But it’s not about the second coming of God or some magical end times scenario. The end of the world is in the mercy of world leaders, itching to launch their biggest nuclear bombs at people they don’t like. And the chain reaction just snowballs from there. The end of the world is one reckless decision away.
The world will continue, humans may not.
The end of human existence is also one virus away, one large comet away, the eruption of a super volcano away, the extinction of bees away, the climate change tipping point away, a nearby gamma ray burst away, harmful AI away….
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Also the End of your personal world is a second away, car accident, disease, anything that destroys the meatsack…then the fate of the Planet Earth does not matter a jot.
It is the End of the World…as you know it Jim….
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That would not stop Christers from laying claim that any post-apocalyptic situation is the just punishment of their easily butt-hurt God and claiming to be the sole way to solve it, though.
It’s really sort of predictable. Mammal species typically last 1-2 million years until extinction.
Hominids can vary. Homo erectus lasted almost 2 million years. Neanderthals got screwed, they didn’t make 500,000 years.
Homo sapiens have been around for about 300,000 years. Statistically, we still have a little while to go.
On the other hand, neanderthals and homo erectus didn’t have social media or AI…so our mileage may vary…
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While we’re discussing The End of the World, the “AI” bubble is very nicely covered in this article:
I think we are just about guaranteed an epic depression from this multi-trillion dollar debacle of bad bets and corruption.
TL;DR quote:
There is every good reason why investment bankers will repeat the .com bubble of the 90’s or the real estate bubble in the 2000’s…capitalism is prone to cheap money fueling speculative bubbles…bubbles always burst…greed is a great blindfold…
It won’t be the end of the world…they used to come every few decades. Now they seem to be trending around every 10-15 years. Progress.
The scariest thing about AI development is the power consumption. Current world AI server power consumption could power over 450 arc furnace steel mills, projected around 945 terawatt-hours (TWh) by 2030…
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Crashes always happen in cycles.
First comes the crash, followed by saner heads introducing rules and regulations designed to prevent the worst of the excesses that caused that last crash. This is followed by a slow whittling away of these regulations by the greedy. This, of course, leads to the next crash, and the cycle perpetuates itself, ad infinitum.
For example, the Glass–Steagall Act was passed in 1933 to separate commercial and investment banking. Glass–Steagall was repealed in 1999, and this was one of the factors that lead to the 2008 financial meltdown. After the 2008 meltdown, new regulations were put in place, and as soon as the ink was dry on the new regulations the rich and powerful immediately began a campaign to water down or outright eliminate them.
Trump (and his sycophants on the Supreme Court) has put deregulation of just about everything into hyperdrive, and this will undoubtedly result in more frequent financial crises and further destruction of the environment.
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Hi! No I don’t believe that is true do to lack of physical evidence.