rate the chances that you will experience a cataclysmic, world-threatening event before you're 70

dunno, like 0%?

depends on where they lived. in the US probably no. in the former USSR? or the Middle East or many places in Africa or Southeast Asia, etc. xp

Yeah, this gets closer to it for me. What do we mean by "cataclysmic?" Culturally we always revert to Hollywood post-apoc visions of destroyed societies and wastelands but, as I've read elsewhere, that shit exists for large parts of people existing literally at this second. And they still exist thru it. For whatever reason(human brain wiring, cultural myopia, intestinal problems, et al), the apocalypse is only something we consider happening to us, of when 3rd World conditions happen in the 1st World, to put it broadly.

And I don't think we'll nec have WWIII over more regional insurgencies popping up hither and yon. Even if there was another American Civil War, you wouldn't have massed armies of uniformed troops blasting away at each other rather than smaller, regional insurgent groups fighting it out in the countryside or suburbs.

I am more concerned about a catastrophic incident directly aimed at me or my family than I am about a global cataclysmic event.

Lmao NV

Voted 100%. Not because of masturbating over bad news, but the probability is just very, very high. I believe mankind is unable to learn from history, and that life on this planet is cyclical. It's rather arrogant to think this/our generation will not experience a disastrous global event tbh. 'We're' not exactly showing we learned from past mistakes. There has never not been war, there have never not been loonies in powerful positions etc etc.
That's macro. Micro, closer to home: not sure. But evidently something is changing for the worst, all over the globe. Never before have I been confronted with such virulent racism that hits my everyday life, nor the reality tv politics and fact free/trolling/fake news shit entering the collective consciousness and having such a huge impact.

I'm 2200 people could read history pdf's about this period as a build-up to some sort of catastrophe, and think "ah well, it was only thirty years". But those will be my last thirty years alive. So 100%.

But they'll never take my what.cd flacs away from me

TL;dr: the end of this interbellum is nigh(ish)

" It's rather arrogant to think this/our generation will not experience a disastrous global event tbh. "

i feel quite the opposite tbph. the louder the doommongering the greater the ego kick, albeit by proxy or wev

But there's no precedent. I don't think a generation has lived on earth in the last 2000 years that didn't experience a shock event. Why should we? We're certainly not making an effort.

Why put your head in the sand deems, if LCFC's PL win wasn't a sign the world is ending I don't know what is.

wasnt liverpool tbf

Well there's "cataclysmic events" and complete, nuclear holocaust

one day i'm going to die and everybody i love is going to die and we will never see each other again and there will be nothing for eternity and that's probly cataclysmic enough

17 years away for me -- I figure it's 50/50 or better, but I voted 40% to make myself feel better.

i've got 42 years to go- not surprisingly thinking about this stuff occupies more of my idle brain time than i'd like. i've also mostly mentally settled on 60 as a 'decent old age to get to' instead of 70 :(

Yeah I think about this question way too often.

100%

Voted 0%

honestly the fact that humanity still exists almost makes me want to believe in the existence of a providential god, which these days seems crueler than no god at all. but mostly i think we've just been "lucky" up until now; we haven't had the capacity for self-annihilation for all that long, really.

voted 10%. We're gonna need another poll to determine what "cataclysmic, world-threatening" means. I would say the last thing that fits this definition that happened is ww2. As bad as things get, I just don't see it getting that bad in the next 30-something years. We are very slowly going in the right direction despite all the dumb and irreparable shit we are causing to ourselves and this planet. I mean, things have always been terrible for most people, that is just the human experience.

Ppl lived thru WW2, but it wasn't a great deal of fun. Voted 80%.

we are very slowly going in the right direction

https://openclipart.org/image/2400px/svg_to_png/110257/citaton-needed.png

gotta zoom out pretty far on the ol moral arc these days

longer life spans, generally less world-wide poverty, that kind of stuff. Don't get me wrong, humanity obviously still needs a lot of work to get into any kind of decent shape, and the destruction of the world's ecosystems seems to still be going pretty strong, but you know, not everything is terrible. Things have certainly been way worse.

xp

Things have been way worse before, if you only consider the the general condition of humans everywhere, but never before have the natural systems within which we are embedded been so weakened and unstable as now.

I think that's true, but the "cataclysmic, world-threatening events" that those will cause seem likely to be more than 30 something years away. I won't pretend to be any kind of expert, but human has proven to able to adapt to many extreme situations. People will die, but we will figure it out a way out of this eventually. It's what we do. The only thing that will stop us is the heat death of the universe.

(maybe)

gotta zoom out pretty far on the ol moral arc these days

― difficult listening hour

tough to do because there are all these potential endpoints, and most of them is because humans as a species don't have very good judgment, but i'm really not convinced humanity will recognizably exist in 100 years.

climate change isn't a discrete cataclysmic event but could eventually cause one. went with 30%

one day i'm going to die and everybody i love is going to die and we will never see each other again and there will be nothing for eternity and that's probly cataclysmic enough

― brex yourself before you wrex yourself (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 23 November 2016 21:31 (two days ago)

Genuine truth-bomb.

Uh tbh most adults get that, surely

Be funny if we're all dead before this poll closes

looked up nuclear blast radii and their effects on midsized american cities today. disappointed that a hiroshima-sized bomb would merely leave me with 2nd/3rd degree burns and crawling over debris rather than immediately incinerating me. as i'd much prefer the latter i'm pleased to read that most hydrogen bombs would probably turn me to ash in about 2 seconds.

doing fine though! honestly. we all die someday. as mentioned. and the self/ego is an illusion, etc

you all should order a pizza tonight- that's a thing you can do, it's pretty awesome

also a lot of life is actually very mundane- i have been freaking out a ton lately about this and evil things do happen but at the same time, sometimes life is just... boring. and that's a good thing

Cataclysmic = affecting our ability to post to ILX.

lol

The Ilx server needs moving a bit further away from the Yellowstone caldera blast zone, otherwise the Trump thread might get destroyed:p

isn't seattle gonna be destroyed by an earthquake in like 10 years

Where do we keep the tape backups?

Ppl lived thru WW2

hmm

everybody making a pt abt relative geography shaping this otm i think ?, like w/o having to taxonomise what cataclysm means things are probably pretty apocalyptic nothing-will-be-the-same-again feeling anywhere where resources are scarce or where bombs are going off, ie to those poll voters. i feel like nuclear war just became 5000x more likely & the thing where some kind of implicit ice barrier erodes & the world is just immediately & cascadingly a different planet seems p feasible. maybe change this poll to before 2017 ???

Has there ever been a generation of humans that didn't ruminate about whether they might be the second-to-last?

(and that there was probably nothing they could do about it? woe is us, cursed to roam this etc.)

the people on this board will almost certainly be fine imo

i don't think it'll be so bad for humans who are born after the cataclysm bc this will be the only life they know. it'll be hardest for those of us who remember what it was like now and how great it was.

Like the younger people in this rather good film http://www.gstatic.com/tv/thumb/dvdboxart/75293/p75293_d_v8_aa.jpg

this is how i feel abt the switch from cd -> mp3s xp

i feel lucky to have experienced how good things can be and have been, but it will be especially frustrating to live with this (likely) suffering and misery, just knowing that it didn't *have* to be this way. hopefully can drive and motivate me politically?? (?)

things will be fine.

Has there ever been a generation of humans that didn't ruminate about whether they might be the second-to-last?

Respectfully, this is such a trite dad argument. It's exactly the kind of banal hindsight fallacy that would be taken as received wisdom on places like Reddit. Like others said, other generations weren't facing climate change with denialist resolve. I don't think global climate change will likely reach cataclysmic proportions in the next 30 years, but in the next 80 I'd say odds are approaching fair to middlin'.

I don't know, how many people have to starve before it reaches a cataclysm?

Wow, good job reading a bunch of nonexistent sentiment into my question!

Speaking for myself, I'm defining a "cataclysm" for the purposes of this thread as 2-3% global population loss.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170418-how-western-civilisation-could-collapse

Eventually, investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy reaches a point of diminishing returns, leading to fiscal weakness and vulnerability to collapse. That is, he says “unless we find a way to pay for the complexity[”]

bump

nah

https://media3.giphy.com/media/114YFLTN8BIQDe/giphy.gif

would need to be something much, much worse than this

this is more of a test run

well yes