How Will The World End?

af_thefragile wrote: »

There will be a great war, possibly WW3.
With dwindling natural resources, high population and nuclear weapons, we'll finally accomplish what we didn't dare to during the Cold War. MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction!

After that what's left of humanity will try to survive a nuclear winter. Ball could roll either way. We may manage to rebuild society and live peacefully once again for a while or we may simply kill each other to extinction.

Ultimately a great meteorite will strike the earth and finally seal the deal. Goodbuy humans and their ambitions, dreams, poetry, literature, history, philosophy, all consumed by the dust that gave it life.

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

hellyeah wrote: »

the world wont end. We will.

In the last minutes, stars and planets would be torn apart, and an instant before the end, atoms would be destroyed.

jamo2oo9 wrote: »

What if Mars was once like Earth, millions of years ago and the civilisation lived on Mars had to leave because of a nuclear war thus leaving the planet a barren wasteland and moved away to somewhere else. What if we are the mirror of them?

noxqs wrote: »

Actually it wont be 6 billion years until the sun will end all life on earth. By most estimates, it will be around 600 million years before life on the surface will end (CO2 levels will drop below level required for photosynthesis), higher evolved species will have died out long before then.

1.1 billion, the oceans will have evaporated, until the earth will finally be absorbed by the Sun in 7 billion years.

Life on this planet is 3.6 billion years old, but has only 300 or so million years left. It's basically 90% over.

Humans are unlikely to last a fraction of a fraction of that.

Wibbs wrote: »

+1 Yea I always found that fascinating. Life on earth is defo way past middle age. It'll likely go in reverse, all higher life dying off until all that's left is bacteria and other single celled life, until that finally dies off. Really tough bugs may make it out to a billion odd, but we would be long gone. Unless we or another hyper intelligent species comes along and has the power to fiddle with stars. Unlikely really, though you never know.

If that does come to pass, it's likely to be our "descendants". If human life dies out entirely and leaves no progeny, IMHO the chances of another intelligent lifeform like us is vanishingly slim. Why? As noxqs points out, life is around over 3 billion years, most of that time as glorified slime. Higher animals came much later(and the Earth is still mostly "slime"). Now over the history of higher life many niches have been exploited and many responses to environments have sprung up. EG flight. Birds, do it, bees do it, even educated... oh wait. Reptiles have done it, even mammals. Swimming another one, dolphins look like sharks, who look like ichthyosaurs etc Yet our killer app, intelligence has only come along once in one offshoot of the great apes. Even there we didn't do much with it until say 80,000 years ago. So while I think you'll have more animals who look "fishlike" evolving in time, intelligence may be a really bloody rare one off.

Basically all species go extinct. We may, by virtue of this mind of ours buck that trend. After all we've bucked evolution as it is. We're unique, the only lifeform so far know that has directed it's survival through extraevolutionary means. So we may survive far longer than we can imagine, or at least those we build as our replacement may. We also need to get off this earth. We need to leave home. Just having a second home massively improves our chances of survival. Again we may be too delicate to do this, too short in life, but our descendants may not be.

The_Gatsby wrote: »

I like the idea of using the earth as a spacecraft. It certainly seems more plausible than travelling at near lightspeed and definitely easier.

I'm interested to see how it would be done. Presumably we'd have to escape the orbit of the sun and then we could travel around using other orbits to slingshot ourselves around the galaxy? We would have to have ways of protecting the atmosphere and stuff like that though.