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

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.

So, roughly 200 million deaths at current global population of roughly 7 billion. Sounds cataclysmic enough to me to qualify.

http://www.livescience.com/14251-200-million-rapture-12.html

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

― Never changed username before (cardamon)

if a punchline lands and nobody is there to hear it, is it still funny?

watched "pale cocoon" last night. touched on a lot of thoughts i've been having lately, particularly wrt this thread.

np: frank zappa, _does humor belong in a post-apocalyptic hellscape?_

just the other day i was wondering which science fiction dystopia seems most plausible from the perspective of 2016 and--if you allow for some imaginative license--it almost seems like it might be The Time Machine.

(not just the extreme inequality or biopolitical schisms, or even the idea that there will be habitable and uninhabitable zones but because it portrays human civilization as just...dwindling away into time and a decaying universe.)

& Orlando Jones rocking a Caesar cut, boggling at our sad descendants who don't take advantage of the vast institutional knowledge that he contains!

http://i.imgur.com/R3T8bih.jpg

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/a-human-extinction-isnt-that-unlikely/480444/

Global Challenge Foundation roughly answers the poll question for ILX:

Across 100 years, that figure would entail a 9.5 percent chance of human extinction.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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.

― Mordy, Friday, November 25, 2016 9:44 PM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

we are legend

still feeling good about this

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

clutch mutch?

16 people leading the revolution

http://i.imgur.com/1eWtMFd.jpg

I'm about to turn 42, and I feel like I am living through one right now.

You are confusing the scaldingly high potential for a cataclysmic event with the actual event, which is scheduled for later this year.

51 and I feel as if everything has gone mad.

You're getting worked up over nothing. Everything is going to be fine. So just relax, okay? You're really overreacting.

http://www.theonion.com/multiblogpost/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entire-mideast-regio-11534

silicon valley hedge fund types certainly think they will

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich