I chuckled. But surely you can fit him into one of Haymitch's categories. Earthly disaster? Virus? Other? :grin:
Virus/disease. We're smart enough to be able to survive a natural disaster at this point. At least a small group would be prepared and in a safe location. I don't believe AI has come far enough for it to destroy us the soonest. Bio-engineering and biomolecular engineering however, has. There are all kinds of microbes and viruses that are currently play things at so many places around the world; I think there will be a simple human error that lets these things propagate very rapidly. We're smart enough to avoid the natural disasters, not smart enough yet to have developed crazy AI, but our bodies have always been pretty frail, and they will continue to be.
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Population will continue to rise while resources diminish. In the end, only one thing can happen.....unless we decide to mentor Hannibal.
Population growth rates are already decreasing in industrialized countries short of immigration, Japan and Russia already have negative growth rates. It's not too hard to visualize oases of technology midst chaos.
we're like cockroaches - some form of humanity will survive until our sun explodes 800 billion years from now.
I can us suffering most of these things, but have a hard time seeing an actual extinction result from something only terrestrial.
Not sure how we're going to end, but how I'd like to end? Aliens in a sci-ish epic battle. pew! pew! pew!
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I meant violent and sustained socio-poilitical revolutions underpinned by the have-not majorities over some enlightened digital uplifting where Mark Zuckerberg is crowned the next Johannes Guttenberg by the Bay Area elite. It's currently neither sustainable nor possible for rising nations (BRIC, Turkey, Indonesia) to match consumption patterns of industrialized nations such as Japan or Taiwan. IIRC, those two countries consume half of what the average American consumes. We would need another three earths for China alone to match Japanese consumption rates. Granted, there were similar fears of a resource crunch (over copper, steel and other metals) in the 70s and that was abated by tech gains in miniaturization, computing, nanotech, and heavier uses of rare earths. It's a matter of whether you believe technology can produce even more advances out of the remaining materials we have and whether there is production capacity and quicker lead times to market in order to meet an explosive market of ravenous consumers. Then there's the food angle where hundreds of millions of people have growing preferences and tastes for meat and luxury items. It just narrows the margin for error for our existing food supplies that's heavily dependent upon consistent weather patterns, lots of cheap subsidized water, and unsustainable destruction of farmland through an oversaturation of chemicals. It's a lot to adjust to and some would inherently think it's unfair to address those issues as those factors have been emotionally attached to an abstract dream of exceptionalism that they've been taught for most of their lives. A dream which is, in fact, an unsustainable practice.
Considering all we do is sit and press buttons, i think we'll evolve into nothing more than a Mr. Potato head and eventually become so useless physically, that even small dogs would easily take us out.
