How will the world (or maybe just civilization) end in the next 50 years? (Poll)

You forgot the most probable end: Total global financial collapse from endlessly printing money. Leading to hyperinflation as the global reserve currency (US dollar) starts to look like the Zimbabwean Dollar.

Thus leading to the bankruptcy of the welfare state, where as, the poor and by now the total lack of middle class, having nothing left to lose, unleash massive civil unrest. Bringing the modern industrial world to it's knees!

Or

Thus leading the world powers, with rising discontent, and a glut of young, unemployed, draftable, citizens, to initiate hard line stances on foreign policy issues. Leading to a conventional World War on an unprecedented scale.

Or

You know, Aliens, from Mexico, now classified as invaders, using all those great guns we sold them in fast and furious...

Man made pandemic. Two stage Weapon grade superaids which uses plankton as an intermediary.

It's either that or Wintermute decides we're not fit to live.

aaron_sl said:

We will all die from a case of global chronic stupidity.

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QFT

Bee die off/famine & global warming will take longer than 50 years to kill us.

Also, I voted Solar Flare because afaik there's no way to know whether one will be big enough and directed toward us enough to do us any harm

what firewater burns said about the economical/financial collapse

You forgot the Robots will rise and replace us option.

Sylverlokk_sl said:

You forgot the Robots will rise and replace us option.

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Exactly. The Japanese will eventually kill us all with their robot/AI fetish. But not before they invent robot tentacle porn.

Grey goo. the first self replicating machine will consume the Earth.

Caliane_sl said:

Grey goo. the first self replicating machine will consume the Earth.

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Sounds familiar...

2024.

Hillary is the fourth year of her second term. Hilldog can do as she pleases since New Jersey Governor Cory Booker has the presidential election in the bag being that he is up against the second consecutive Santorum/Palin ticket. Somehow Republicans are still in control of the House.

China keeps inventing new ways to destroy the environment. Firing rockets to attack their air pollution away somehow fails to solve the problem. So does the impressive collectivistic demonstration of having 1.5billion people all face Japan and blow at the same time.

Storm of the century solves the problem for them, as a virtually opaque blanket of smog is blown across the pacific and deposited directly on top of California. The fattest 40% of Mexicans there die within 24 hours, the remaining 51million riot.

Hillary tries to boycott all products from China and enact strict environmental regulations. The House tries to stop her but chokes on her massive throbbing executive orders. Civil unrest breaks out across America. The doomsday prepping survivalists all say "I told you so" and take their guns and MRE's into the mountains where they die of exposure. With no one left to pay a buck a round for 5.56 ammunition for AR15's the US economy collapses. The European Union disintegrates because fuck em, that's why. The World economy follows.

A Great Leader Emerges! A man(obviously) unites the downtrodden people of the world under one government by the sheer force of his charisma and killer hairdo. Humanity bounces back and soon we are in the midst of a technological golden age that makes the Renaissance look like a biology lab at a church school. Every disease is cured. Within 15 years anyone on earth can get free pill to cure them of AIDS, cancer, malaria, tuberculosis, being black, heart disease and diabetes. The AIDS cure has a side effect though, and soon it turns its users into rape-zombies and then overrun the planet and put super-AIDS into all of our butts.

So zombies.

Pretty much this...

I voted "other" because there was no "shit will just keep on trucking with the occasional fuck-up or moderate calamity" option. Or was the intent for us to vote how we'd LIKE to see the world end? In that case, asteroid, because we'll see that shit coming weeks or even years in advance, and it would be fucking awesome how much widespread destruction would happen.

The most likely way the civilization will end in the next 50 years, if it in fact happens is either nuclear war (which seems unlikely now but in 50 years who knows), or a truly lethal pandemic. Some of the other stuff is unlikely but certainly civilization ending (no kilometer wide asteroids or gamma ray bursts likely in the next 50 years), or entirely likely and will be shitty to live through, but civilization will survive (global warming, solar flare, famine).