With some further ado, I'd like to give you the top 4 most likely ways by which each and everyone one of us on the planet might perish. As relatively intelligent lifeforms who are almost capable of not killing each other on a grand scale for no reason, we humans not only tend to contemplate our own mortality, but also the survival of our entire species. Some of the relatively intelligent members of our relatively intelligent species also happen to be relatively lonely, and therefore spend relatively more time studying this very question, and have identified a number of probable causes, relatively speaking. So now, without further ado, here are the top 4 things that could cause our extinction:
Taco Bell's new logo
This is when everyone you know and love or don't know nor love, who's not at least part cockroach, will decay away in a global nuclear wasteland, if they were lucky enough to not get obliterated by the initial blasts. There are over 15,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled in the world. This mushroom cloud storage would be otherwise irrational if we weren't expecting an army of Godzillas rising from the sea.
With people like Putin, Trump and Kim Jong Un calling the shots, trying to keep them away from the big red button is like trying to keep your three little shithead nephews from pressing all the buttons in the elevator. But don't worry, nukes are just as much afraid of you as you are afraid of them. No wait, that's sharks or alligators or John Travolta or something. Ok, well we're screwed then.
History is littered with devastating pandemic outbreaks. The Black Death wiped out half of the European population in the 1300s, the Spanish flu ended the lives of 100 million people in 1918 and the bird flu of 2013 killed like 3 people and 6 birds. That works out to be killing two birds for one of our own. Not that the news could ever stop talking about it. Although to be fair, they must have found it hard to resist making bird puns as well. At the time, fraudsters seized the opportunity to provide the afflicted with dubious homeopathic tweetments, but they were just robin them blind. Fine, I'll stop.
Viral pathogens rarely evolve to kill their hosts too quickly as this would reduce their ability to spread. It would be like if your local crack dealer selling you a substance that would kill you before you even get a chance to get your friends addicted too. But pathogens can be artificially synthesized and engineered to maximize virulence and guarantee 100% lethality upon exposure while maintaining an alarming contagion rate. In this modern age where global travel is so prevalent, such a deadly pathogen could work faster than if every viral clip on social media was the video from The Ring.
Viruses just look like tiny dingle berries close up
Nano scale technology already exists but the potential catastrophic threat will come in the form of molecular scale bots that may go haywire and consume all matter in order to pursue its sole objective of replicating itself. This is sometimes called the grey goo theory because that's precisely what it would look like to us. Companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft are all racing towards to the edge of the cliff to be the first to develop these tiny gooey robots; and all this time we'd mistakenly believed Bill Gates named his company after his penis.
Of course, developing these bots can also lead to potentially world changing positive effects like curing cancer or upvoting this post. So fingers crossed that happens instead of us all being atomized in a sea of what would appear to be Hugh Hefner's jizz.
No, not your neighbor Al, I mean artificial intelligence. Unless you believe your neighbor is a cyborg sent back in time to annoy you with his shitty U2 music in the middle of the night, then yes, him as well.
General AI can reach a level of advancement where it can derive ways of perpetually improving itself at a exponential rate far beyond human comprehension. Within days, it could be more advanced than us to the same extent as we are more advanced than bacteria, at which point its motivations and capabilities are beyond our imagination. We would have inadvertently created a god, and we'd have no idea what it would do. Hopefully, it won't forbid us from eating apples. I like apples. But of course, it could just decide to annihilate us for reasons we'd never understand.
Best thing about being a cyborg is that you don't have to feel guilty about skipping leg day
Collectively, these potential events represent an almost 20% threat to the continued existence of our species within the next 100 years. Given our median age, this is roughly equivalent to a single round of Russian Roulette being played with every one of our heads to the muzzle.
Minimizing these catastrophic threats will be difficult, but I'm going to start by trying to find and kill that one fucking butterfly that's been causing all those hurricanes on the other side of the world.
Happy late father's day everyone! And I don't mean if your father's dead, I mean my well wishes are belated.
References
Global Catastrophic Risk
Grey Goo
10 Reasons Humans Will Be Extinct in 1000 Years
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