Quotations and Literature Forum

I'm fishing for interesting doomsday scenarios. Come on. Dazzle me with your creativity and/or social and political insight.

What would be a plausible chain of events leading to the extinction of the human race, or at least severe depopulation of the globe?

Are we all doomed, or will we get to see our children and grandchildren grow up to make the same mistakes as we did?

Speculate wildly. I'm not looking for hard facts. Just a big, broad 'what if'.

che

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Re vera, cara mea, mea nil refert.

I have high hopes for this new Swine Flu.

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"I learned to stick up to myself today, you're not angry are you?"

Okay, so America begins producing enough chocolate to feed the world a thousand times over, and miraculously begins to export it. Then the whole world contracts diabetes, and we all die because all the insulin producers are lying on their floors in a diabetic coma. the end.

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Sanctuary: a small safe place in a troubling world

Cd, that's actually frighteningly possible....

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-Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort. -
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Will I survive bird flu long enough to get Swine flu?

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السلام عليكم

Considering how deadly the bird flu is, the probability of recovery is not that great; but as of now, that virus is not a huge threat to the world because it does not have the ability to spread human to human. On the other hand, the swine flu "does" appear to have that human to human component; but it is not that deadly of a virus right now. My prediction, the swine flu will eventually fizzle out and show up again around September or October. What happens then is what I am most concerned about. If it mutates into a more virulent form, we might actually see a thinning down of the population like with the Spanish flu of 1918. Did that answer your question?

As far as doomsday-type scenarios, I am thinking "maybe" a nuclear war could cause that kind of devastation to the world; but even if that happened, the human race would manage to still exist...

I know, contagious diabetes, thank-you America.

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Sanctuary: a small safe place in a troubling world

The sun goes out for good.... plants die.. and chain of events follow... we all die or try to evolve as vampires and feed on each other...

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Ishrat Noor Khan

I was voting for swine flu to have a pretty large impact, of course the disease I want spread doesn't, same situation with the bird flu... My death theory is that the day before the *supposed* end of the world if we knew the date, we'd all commit suicide, then, the next day... ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAPPENS! Sort of like with the LHC, everything went smoothly, no earth-eating black hole created.

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"The sun rises every day. What is to love? Lock the sun in a box. Force the sun to overcome adversity in order to rise. THEN, we will cheer! I often admire a beautiful sunrise, but I will never consider the sun a champion for having risen."
Garth Stein

Yeah, but the LHC broke down, so they haven't really run it yet. They just pushed Armageddon a few months into the future.

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Re vera, cara mea, mea nil refert.

Chuck will roundhouse kick us all to death... at once.

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I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

Very true, very true... But still, there was even fear then... I'm just waiting for the asteroid that will come in near-earth orbit, and likely to hit, taking out a very large area, considering the thing is half a mile wide... But, it'll be about 20-30 years before it supposed to get here...

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"The sun rises every day. What is to love? Lock the sun in a box. Force the sun to overcome adversity in order to rise. THEN, we will cheer! I often admire a beautiful sunrise, but I will never consider the sun a champion for having risen."
Garth Stein

End of the world:

Everybody watches so much TV that it causes a huge electric explosion that will wipe every atom from existence.

... That's creepy how possible that actually could be...

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"The sun rises every day. What is to love? Lock the sun in a box. Force the sun to overcome adversity in order to rise. THEN, we will cheer! I often admire a beautiful sunrise, but I will never consider the sun a champion for having risen."
Garth Stein

A little more seriously now,
It's very unlikely that humankind would ever come to an end by disease.
Firstly, we, humans, are known for killing the evolution machine (depending on your perspective, we also increase it's eventual power), thus promoting more genetic difference than any other species. So it's basically impossible to kill us, there will always be some who are resistant to new diseases.
Secondly, in the past, we have almost no knowing of species being endangered by the presence of a pathogen only.
Furthermore, there is barely more diversity in microbiology now than there was a million years ago, and through all this time, without needing our new evolutive advantages, without particular medical treatment of any kind, we survived. We just tend to see diseases more often, because now we actually can see them. It's just like much of the polemics about weather and pollution, and how it will affect the world. This has all happened before, we might just accelerate it slightly, there is no need for panic though. Species have survived this before, and humans are perfect at adapting.

I guess that if we ever come to an end on this planet, it will be by it's own destruction: solar flare, blind star, cataclysmic trigger to intraplanetian autodestruction or even humankind, though I've recently started to believe we probably won't kill our own species (I don't even think we can)

We could also get exctinct by an other higher evolved species, perhaps alien

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I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.