Which apocalyptic threats are most likely to wipe out Earth's population?

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I first experienced this while reading Alastair Reynolds - thinking about extremely long timeframes freaks me out in a way that nothing else does. Worse than spiders, darkness, heights, and contemplation of my own mortality all wrapped together.

anyway, neat infographic, but I’m going to go back to quite deliberately not thinking about this.

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I suspect that gay Mexican liberals will be what finally finishes us off.

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Well, these articles in different places refer to this as speculating about human extinction, or Earth’s extinction rather interchangeably - and they aren’t the same thing.

Easy! The “Posthumanity” scenario is pretty much 100% likely to occur if no other chance catastrophes do in the meanwhile. “Recognizably human people no longer exist due to genetic engineering and other technological advancements.” It will likely seem as “catastrophic” to humans/post-humans of that era as the apparent extinction of australopithecines are to contemporary humans. Are we really the Post-australopithecines? Or is this a semantic bugbear of coping with incremental change?

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Oh poo you call these apocalypses? Why most of them wouldn’t exterminate but 90% of us. That’s not even a genetic bottleneck.

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My vote is on stupidity.

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DRM. It’s totally going to be DRM.

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Lay off the spice and it won’t bother you so much.

Excellent point, simple evolution will convert humanity into something not recognizably human within a few tens of millions of years at most even if we revert to the stone age. Probably shorter than that if we revert to the stone age since speciation is faster among isolated populations. Mammal species last about a million years on average so I’m being very conservative.

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“The planet isn’t going anywhere. We are!” - George Carlin

George on “Saving the Planet”

Abrahamic religion nutcases causing a global religious war, which is WHY we MUST ban religion.

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