End of the World

[{ Emilia }]

Hmmm. This poll fails to include religious endings.

Well, doh. It's the science forum, not the fantasy forum.

 

[Mudd]

Oh, I voted "Death of the Sun" before I read the topic and realized that it was about human extinction and not the literal end of the world.

Never mind...

Science fiction is just a subgenre of fantasy. James Blish permitted the destruction of a star system to possibly, ambiguously result from the Catholic rite of exorcism in A Case Of Conscience - and of course popular skiffy stuff is awash in the notion that human beings have souls of some kind that can be popped out of one body and plunked into another.

Human beings will probably end when the planet's environment is no longer suitable for us. That's what kills most species.

 

[Starborn Dragon]

I don't understand why people fear a true AI would turn on us and destroy us.

Personally, i can see the possibility since currently humanity is entirely insane and only wants to yell, scream, and hurt people who are not like them, and then pretend like they don't do anything wrong and then turn around with a superiority complex.

But on the other hand, the AI could fall totally in love with us and would want us to aspire to become better than we are. Such as Data in Nemesis.

 

[Mudd]

Human beings aren't motivated by intelligence but by a multi-layered array of reflexes and emotional responses evolved over millions of years because they enhanced our likelihood of survival. Rationality is only the most recent, fragile and arguably least influence on why we do things and what we want. Why would a machine, even if somehow "conscious" - whatever the fuck that means - be motivated to do a damned thing other than absorb information and fantasize or something?

 

[HIjol]

I voted for Super Volcano because it sounds cool.

HIjol wrote:

And, because Tommy Lee Jones...

...ok, and Tia Leone

I prefer to think that there will be a combination of events. Super volcano followed by asteroids then super awesome AI will enslave us (before finally being destroyed themselves by an alien invasion)

HIjol wrote:

Thanks for the description of the contents of the Goodie Bag, Hux! That Sarte! What a funny guy! I love when he talked about, "...nothingness is a state of mind in which we can become anything, in reference to our situation, that we desire."

Can we PLEEEEASE also have a virus?

Okteacake, you got it! A real heinous one!
Because, Dustin Hoffman!

 

[Hatshepsut]

Human beings aren't motivated by intelligence but by a multi-layered array of reflexes and emotional responses evolved over millions of years because they enhanced our likelihood of survival.

Although emotion itself has to be considered a form of intelligence. They seem "irrational," yet we usually manage to have the emotion appropriate to in each situation, such as not bursting into laughter and hiring a clown if our mother dies. The brain puts a lot of effort into circuits which compute emotional response. After all, there's nothing telling us not to hire the clown except we heard a little word, "die," an arbitrary sound, instead of some other word like "promoted to vice president."

 

[Jax]

Most likely all land & ocean life will be ended in just over 1 billion years when the Sun becomes brighter & hot enough to make the Earth a toxic barren wasteland. 7 billion years from now the planet itself will go when the Sun swallows us whole to a nice burnt crisp. Humanity is a more difficult topic because far as we know no life form has had the intelligence, numbers spread out across the entire globe and the level of technology like us before in Earth's history. More likely a combination of events would leave to our downfall or we might live so long our genetic material could well just reach its limit AKA unable to reproduce anymore even with technology helping but that would take millions of more years I presume if at all.

If we manage to escape every natural disaster to come and inherit the worlds out in the universe we will eventually run out of luck when our Universe dies of heat death when maximum entropy is achieved.

 

[Hatshepsut]

...life will be ended in just over 1 billion years when the Sun becomes brighter & hot enough to make the Earth a toxic barren wasteland.

Or, long enough to run the whole story of multicellular life from Cambrian to Pleistocene twice over again if we wanted to. But from an individual perspective the end of the world doesn't take that long to arrive: At death it will apparently disappear, as if it had never existed. So the world is ending all the time for some of us.

 

[Mudd]

Although emotion itself has to be considered a form of intelligence. They seem "irrational," yet we usually manage to have the emotion appropriate to in each situation, such as not bursting into laughter and hiring a clown if our mother dies.

Of course. The point is that we seem to imagine that a machine intelligence would somehow act out of self-preservation, or malice, or acquisitiveness, or a sense of any "need" when none of that is really based in our reasoning process. We apply rationality to satisfying needs and desires that are based in something older than that.

 

[publiusr]

I voted for Nukes. They are still out there, after all.

 

[JES]

Another nasty way for us to go is from a gamma ray burst. The planet would still be there, but most life would probably die off, though that would depend on how direct a hit we're talking about.

 

[Ithekro]

That or everything Hulks out.

 

[Hatshepsut]

I voted for Nukes. They are still out there, after all.

It's good to see someone still remembers that. It's like the whole nuclear war thing went *poof* the minute Gorby said goodbye at the end of 1991.