Apocalypse never

A helpful reminder, in the horrible clickbait culture that wants to scare the shit out of you in order to get your attention for three minutes:

Human predictions of the apocalypse: 1,000,000,000s

Number of times it came true: 0

Predicting the end times: it's merely our programming. It's what we do. It's what we pay attention to. There is nothing different about modern predictions. This is simply human nature at work.

If you think your prediction is somehow different, please reference the table above. You're not special, and you and your human sources of information are definitely not immune to this. It's part of our DNA.

Meh. The only difference between us and all the other creatures that have faced extinction is we are looking for it.

May I remind you of that time oxygen almost killed everything...

[YOUTUBE]qERdL8uHSgI[/YOUTUBE]

So, oxygen was the first lethal pooticle.

Undertoad;1002953 wrote:

If you think your prediction is somehow different, please reference the table above.

Note that the only predictions for which that table is applicable are those which predict the elimination of all humans.

If you quibble, you think your prediction is different! :D But it's not. Enjoy.

DanaC;1002954 wrote:

May I remind you of that time oxygen almost killed everything...

Man, I hate when that happens.

If you don't know when it's coming you must worry every day.

sexobon;1002957 wrote:

So, oxygen was the first lethal pooticle.

:thumbsup:

Undertoad;1002970 wrote:

If you quibble, you think your prediction is different! :D But it's not. Enjoy.

I'm not predicting; I'm just saying that it relies solely on the fact that humans still exist. There have been many predictions of disasters which came true, but didn't extinct the species, and there have been many species extincted, who probably didn't predict it.

All it says is that nobody who predicted the extinction of humanity was right, which is pretty much a tautology, if claimed by a human.

:| It is a statement about human behavior, not actually a logic or math problem to be solved.

If the scientists are right about the history of the earth, then logic tells us the future will hold more cataclysmic events that could very well wipe us out. However predicting them is a whole different matter so for now, "the end is nigh", remains wishful thinking.

I know exactly where I want to be when the world comes to an end and I know precisely when that will be; but, I'm not telling anyone 'cause they might take my spot.

So when it happens you'll be spot on?

It'll be a one party win-lose situation.

Where would the safest place be, for, say, an asteroid strike? Tall mountain? What's the expectation?

Having the best seat in the house to watch the end come.

I'm just here for the entertainment.

Undertoad;1003032 wrote:

Where would the safest place be, for, say, an asteroid strike? Tall mountain? What's the expectation?

The International Space Station I'd imagine. I heard Elvis is up there at the moment, hiding from the IRS.

Shhhhh, don't rat out the king.

I ain't nothin' but a hound dog ;)

Squawk;1003050 wrote:

The International Space Station I'd imagine. I heard Elvis is up there at the moment, hiding from the IRS.

The ISS would be a slow death instead of a fast one on Earth. Not sure if they would burn up in the atmosphere first because a wiped out Houston isn't doing routine controlled burns to keep them in orbit, or if they would run out of food first. I suspect they would burn up first, but that's just a guess.

Undertoad;1003015 wrote:

:| It is a statement about human behavior, not actually a logic or math problem to be solved.

But if it were reworded to apply to anything other than extinction of humanity, it wouldn't have such a spotless track record (and would require actual research to come up with the number).

There's also a human tendency to ignore or discount warnings.

glatt;1003064 wrote:

The ISS would be a slow death instead of a fast one on Earth. Not sure if they would burn up in the atmosphere first because a wiped out Houston isn't doing routine controlled burns to keep them in orbit, or if they would run out of food first. I suspect they would burn up first, but that's just a guess.

The book Seveneves provides an interesting, if wildly improbable, exploration of the premise of the ISS being a survivor of a global apocalypse.

Happy Monkey;1003077 wrote:

The book Seveneves provides an interesting, if wildly improbable, exploration of the premise of the ISS being a survivor of a global apocalypse.

Did you enjoy that book?

Happy Monkey;1003076 wrote:

But if it were reworded to apply to anything other than extinction of humanity, it wouldn't have such a spotless track record (and would require actual research to come up with the number).

:eyeroll:

Alrighty then.

The statement is 100% accurate to complete extinction;

And yet, that doesn't stop the many predictions of complete extinction;

Which, obviously, gives us a perspective on predictions that only apply to a smaller number of humans, or a smaller region of the world; those predictions are perhaps only almost entirely wrong but that can't be mathematically proven.

There's also a human tendency to ignore or discount warnings.

:eyeroll:

Yes, whole point of the thread: it's a good idea to do exactly that, for all 100% apocalyptic warnings, and most of the rest as well.

Y2K: it wasn't necessarily going to kill ALL of us, capisce?

glatt;1003078 wrote:

Did you enjoy that book?

Part 1 was quite good, hard science fiction, like I expect from Stephenson. Part 2 was a wild change in direction, that felt like the pilot for a SF TV show - more Star Trek than 2001. I probably would have enjoyed it more if it weren't tied to the first half. But overall, I did enjoy it, and will look for the sequel it quite blatantly set itself up for.

Undertoad;1003079 wrote:

Y2K: it wasn't necessarily going to kill ALL of us, capisce?

Was the lesson you took from Y2K that all of the work that was done to prepare for it by upgrading out-of-date software, and testing important systems, was wasted?

Or that institutions would have spent the money to do all that naturally, even if they hadn't been warned?

Well here we go, 780,000 years ago the earths magnetic field switched poles. 40,000 years ago it tried but snapped back. Meh, so the Boy Scouts will turn their compasses around, no big deal, right?

The Earth’s magnetic field protects our planet from dangerous solar and cosmic rays, like a giant shield. As the poles switch places (or try to), that shield is weakened; scientists estimate that it could waste away to as little as a tenth of its usual force. The shield could be compromised for centuries while the poles move, allowing malevolent radiation closer to the surface of the planet for that whole time.

Oh, that sucks.

Daniel Baker, director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, one of the world’s experts on how cosmic radiation affects the Earth, fears that parts of the planet will become uninhabitable during a reversal.

I wonder if that includes sexobon's spot?

The vast cyber-electric cocoon that has become the central processing system of modern civilization is in grave danger. Solar energetic particles can rip through the sensitive miniature electronics of the growing number of satellites circling the Earth, badly damaging them. The satellite timing systems that govern electric grids would be likely to fail. The grid’s transformers could be torched en masse. Because grids are so tightly coupled with each other, failure would race across the globe, causing a domino run of blackouts that could last for decades.

Oh no, watching netflix by candle light.

No lights. No computers. No cellphones. Even flushing a toilet or filling a car’s gas tank would be impossible. And that’s just for starters.

The ultraviolet inhibitors in you window caulking don't stand a chance. :eek:

glatt wrote:

Did you enjoy that book?

I'd second what HM said--the first 2/3 of it was great. The last bit was nuts, and completely stylistically different. Not bad on its own, just frustrating that it was pretending to be a conclusion to the first part. What it really feels like is there were three books, but the second was radically different, and maybe none were long enough, so they said "let's split the second book into the back end and the front end of books 1 and 3."

Speaking of Stephenson, I also just finished "The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O" which he actually co-wrote with a female author known for slightly-romanticized historical fiction. Her influence was evident, and jarring, and also made Stephenson's usual style jarring by comparison. I finished it without complaint, but I probably won't get the (again, clearly set up for) sequel.

I present for your consideration that humans are extremely good at ignoring obvious, clear and present dangers which they are actually, fully aware of.

Here is a factoid which has faced varying degrees of dispute about scale and impact, which therefore you can be easily dismissed: the Roman Empire was aware of lead poisoning--its causes and effects--and yet continued to not only deliver water through lead pipes, but actually eat off of lead dishes. Why did they do that , and *how* could that even be possible?

How is it that, although an individual human will be aware that the leopard in the tree is going to jump down and eat you, a *group* of humans doesn't have this same instinct, collectively?


I would argue with equal veracity as your OP claims, that human culture is *very, VERY good* at ignoring threats.

Happy Monkey;1003081 wrote:

institutions would have spent the money to do all that naturally, even if they hadn't been warned?

They were doing that all along. No additional "warning" needed. And then this industry issue turned into a widespread panic that it was pretty likely major systems would collapse.

Did I tell the story before: mom had a party that night. I told her, why not play a joke. Have someone slip away one minute before midnight, and at then end of the countdown, have them hit all the breaker switches.

It worked as a joke, because everyone considered it plausible.

Major media gave us to-do preparation lists and quotes from politicians saying it could be trouble.

Flint;1003088 wrote:

I would argue with equal veracity as your OP claims, that human culture is *very, VERY good* at ignoring threats.

So I guess the question is when they become apocalyptic threats. I guess we could use any disaster or problem that led to broad calamity. Maybe the Japanese tsunami is at that level? Of a thing that was pretty apocalyptic that was ignored? Other examples?

Happy Monkey;1003080 wrote:

Part 1 was quite good, hard science fiction, like I expect from Stephenson. Part 2 was a wild change in direction, that felt like the pilot for a SF TV show - more Star Trek than 2001. I probably would have enjoyed it more if it weren't tied to the first half. But overall, I did enjoy it, and will look for the sequel it quite blatantly set itself up for.

Spot on.

Undertoad;1003090 wrote:

They were doing that all along. No additional "warning" needed.

I am not confident that that is true, to say the least. There were large scale Y2K efforts in the industry in the very late 90s, which should have been long over if they had been doing it all along. Many critical infrastructure systems are very old legacy systems, which are expensive to change - including pulling people out of retirement. I do not trust that an engineer predicting a potential issue would have had as many expensive updates like that funded as did the general alarm raised.

The majority of the advice given to the general public was similar to that given for a potential blizzard - a couple days' food and water in case of power or other infrastructure interruption. It was covered more breathlessly because computers are more exotic than weather, but the actual advice given was usually appropriate.

I did test my personal computer in late 1999 (I forget if it was win95 or 98, in either case it was the latest patch set) by setting the date to a minute before Y2k, and it crashed when the time came, even though the Y2K fixes were distributed by Microsoft in December 1998.

If that could happen, it is not unreasonable to prepare for the possibility that it could have happened to a computer that was doing something important.

"Why are you snapping your fingers?
"It prevents tiger attacks."
"But there are no tigers here!"
"It is working!"

Because it's impossible to prove a negative, I can't show that there weren't going to be problems without the panic. There might well have been. I'm saying they wouldn't have been apocalyptic.

Like your situation. MOST WIN 95/98 boxes were not patched for any Y2K problems these OSes had. Luckily, there was a workaround: reboot.

That's it. Reboot! OMG Apocalypse? No!! If you ran Win 95 and didn't have to reboot on a particular day that would be a good day for you!!!

But you have gone to the trouble of *imagining* an apocalyptic result (what if my system was doing something important!) and, that's exactly how this works. Voila apocalypse.

(J'ever talk to those legacy programmers? I knew some. They were doing global search and replace in COBOL code to prevent the checks from being printed with "19" instead of "20" in front of the year. The panic became more costly than the problem when it left the realm of the experts.)

Undertoad;1003144 wrote:

But you have gone to the trouble of *imagining* an apocalyptic result (what if my system was doing something important!) and, that's exactly how this works. Voila apocalypse.

I didn't imagine my computer doing something important, I knew that computers do important things and that my computer, a "modern" OS with the patch installed for this particular issue, still crashed. It may well have been a driver or firmware issue, rather than OS, but the point isn't assigning blame, it's acknowledging that computer systems are very complicated, and the advice to prepare for some level of infrastructure interruption was appropriate.

(J'ever talk to those legacy programmers? I knew some. They were doing global search and replace in COBOL code to prevent the checks from being printed with "19" instead of "20" in front of the year.

That might be enough for something that only prints the current date, like checks or receipts, and I'm sure there was plenty of that to do, but that would be a dumb solution for anything that stored historical data (1989 becomes 2089?), and would be irrelevant to the real concern - anything that compared dates, and would behave in an unpredictable manner if the comparison came out negative.

If they told you that all they were doing was cosmetic, they were either working only on the simplest of the software, or they were exaggerating the simplicity in order to make fun of the hype.

It worked, there were no tigers!




Does anyone take my overall point who doesn't just want to be endlessly argumentative?

I understand your point, I just disagree.

Forgive my blunt analysis, but this is what I am hearing: It sounds something like survivorship bias, although in a way that can only be defined by future events, i.e. "there's never been (in *my* lifetime, or in the short recorded history of modern man--a mere infinitesimal sliver of time!) an extinction level event (or: insert other definition of the threat level), therefore there will never be one, therefore all conversations that reference this topic are D.O.A., ipso facto.

But it only takes one, right? And *by definition* it hasn't happened yet.

I swear I did not know that someone has already written a book about this

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10793575-apocalypse-not

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Not-Everything-Nostradamus-Rapture/dp/1936740001

Flint;1003154 wrote:

But it only takes one, right? And *by definition* it hasn't happened yet.

Yup.

My dad predicted he was going to die many times. Then he did.



The history of life on our planet is of verdant flourishings and cataclysmic extinctions. Sometimes the stuff that life was doing caused the extinction by fundamentally altering the environment it relied upon for survival. Other times 'external' forces came together to create an environment that no longer supported a given type of life. Sometimes just a few species, occasionally most of the species.

Saving the possibility that humans might find a way to self sustain on other worlds, sooner or later we will face extinction.

One thing to keep in mind about grand-scale destruction is it has tended in the past not to be recorded very thoroughly, because the people going through it had other shit to deal with at the time.

Take, for example, the varying legends of a massive flood that wiped out somewhere between "a whole lot" and "all but two" humans on the planet. In its most generic form, the devastating flood story almost certainly has a level of truth to it, because it shows up in different forms in different cultures all around the same point in (very poorly-recorded) history. Meanwhile, forensic genealogy (i.e. mitochondrial DNA tracking) has proven that humans nearly went extinct 150,000 years ago, and again 70,000 years ago. We can even prove that as of 1.2 million years ago, we had either been heavily culled in an unknown event, or else spent the majority of our early development as both a rare and far-flung creature--an endangered species that somehow managed to migrate a hell of a lot.

Statistically speaking, you only have to go back roughly 5,000 years before every single one of us is down to a single common ancestor, which means we could have had non-apocalyptic but nonetheless really-fucking-awful levels of death countless times in our past, and would still only need a couple thousand years to re-establish ourselves.

We're sturdy, and resourceful, and as a species I think we'll survive whatever comes next--but near-extinction events are practically an inevitability. It's also probably not something we can do much about anyway. The Earth abides.

Not sure if it's what you referred to, but, there were more than two people on the ark. There was Noah and his wife, and his sons and their wives.

Just being contrary and disagreeable.:D

Abiding...If it's good enough for The Dude, it's good enough for me.:cool:

Imma just leave this here.

Oh noes! Here's one currently making the rounds (again). Enjoy.

Newsweek: EARTH’S MAGNETIC POLES SHOW SIGNS THEY’RE ABOUT TO FLIP—EXPOSING HUMANS TO RADIATION AND PLANET-WIDE BLACKOUTS (warning autoplay video at the link)

AND WOW this one could be really really bad!!

CBC: "When our magnetic field flips, say goodbye to modern life"

News.com.au: "Earth’s magnetic poles could be about to flip sparking chaos and mass blackouts"

Weekly Observer: Destruction of cell phones and TVs if the magnetic poles of the earth are reversed!

Goodbye to modern life! Chaos and mass blackouts! Destruction of consumer electronics! OH MY FUCKING GAWD!!!

Are you all IGNORING this threat?

Do you keep your bathtub filled so there is potable water available? Well you better get on that pronto! Preparation is going to be critical!

The likelihood of it happening now is unknown. I'd say it's small, but I would be bullshitting you because I have no idea. But from what I understand (without reading any of your links) is that the increased solar radiation in some areas would make vast swaths of the planet uninhabitable. It would suck if it was someplace you lived. And it would suck if a billion people wanted to come to your hood because they were being fried at home.

But how likely is it? Beats me. I can't do anything about it anyway. Except maybe buy a sailboat and learn to sail so I can get to someplace safe without competing with a few hundred million other people who also want to get there.

Undertoad;1003255 wrote:

Oh noes! Here's one currently making the rounds (again). Enjoy.

You were warned.
The International Geomagnetic Reference Field model from 1900 to now is interesting. Probably explains why gravity varies.

Ah, right sorry! I had ignored that threat.

NASA says it's no problem and that when a flip occurs it's over hundreds or thousands of years. Who you gonna believe, Chicken Little or Need Another Seven Astronauts?