How long do you give the human race?

Shit, I just worry about myself and few folks close to me, that's enough.

Amateur.

their society could crumble at any moment tho. reducing the remaining humans to their natural savage state. but they're not going away any time soon.

Then I reflect upon how twenty years ago I sometimes envisioned a world where everybody would be dead.

End of Cold War nuclear paranoia or the modern variety of paranoia -- taking sides?

There may be a really massive asteroid impact greater than the one at the KT boundary (Yucatan, bye-bye dinosaurs) but we have the means to detect (& possibly deflect it) now.

The sun going red giant isn't going to happen for another 5 billion years. This means that we're less than half way through the total history of the Earth - so this is not something humanity will have to worry about; by then we would've evolved into something else!

I'm sorry to say that the biggest threat to us is still nuclear annhiliation. I feel recent world events have proved that this is something we cannot be complacent about. If there is not more effort is made to disarm (something we are terribly bad at, to our shame) it is still quite possible that we might meet our end in this way in the next 10, 20, 30 years.

I'LL TAKE THAT TRADE-OFF

However, modern industrial civilization will not last more than 50 years from now. Its collapse will be brought on by the exhaustion of oil reserves. Since oil-based energy is used to greatly increase agricultural output, once it is gone there will be a severe food shortage. No form of renewable energy can generate enough energy to sustain current agricultural output. This will result is panic, chaos, war, and seal the fate of civilization.

Theoretically, some states could prepare for this, cut their populations through birth control, develope renewable energy sources, and accept a lower "standard of living" in order to have a decent post-oil existence.

But this won't happen anywhere, for obviouse reasons.

Fuel cells, I'm thinking. It'll happen, question is whether it'll happen enough, and I hold out hope.

No hope there. Where will you get the free H2 to run them? There is almost none found in nature - it has to be extracted from some compound, say, by electrolisis of water. This will require energy. Where will this energy come from? You could use a renewable source, but as I said, no renewable source can provide enough energy to meet the current energy expenditure (maybe 25% in a best case scenario).

Or we create nanobots that go wrong and turn the whole world into a featureless mush?

Or the particle accelerators in Switzerland create and extraordinary event that swallows the entire universe?

Oh yeah! I'd love it - no cars for one thing, less pollution, a simpler (maybe shorter) life, etc etc. As I said, it would be possible to have a nice existence on 1/4 the energy.

But it ain't happening. You can't just wait until you run out of oil, then hurry up and build some wind farms. You have to plan the transition to post-oil civilization decades in advance. But no one is planning anything realistic. People don't want to accept that their lives as they know it will come to an end. So they will wait until it is too late. And even then, when it is clear that the oil age is at an end, they will follow the leaders who will say "I will make things just like they were before!" and therefore follow them to their doom. Oh, and all the famines will be quite ugly.

la la la.

>Or we create nanobots that go wrong and turn the whole world into a featureless mush?

la la la.

>Or the particle accelerators in Switzerland create and extraordinary event that swallows the entire universe?

la la la. nothing is going to happen, everything will be ok.

Yes I realize N. was making fun of my gloom-and-dooming, but there is nothing silly about what I am saying, really:

1) Oil is a finite resource.
2) Oil, due to its intrinsic nature (i.e. incredibly high weight/energy ratio) is irreplacable as an energy source for many applications, and in those cases where there are substitutes, they are much inferior.
3) When Oil runs out, there will be a severe disruption in the way industrialized civilization functions.

None of this is way-out sci-fi stuff. The only conjecture on my part is that due to human nature, industrial civilization will not anticipate the exhaustion of oil, and that the "disruption" will end in the fall of industrail civilzation.

aaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggg!!!!!!!!!!

As I said above, I fully expected to see some sort of nuclear catastrophe twenty years ago. That it didn't happen doesn't mean that some sort of awful thing can't happen. But I have learned that predictions are incredibly shaky things to nail down, and have as much to do with personal conclusions -- and biases -- as anything else.

But the problem with this, as I said, is that renewable energy sources will only ever get you 25% of the energy now being generated by oil, *at best*. The problem is not, "Is it possible to have some sort of car that runs off of renewable energy?" but, "can we maintain the current world population and standard of living with only renewable energy sources?" The answer is no, fuel cells or not.

Nuclear war is not inevitable. Running out of oil is.

trees were also required for food (fruit) and boats (to fish, or to leave the island and reach other land, thousands of sea-miles away)

anyway, as is well known, when europeans arrived they found a totally treeless island, containing a very small fairly healthy and peaceful population, and the statues all tumbled about and smashed, except for some — including absolutely huge ones — half-carved, in quarries

when questioned, the peaceful population only gave the vaguest outline of some historical catastrophe which had overcome the statue-makers => the small present-day population no longer made statues, or actually seemed to care or think much about them

the basic theory is that the society which made the statues — which was much more populous and technologically more capable — became competitively obsessed with them (the larger yr tribal statue array, the better yr future) and cut down more and more trees to erect more and more statues

well, at some point it must have become clear that the trees were not renewing themselves, that birds were leaving, that the ecology was changing drastically, and that boats were therefore more important than statues => but the local ideology was more powerful than material reality, and the statues continued to be made, in a last fatal frenzy

result: no trees... as one of the ethnologists said, easter island is not THAT big, and there are places where you can stand and pretty much see all of it => ie whoever cut down that final tree KNEW it was the last tree, and that there was no turning back

but it WAS cut down (of course there's no way of knowing if it became a roller and hoist for one last stupid statue, or the last ever boat, in a desperate probably futile bid to find the next island along)

when the trees were gone, the people turned on their gods and smashed them, and then, desperate for food in an ecology of a far more meagre kind, turned murderously — cannibalistically — on each other (there are heart-breaking beautifully made and spooky wood carvings of people clearly in the last stages of starvation...)

somehow some of them did survive this period, and put together a much smaller less ambitious self-supporting society — which of course was devastated by the arrival of europeans abt 100 years later, courtesy syphilis and standard-issue colonial rapacity complete with muskets

But so was the millennium bug, Fletrejet, according to many who 'knew.' You're fixated on a point and getting annoyed at others for either being equally fixated on another point or wanting to consider other factors. That doesn't wash.

I always figured the winners are going to be the amazon / southeast asian tribesmen. They will continue living off the jungles the way their ancestors did for thousands of years, a hard life but not too terrible.

Surviving off subsistince farming on enviromentally degraded and unreliable land is probably one of the worst ways to "live", and is what most of the world is fated to do, if they are not doing so already.

incidentally the magnetic polarity of the poles may just be abt to reverse, which will shut down the van allen belt for nobody-knows-how-long, allowing in all the sun's rays we DON'T need

Virulent fatal diseases tend to 'burn themselves out' when the affected population thins out enough to break the chain of transmission. Diseases can run like wildfire through cities, but have a hard time reaching into remote areas. Humans have lived with diseases from the start. They can't kill us off entirely unless we're reduced to a very small population that's living in fairly close proximity.

Doesn't 'about to' = 'any millenium now'?

Funny how every generation thinks that the world is about to end dating back to about, oh, at least 2000 years ago.

Well yeah, but just cause it's not going to end right now doesn't mean that it's not going to end sooner or later. It's much more arrogant to be so confident of our own species' smartness that we be immune to fucking ourselves over if something else doesn't do it for us. On a smaller timescale, people were warning for ages that the dotcom bubble was about to burst big time and yet it kept going on regardless. Until one day, it did. The more predictions of doom fall flat, the more invincible people feel, the more reckless they get, and the harder they fall, maybe.

some of them were arguing that y2k had REALLY ACTUALLY HAPPENED two years later*, but it was all being covered up...

(*in fact they may still be arguing it, except the board went password-only bcz the arguments and flaming were getting so out of hand)

I'm suprised no one has picked me up on the 'we aeroplanes' thing.

'It is little known that lying underneath one of The United States largest and most picturesque National Parks - Yellowstone Park - is one of the largest "super volcanoes" in the world.

The term "supervolcano" has no specifically defined scientific meaning. It was used by the producers of The BBC TV show Horizion in 2000 to refer to volcanoes that have generated Earth's largest volcanic eruptions. As such, a supervolcano would be one that has produced an exceedingly large, catastrophic explosive eruption and a giant caldera.

Scientists have revealed that Yellowstone Park has been on a regular eruption cycle of 600,000 years. The last eruption was 640,000 years ago…so the next is overdue. The next eruption could be 2,500 times the size of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.

...

Such an eruption would disrupt global climate by injecting millions of tons of ash into the atmosphere. Some of the ash would remain in the atmosphere for years, reflect sunlight back into space and cool the planet, significantly affecting life. In addition, a blanket of ash over a meter thick would be deposited in nearby regions and effectively smother life there...'

also there was another abt the mile-high tidal wave set off when a bunch of rock in the canaries falls into the sea: london is safe but the eastern seaboard ain't (however the really alarming thing in THIS prog wz the dinky white shorts the scientist wz wearing)

Fa-SHWAHN is going to be the name of my first child.

"The vision of CRN is a world in which nanotechnology is widely used for productive and beneficial purposes, and where malicious uses are limited by effective administration of the technology. We believe that even a technology as powerful as molecular manufacturing can be used wisely and well—but that without adequate information, unwise use will be far too common. The mission of CRN is to raise awareness of the issues presented by nanotechnology: the benefits and dangers, and the possibilities for responsible use."

On bacterial apocalypse, who was mainly responsible for stopping sars?
Was it World Health Organization : Communicable Disease Surveillance & Response (CSR)?
I heard (they) were preparing for a safety rehersal before sars made it's debut and all things considered when it was over they agreed they passed their own tests and were getting better.

what if robots become our masters?

I don't know if their efforts will amount to anything more than inspiring other research fellows, but these guys care enough to dedicate their lives working on :
creating Friendly AI