I’m not even being sarcastic. Top level US military heads are predicting a war with China by 2025. The US is already in a proxy war with another nuke superpower Russia. It’s been steadily escalating. That’s ALL 3 TOP NUCLEAR SUPERPOWERS IN A WAR TOGETHER. JOY!!!!
So my thinking is, well this might be the actual, for real, no shit, end of the world. And we’re lucky enough to be here when it happens. We’re here for the grand finale. How many souls get to witness the actual end of life on a planet. If I were a timespace traveler I would definitely count this as a point of interest.
So my thought is (again no sarcasm, as batshit as this sounds I’m serious), this might actually be a reason to not kill yourself. At least not until 2025 when we see if these predictions of war were true. But if there’s just the possibility of catching the once-in-a-4.5billion-year-planet-lifetime spectacle of the entire planet nuking itself… and you got front row seats… isn’t that a reason to live?
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Eh, might be my age showing, but I don’t get as excited as I used to for the end of the world. One came around when I was a kid, Y2K, and it was an existential threat as realistic as this one… you know what they did? They hired people like my dad to write code updates, then once they were out of the danger zone they laid all of them off
so, my cynical attitude is that humanity will carry on, cruel and indifferent as always.
Small comfort if it does come to nukes; the weapons themselves are almost entirely outdated. The US, the best funded of the super powers, hasn’t developed a new high yield Intercontinental Ballistic Missile since the 70s. I doubt China or Russia is better equipped. The trend in missile technology is towards higher accuracy directed strikes.
Which brings me to why the people I detest and myself will survive; we aren’t near any high value targets.
What I’d really be frightened of, if I was capable, is crop failures. The dust kicked up by so many bombs could set off a mini ice age, killing off 70%+ of our food. Most people are a few weeks from starvation if shortages were to hit. The most vulnerable will run out of food in days
I guess that would be a hoot, watching all these rabid capitalists eaten by their own society, literally. I have, not to be morbid, always wondered what ethical cannibalism would look like. That kind of hunger, we’d find out.
showing your age? if so, then me too. i was young when Y2K came around, and everyone was sh*tting themselves about the end of the world then lol. and then jan 1 came and ended, and not a single thing happened. all the fear and ppl going out of their minds was for nought. O_o
“my cynical attitude is that humanity will carry on, cruel and indifferent as always.”
indeed
“humanity will carry on, cruel and indifferent as always”
Yeah, as long as 2 humans survive they’ll spawn more humans and we’ll repeat this whole shitshow all over again. The only way this will end is if nukes poison the air & soil so bad that nothing grows, nothing lives, and the last remaining pockets of humans (after eating each other) will simply starve out. That itself could take generations.
As for ethical cannibalism, I don’t think it could ever work because it’s sorta like ethical farming or ethical slaughterhouses… someone will always push the boundaries in search of bigger profits. Like these so-called ethical “free roaming” chicken producers. They legally redefined the term “free roaming” to mean caged with a little bit of breathing room. So I imagine the ethical cannibal meat producers will eventually start chasing ambulances, scouring homeless camps, looking for the other dregs whom no one will notice have gone missing. They’ll probably start growing human meat, like this whole stem cell research debate that can’t get resolved. I guess my point is, anytime you try to mandate ethics, someone will always sneak around it.
Makes for good scifi though. It may be time to give Solyent Green another watch.
So…you’re bringing out the popcorn to watch what happens? lol
Unfortunately (or fortunately for the rest of the population) we are not going to be so “lucky” to have a nuclear war that ends all life on the planet in a blip. We are not going to have a nuclear war at all- anyone with a brain on all sides knows this. That is not to say humans will not end ourselves via nukes. Just don’t believe 2025 will be it.
Not popcorn, it would be with extreme sadness that I watch all the animals and trees vanish. But I’m saying objectively speaking… even on a spiritual level if you believe in things like enlightenment… The end of life on earth would be something worth witnessing for any soul seeking wisdom. I would want to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the human race was a failure. I strongly believe it is, but I cant be sure unless it truly wipes out the planet and ends the experiment.
Worry not, humans will go extinct long before all the animals and trees vanish. Even if humans set off nukes that destroy life on Earth for humans and most mammals and larger sea creatures, nature always survives in the end.
If you look at natural disasters, they wipe out the bigger mammals, but the small ones survive. The Earth will be fine. It is humans that will go extinct- eventually. Even if we aren’t dumb enough to nuke ourselves, most mammals have an extinction of 1M years, and invertebrates 11M years.
Many human civilizations have come and gone. Many earlier homo species have come and gone. Homo sapiens will eventually be replaced by something else, as we did our ancestors.
True, one comforting bit of info I read about Chernobyl is that forests & wildlife soon thrived even though humans can’t. The reason is that animals there have a lifespan of 10-20 years, maybe 30 tops, and radiation of the nuke sort takes longer before its effects really show. In other words it’s almost the perfect antidote for the scourge of humanity… trees, plants, bunnies & deer can flourish but it’s certain lingering death for people.
Only problem is if it happened on a global scale it would take out other animal life that has a longevity of 30+ years. Elephants, rhinos, hippos, some horse breeds, bird species would suffer. All because our dumbass species couldn’t stop itself from frying the planet we live on.
Not by stable countries with old politicians but depends if a terrorist group gets access to nuclear bomb. Like in Pakistan. It is about to go bankrupt and collapse. There are many terrorist groups there as well as nuclear bomb. Taliban is in neighbourhood.
Bingo. dude that’s what really worries me. Nukes are getting easier for anyone to procure. Can you imagine the rampant carnage once terrorist orgs get their hands on the technology? All these daily cases of suicide bombers will become daily cases of suicide nukes. That’s what’ll really poison the planet.
Well it should worry me more as I’m their immediate neighbor and they consider my country their sworn enemy. I’m sure that before collapsing, like their suicide bombers, their would do a nuclear suicide attack on my country. I always imagined what it might have been like for people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A very quick death. Probably painless too. They say you evaporate! Better than many suicide methods.
uh no, sorry to burst your bubble but no, it doesn’t work that way. if you were directly at the center of the blast (within half mile), then sure you died instantly. but the vast, vast majority of the ppl lived but suffered from long term chronic damage- from leukemia, cancers, radiation- to this day. so no, for the majority, it was not a quick and painless death. very much on the contrary.
70% of the victims suffered from severe burns. Imagine radioactive rain pelting down from the sky, which is what happened, severely burning most of your skin, but you live through it and suffer for decades after. yeah, not a quick painless way to go.
The great depression, the cold war, Y2K, the financial crash of 2008, the nonsense that was 2012, and now the COVID era and all this crap… I’m over the end of the world/recession scenarios, honestly.
uhm, Y2K was bullsh*t, but the great depression was a real thing. the financial crash of 2008 was a real thing. sure it was orchestrated by assholes and asshole banks, but the effects were real and devastating for the ppl who lost their jobs and housing.
It only just occurred to me, because my main gap is assuming others have read the books I have, given the subject matter you might really get into science fiction from the cold war era.
One that came to mind, reading the posts here, was Larry Niven’s Protector 1873. Niven, for those that don’t know, was the author of the incredibly popular Ringworld series. Protector focuses on creatures that we evolved from called the Pak. They live on a world closer to the center of the galaxy. They have two phases of life, the childlike time when they mate and are consumed with immediate needs, and the protector time when they look after their offspring.
Anyway they’re insanely xenophobic, getting in wars with each other so often that they literally forgot they had sent out space missions. The wars were fought between protectors, and the protectors were the only ones who could survive the irradiated landscape left by atomic weapons. Their skin thickened to armor, and they became insanely strong.
But they needed the earlier stage to keep their line going. Most protectors became suicidal when their children died, which happened quite a bit because xenophobia.
The story centers on a particular protector who isn’t ready to die, and tries to expand his interest outside of his own family line. He walks to the library of all knowledge, kept at the center of a nuclear wasteland kept that way perpetually to keep any clan from claiming it.
In that library, he finds an SOS sent from prehistoric Earth. They had lost the substance that allowed them to transform into the second stage. So he builds a space ship and goes out to fix it. Chaos naturally ensues because humans for the most part didn’t want that substance.
Socio-political scifi is my favorite: those stories which provide a cautionary satire of humankind’s foolishness. The story you described sounds like a scathing exposition of the eternal divide between humans: liberal vs conservative, or democrat vs republican, or young vs old, or hope vs fear, whatever form it takes. It’s reminiscent of HG Wells’s Eloi vs Morlock in “The Time Machine”, the Eloi being the young dreamy hippy vegetarians on the surface vs the ogrish industrialized cannibalistic Morlock underground.
The Time Machine was written in 1895 so that was some time after Niven’s Protector. And all this was nearly a century before Logan’s Run and all those great stories of the 60s-70s. I guess the point being that the human race never changes. It’s always as fucked up and on the verge of annihilation as it has always been.
I do think the invention of nukes, and the subsequent insane stockpiling of nukes by USA & Russia has fundamentally changed the “what-if” scenario into a “when” scenario. It’s just depressing to see that writers and progressive thinkers have been warning about this for literally centuries to no avail. It makes you think nothing makes a difference, we were destined for self destruction the minute we got 23 chromosomes. Or if you’ve heard of the Fermi Paradox, that’s all that needs to be said. We were fucked since the beginning of time.
ngl i will bring popcorn, and enjoy the show.
and yes, the fermi paradox confirms that WE will kill ourselves, not fucking independence day.
also when i get tired of the fireworks, ill set one off myself. just have a seat on top of it. get vaporised.