since a bunch of other factors will likely make the entire planet more or less uninhabitable long before the Sun itself becomes an issue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

Corrupt or incompetent leaders.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Doesn't really matter, since a bunch of other factors will likely make the entire planet more or less uninhabitable long before the Sun itself becomes an issue:

More to the point waaaaay before the planet even becomes uninhabitable by means other than humanities hubris, we would colonize mars and then the moons of saturn/jupiter etc and be able to even survive the sun expanding.

Basically either Humanity is going to destroy itself, or expand first out into our solar system, with technology that will allow us to live anywhere (even creating large space/stations that are self sustaining and can travel from solar system to solar system in search of new places to live).

Technology is actually already there for us to colonize mars, we just have not spent the resources and time to do so, once done, that gives us multiple places to keep expanding from and it's almost impossible at that point for humanity to suddenly end (unless we get invaded by aliens with greater technology, or a space anomaly we do currently know about/understand impacts our sun etc (something like a black hole traveling towards us through space but that is undetectable currently due to it's trajectory and the speed of it's movement relative to our solar system (moving fast enough compared to us would make the light from anything that would block while traveling be gone for so short of a time we wouldn't know it was coming till it got to close to do anything about).

Basically the next 10-20 years will determine the future of the human race almost certainly, there are a few situations where we might stagnate and not develop new technology or very little, and then regress, but they are very unlikely. Pretty much we will become like gods or we will cease to exist within the current generations lifetimes or even Gen Z's lifetime for that matter.

wolfy42 posted...

More to the point waaaaay before the planet even becomes uninhabitable by means other than humanities hubris, we would colonize mars and then the moons of saturn/jupiter etc and be able to even survive the sun expanding.

Except we probably won't.

People love the idea of space colonization, but the complications are waaay more difficult to overcome than most people realize, and anything outside of the solar system likely becomes functionally untenable unless we somehow figure out a workable method for FTL travel. Mars likely isn't viable for long-term independent colonization on a massive scale (smaller settlements, sure. a full transfer of the bulk of the human population, no), and even if we do pull it off it would basically have to be hermetically sealed underground hives (at which point we'd almost be on par with just burrowing into the surface of the Earth anyway).

There isn't much else of any value in the solar system apart from a couple of the moons of the gas giants, but even there you're talking logarithmic issues of scale and other complications that kind of render them poor choices for long-term colonization. And free-floating space station or ship-based colonies would be even more complex and problematic on anything other than the smallest of scales.

The most likely scenario is that if we manage to get off this mudball at all we never really progress beyond establishing mostly-automated mining colonies to acquire resources, but still center human civilization on Earth itself. And when Earth dies, we die.

As much as people love to fantasize about us getting off-world and spreading across the entire galaxy (or beyond) like a virus, the realistic likelihood is that it's never going to happen.

Sure, it's possible that we might discover the multiple borderline-magic level scientific breakthroughs we'd need to change that in the future (cue comments about how modern science would look like magic to people in the 1500s), but no matter how much people have come to assume that all scientific progress is forward and everything is always getting better (and how much American schools have lied to students about the myth of "Progress" in general), there is always the potential for backsliding, setbacks, and ultimately resets that prevent us from ever reaching that point, even if that point is possible at all in the first place.

The real interesting question is whether or not we survive the next 100 years. The entire Industrial Age (and the Technological Age that followed it) is basically built on the back of fossil fuels, and while we can talk all we want about switching to alternative fuels and, that doesn't mean we're going to successfully manage to make that switch without catastrophic consequences. And even if we do there's the added issues of damage already done to the environment, innate and inevitable climate shifts that will happen regardless of what we do or don't do to cause/prevent them, current political conflicts that will shape future geopolitics, and issues most people don't even think about at the moment like water rights crises, overmedication leading to virus resistances and more plagues, and the growing instability of global economies. People assume we'll be easily heading back and forth to Mars by 2150, when we might actually living in caves and hitting each other with sticks again.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

People assume we'll be easily heading back and forth to Mars by 2150, when we might actually living in caves and hitting each other with sticks again.

While it is possible, it's extremely unlikely, even the old fear of wiping out all tech (massive EMP charge etc) and being unable to get back to the same level of technology because fossil fuels are too hard to reach now, is pretty much gone due to our current methods of generating power from solar etc.

Information is very hard to totally destroy, and progress therefore is likely to continue, the extreme progress we have made, and the increase in how fast we make it steadily, over the last 50 years, makes it extremely likely that tech will continue to progress at the same rate of faster for the next 50 years.

In 1978 color tvs were finally available to the public, so in less than 50 years we have gone from that, to being able to watch any show we want, anywhere in the world on our cell phones lol.

As far as extensive space exploration and terraforming etc, the primary roadblock is energy. Water can provide that, so any planets/asteroids etc with water can be used, but if we do eventually develop a method of cold fusion, that would pretty much give us unlimited power and the ability to travel anywhere given enough time.

As far as traveling vast distances, it only would take 173 days to reach half the speed of light in space at 1g of acceleration. Any method of creating enough energy to do that would enable us to reach other solar systems within a fairly (relatively speaking) short amount of time.

The closest solar system for instance is 4.2 light years from earth. If it takes 173 days to accelerate to half the speed of light and 173 days to decelerate once you get where you are going, then the total trip would probably take between 8-9 years (maybe a bit over 9, not doing the calculations). While long, that is not unreasonable at all, but none of the planets there would likely be able to sustain life without massive tera-forming or living in domes etc (like on our moon etc). The closest planet that could probably sustain life is 22 light years away Gliese or something like that), is much larger than earth, and would take over 40 years to reach (possibly less, again math is needed but you can keep accelerating past 1/2 light speed, it just takes more fuel the faster you go etc, still I bet you could get to 75% eventually, probably in a year or so.....which would reduce the entire trip to maybe...30 ish years?).

Also as you develop technology you don't need "earth like" planets anymore, as you can create stable environments (within very large domes etc), and as long as you have resources for energy, and water of some kind on the planet (or asteroids nearby etc), you are golden. Don't have to have an eden, just need another place to expand from.

Same goes eventually for space statins, you can use asteroids that have metals and ice etc, to build large space stations, and then literally bring the ice/metal asteroids with you as you travel for fuel etc.

Anyway unless something massive happens, even if most of humanity goes poof, most of humanity is worthless anyway, the brightest minds will continue to develop technology and advance and more than likely we will eventually reach the stars and conquer them.

wolfy42 posted...

While it is possible, it's extremely unlikely, even the old fear of wiping out all tech (massive EMP charge etc) and being unable to get back to the same level of technology because fossil fuels are too hard to reach now, is pretty much gone due to our current methods of generating power from solar etc.

This is falling into the trap of assuming massive calamity is required to seriously set things back. There are plenty of lesser factors that can cause issues in and of themselves, or combine to form a systemic chain reaction crash.

There are a LOT of simmering issues brewing in the world that people have already identified as future flash-points. We have no real way to predict which are going to ignite and when, and what consequences they'll have when they do.

Even stuff like Covid was predicted (virologists and other specialists were warning that the world wasn't ready for another pandemic, and predicted we'd see one within 10-20 years). We weathered Covid, but it had plenty of related negative consequences that we're still dealing with (and likely will be for a while to come). Now imagine if multiple problems on that level occur at the same time. Infrastructure can strain past a breaking point from multiple smaller issues as easily as it can from larger ones.

And none of that takes into account possible problems we can't foresee.



wolfy42 posted...

Information is very hard to totally destroy

Information is very easy to destroy, and we've actually spent the last century or so making it easier than ever. As media storage capacity increases, lifespan decreases. Clay tablets last for thousands of years, but papyrus and paper is much more fragile. Mass produced books from the 20th century is even more fragile, as they used cheap paper and cheap ink to reduce costs, and those decay far faster (there are books published in the 60s/70s/80s that are already almost completely degraded).

Digital storage is worse in some ways. Magnetic tapes from the 60s and 70s have mostly degraded, and even CDs and DVDs tend to have a lifespan of about 70 years, give or take (and writable ROMs are worse - I have backup data CDs from the early 2000s that have already become impossible to read from bitrot). And even beyond the integrity of the storage medium, the ever-changing standards mean that some things have become extremely difficult (if not impossible) to access. If you've got a stack of old floppy discs or zip discs, you'll find it hard now to ever actually use them, without tracking down surviving old hardware and jury-rigging a set-up (and even that will grow harder to do over time).

(It's like when people ask why we can't get to the moon now when we could do it in the 60s - as technology advances, it leaves obsolete technology behind, and what was possible then becomes impossible now. Sure, we can find new ways to do old things, but the old way still becomes lost to time.)

Sure, information can be copied into new systems and retained, but then you start getting into the problem of curation (who chooses what's worth keeping and what winds up lost?) and the problem of error propagation (mistakes made in transcription become perpetuated in all future transfers). And with digital storage, you run into the problem of power (if you have data stored on a hard drive, but no power - or no power of the correct voltage/wattage/etc to access it, what you actually have is a fancy doorstop).

So yeah, data can very easily be lost, even in the Information Age.

And on top of all that, there's also the cultural assumption problem - some knowledge has been lost simply because people considered it so common-sensical that no one ever thought to write it down (things like the recipe for Roman concrete). Or because certain knowledge was deemed to be too important and needed to be kept secret (like the recipe for Greek Fire). Or because information that is inaccurate or outright lies is perpetuated while factual data is lost over time.

In a significant enough crisis situation, there is a tendency for humans to prioritize currently useful information over other forms of learning, and that can easily result in things being forever lost. Even in the last few hundred years we've lost films, tv shows, crafting secrets, historical context - in a crisis scenario, we could easily lose much, much more.

But even beyond ALL of that, mere catastrophic data loss isn't the only way that "progress" could backslide. Scenarios like certain Christian and Islamic library purges or things like the Ming Chinese actively suppressing their own naval supremacy for political reasons show that culture can easily play a role in shifts, and that history isn't always "ever upward and ever onward", regardless of the lies that American schools have perpetuated for years.



wolfy42 posted...

Anyway unless something massive happens, even if most of humanity goes poof, most of humanity is worthless anyway, the brightest minds will continue to develop technology and advance and more than likely we will eventually reach the stars and conquer them.

Again, this is basically the myth of progress. And this (along with most of the rest of your post) falls into what I generally classify as the belief that SCIENCE! is capable of answering every question and solving every problem, which often borders on religious faith more than rational reasoning.

"Well, we don't understand it today but we will tomorrow" is a massive act of faith. It and statements like "Look how much we've learned over the last 150 years or so, surely we'll eventually learn even more and solve [x]" are both logical fallacies. They're assumptions without proof (which ironically is something science itself looks down on).

Sure, it's possible future humans WILL solve today's insoluble problems. But there's no real guarantee that it WILL happen or MUST happen. It's entirely possible that some problems may never be solved. It's possible that some problems cannot be solved, due to the very nature of the universe itself. Or our limited perception of it. There may be some limitations we can never transcend, even if we had a quadrillion uninterrupted years to try.

Believing it's inevitable that humans will somehow manage to colonize the universe makes so many assumptions about things we cannot prove that it borders on saying good people go to Heaven when they die.

And in some ways, it makes the conversation almost meaningless. Even if it does happen, it's not going to happen in the next dozen lifetimes. We're so far away from where we need to be scientifically and technologically that it will take generations of forward progress to even dream of achieving it. And looking forward that far may lead people to neglect the problems of the moment.

See, much of what you are stating makes sense, but there is another factor.

We currently have technology to make a much smaller population of humans live like gods and colonize at least our solar system with the resources at our disposal. If the population of this earth was 1 billion instead of almost 8 billion, and the entire world worked together to reduce the amount of menial labor needed, allowing all 1 billion humans to work towards advancing technology, artistic desires etc, we would not have many of the problems we have right now and could accomplish amazing things.

That seems fictional, like no way it could happen, but honestly most "apocalytic" scenerios will just lead to such a situation. More than just the US have underground bunkers on their own power/air source etc that could even survive the loss of atmosphere on this planet. After such a catastrophy (or just a virus that kills 95% of people etc), the remaining humans would have a ton of resources to play with, and not a ton of people to use them. Robots/machines etc would be used because a very small percentage of humans are no longer using a freakton of resources to live like gods and requiring a huge majority of humans to work like slaves doing menial tasks.

The point is that we don't need to advance that much more technology wise (Even if it's likely that we will based just on the last 10-20 years....many would say 20 years ago we were already reaching a point where advancements might slow down, but the reverse has happened instead). With what we have now, we could easily set up bases on the moon and mars within a few decades, to the point where mining at both locations could sustain life there indefinitly (much harder on our moon do to no easy access to water mind you, and if the earth goes poof in most cases so does the moon so it's not really worth the investment other than having a place to launch from that requires far less fuel (if you can mine metals on the moon and build things there, you only need to get the fuel to that planet/water to use it as a great place to launch/build larger ships etc for further colonizations).

Mars could be like a second earth, it's already within the range of planets that could sustain life, it would just need a long term teraforming process to make humans able to live there outside of domes etc. Not something that would happen (With current tech) within 100 years, but it could happen eventually.

Anyway, you are right that it is all pointless really, we need to deal with the reality we live in now, and the extreme likelyhood is that no matter what happens to the human race as a whole, a majority of us will not live out our years at this point if we are younger than 60 (dieing from natural causes that is). More than likely war or disease or other factors will kill off a majority of humans. It won't wipe out humanity (that is VERY hard to do now) but for most of us it won't matter.

wolfy42 posted...

See, much of what you are stating makes sense, but there is another factor.

We currently have technology to make a much smaller population of humans live like gods and colonize at least our solar system with the resources at our disposal. If the population of this earth was 1 billion instead of almost 8 billion, and the entire world worked together to reduce the amount of menial labor needed, allowing all 1 billion humans to work towards advancing technology, artistic desires etc, we would not have many of the problems we have right now and could accomplish amazing things.

Thats still an assumption, bud Theres no proof that if we had less people, we wouldnt have some similar problems Wed probably be further back, if anything Less people can mean slower research. Or less ideas overall And just because that 1 billion could work toward advancing technology and artistic desires doesnt mean they actually would Maybe theyd be content with where they were at and just live

The greatest threat caused by humanity? Hilary's E-mails
The greatest threat to humanity? Coronal Mass Ejection leading to another Carrington Event

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

The greatest threat caused by humanity? Hilary's E-mails
The greatest threat to humanity? Coronal Mass Ejection leading to another Carrington Event

dude I think you might actually be my old 66 year old roommate lmfao

CME will lead to another Carrington Event? Ah yes, the Carrington Event that 'took down the grid' of Quebec in 1859...it caused sparking, disruption, interuption and there seems to be no record of extensive damage or prolonged damage. Same with the 1921 event. Many radio signals were enhanced. Same with the 1859 event, some telegraphs continued functioning even without an electrical source. Even the journalism of the 1850s and 1920s seems sensational. Details are scant - if widespread damage occurred, the cost incurred would have been reported. Fuses went. That's their purpose.

Is a Carrington Event really a major threat to humanity?

ReturnOfFa posted...

Is a Carrington Event really a major threat to humanity?

You might not be aware of this but there weren't a lot of home electronics in 1859. Or that a telegraph network is much smaller than the electrical grids we have today. Or just how dependant we've become in data storage and even more so as the shift to digital currency continues. It may be fine when a telegraph signal gets through without being connected to a battery but imagine what that does inside a harddrive, or the whole computer, or entire room filled with servers.

The inevitable return of Quetzalcoatl.

of those, global warming

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/5/4/AAQwHjAAEUO-.jpg

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iJPFSNu_QNs

I mean, its all coming together to form a pretty perfect storm. Something is going to give, and probably soon.

Krazy_Kirby posted...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iJPFSNu_QNs

You know, they never actually say which one is the genius and which one is insane...

It may not be the most responsible take, but I feel like realistically no one will be dumb enough to launch a nuke.

Global warming, on the other hand, is guaranteed to fuck everything up 100% at the current rate. We might have to resort to releasing aerosols into the air if we can't stop companies from digging oil up.