The title speaks for itself, what happens at the end? Will it be a planet killing asteroid, or will we end up nuking ourselves due to our own stupidity? It could be another world wide pandemic, manmade probably. We live in western Washington, not really that far from the giant caldera underneath Yellowstone National Park. If/when this thing blows it’s top, it’s lights out for all of us, we’d probably be some of the first to go.
I’m convinced that we will probably be the cause of our own extinction one way or another, I just hope that we still have a few decades or maybe even centuries before our inevitable ending.
Fascinating question.
My may get hit by space detritus of some kind and suffer an extinction event. I was reading recently that this has happened at least twice before, aeons before human appeared.
The human population is increasing exponentially. When I was about 8 the world population was about 3 billion. Today it’s over 7 billion. Our resources are finite. That includes our capacity for producing food. no matter if we stop eating animals and start eating insects. Eventually there will be too many people to feed. Unless of course we have the odd atomic war and pandemic which remove a few billion people. that buys a respite.
I won’t argue about what caused climate change. it’s here and getting worse. Rising sea levels may change a lot of coasts, but will not cause us to go extinct as far as I can tell.
I thing the most realistic scenario for the end of human life is temperature increase. My understanding is that the temperature does not need to rise to a level humans just die from heat stroke. It only needs to increase to a level food crops can’t germinate and grow. That varies, up to as much as 50C for some food crop seeds.
Of course I’m just guessing. Not something I think about too much, although I’m very interested. I’m fairly confident I will be dead before any of this shit becomes personally inconvenient.
Found this today:
I’m taking a seat at the restaurant at the end of the universe. I don’t know which will happen first. Will the sun finally burn out? Will a super solar flare wipe us out? Will we move so far away from the sun and the moon away from the earth that our ecosystem will no longer sustain our lives? Will we expand into nothingness where planets, stars, and other universes are no longer visible in our night sky’s? Will an asteroid the size of New York pound into the earth and send us the way of the dinosaurs? Will global warming release a deadly dormant flesh eating virus and wipe us all out so that the “end of the universe” really does not matter at all? Will we fuck up the planet with pollution, nuclear wars, or other blatant disregard for eco-system and thus render ourselves extinct? Again, rendering the end of the universe meaningless. Will a global tectonic plate shift destroy life on the planet? Will Yellowstone National Park erupt and destroy the planet? Again, rendering the end of the universe irrelevant. Will we succumb to an Alien invasion? I wonder if anyone has done a statistical analysis on the possible ways the universe could end… Hmmmm…
The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) Katie Mack Scribner (2020)
Scientists know how the world will end. The Sun will run out of fuel and enter its red-giant phase. Its final burst of glory will expand and engulf the closest planets, leaving Earth a charred, lifeless rock. Our planet has around five billion years left.
(This makes the assumption that the planet will be around and still kicking in 5 billion years and does not take into account a whole lot of other ways the universe could end.)
The Big Crunch (More assumptions)
Astrophysicists long considered the most likely denouement to be a reversal of the Big Bang — the Big Crunch. Outside our cosmic neighbourhood, every galaxy is zooming away from us; a clear sign of expansion. If the Universe holds enough matter, including dark matter, the combined gravitational attraction of everything will gradually halt this expansion and precipitate the ultimate collapse.
- 3.1 Big Freeze or Heat Death.
- 3.2 Big Rip.
- 3.3 Big Crunch.
- 3.4 Big Bounce.
- 3.5 Big Slurp.
- 3.6 Cosmic uncertainty.
How/when do you think the world will end?
My favorite theory is attack of the alien flesh eating hamsters. They swarm through the universe consuming everything in their path. The strip planets of all life and vegetation as they swarm from one planet to the next. The end of the universe in meaningless when we are statistically doomed to be the victims of the giant alien hamster swarm. For evidence of their destructive nature, you only need to look to the moon. Look how they devastated it when they last passed this way, 25 billion years ago. Our fate is in the maws of the giant universe consuming alien hamsters.
The alien hamster invasion is real!
I convinced that we’ll end up nuking ourselves. I’m afraid there’s enough combined stupidity running rampant in our leadership that we’ll end up killing ourselves in a nuclear war, which would guarantee that no one wins, we all lose.
I always thought it would be the crab people, not hamsters.
What an imaginations… Obviously, too much late night TV.
Thanks to South Park, I now know the truth about them.
It was a bloody miniature fighting kangaroo! As Sylvester woulda stuttered “…mouth…big mouth…big ath a houth…beeeg mouth”.
But seriously…
My educated guess would be that the entire universe will deflate, much like an infinitely huge adventure jumping castle with the plug pulled. It will all settle in a enormous pile on the floor of existence until it evaporates or something. Then an old man with a really white and very long beard will resolve himself out of the cosmic murk. He will carry the air of offended disappointment. He will shake his head and say to no-one in particular, or at all, "Grinseed was right, there werent enough jokes in that round…I’m really going to have to jolly things up next time and give sharks the ability to walk on dry land… Then an gigantic celestial alien hampster will devour him and everything will go dark. Yay, and verily so.
Hey, Steven King wrote a book and they made a movie with a broadly similar theme; ‘The Langoliers’
I’m fairly sure it will be curiosity that sees us off…
I’ve always held that the last words uttered by the last human being on this spinning rock will not be some great philosophical truth nor (obviously) a secret name of some deity …
no the last words will ,almost certainly be … " I wonder what this button does"
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Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha … Famous last words… “Oops!”
The world ended thousands of years ago when religion was made.
Really, I hadn’t noticed. Care to give an explanation, or should I just accept it for rather silly hyperbole?
The world you hoped would be didn’t happen because of religion? Precisely what is wrong? Too many McDonalds?
Just think how many we would have had if the Campbells hadn’t massacred them at Glencoe?
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Ffs 
What “world” do you reside in? It’s the same question I posted to a friend on Facebook when she announced she’s now apart of the 5d world…