The End of Humanity

[sneekula]

It's time again to poll the well educated folks at DaniWeb about the possible cause of the end of humanity on earth.

[Salem]

> This poll will close on 17th Sep 2010 at 16:22
Expecting something to happen then?

> Massive solar flare to blow off earth's atmosphere
Hasn't happened in 3+Bn years, so it seems unlikely to happen in the next week or two.
I doubt the sun has the means to generate the kind of flair which would cause a problem. There are well documented hits from very massive CMEs, and we're still here.

> Far away giant gamma ray burst
Far away ones aren't the problem, they happen every few days.
It's the close up ones which are the problem!

> Swine-flu or bird-flu
No disease yet has had a 100% fatality rate.
It might be a very bad day, but so long as some farmers survive, it won't be curtains for everyone.

Remember, viruses invented jet aircraft to propagate themselves more effectively ;)

> Other (explain)
Most large (to be a big problem) NEO's have been catalogued and are of no immediate cause for concern.
A big comet from the Oort cloud with minimal (or zero) warning seems the most likely contender for true extinction.
Supervolcanoes like Yellowstone would devastate a continent and trash the atmosphere to the point only a few would survive.

[MosaicFuneral]

One day while cleaning my bedroom, to my surprise, I found one Fly Agaric and one patch of Psilcoybe growing under my bed! "Do I take the red one or the blue," that was the immediate thought. I felt like a blue, so I just threw the whole patch in an omelet I happened to be cooking on a hotplate on my bed. Ate it.
Heard a knock at the door. GOTO FRONTDOOR. LOOK. GET PACKAGE. OPEN PACKAGE. I had recieved 800mg of DMT and an ounce of a White Widow/White Rhino mix. New immediate thought was, "Lets smoke it!"

The scene leading from the last paragraph involves allot of floating around in a sphere, massive metropolitan areas patterned as labyrinths, imagining myself as ruler of this place, enslavement, and then everything flickering away due to my ego.

Yep, everyone and everything is going to disappear as soon as I imagine it. :twisted: lol

[jephthah]

humanity will be reduced to scavaging and cannibalism. roving bands of blood cults will enslave others as catamites. women will be subjected to birthing babies as a food source.

[scru]

It's time again to poll the well educated folks at DaniWeb about the possible cause of the end of humanity on earth.

I do hope that was just you trying to be funny.

[jbennet]

The world will end in 2038 when the "real" millenium-bug hits.

The vast majority of embedded systems (which are designed to stay in place for decades) do not use a 64 bit integer to store time (In seconds since the UNIX epoch on 1/1/1970) and will overflow, leading to errors.

The problem is that most of these systems are mission-critical systems usually in an embedded role, meaning it will be hard to rectify this problem.

[sneekula]

Sooner or later some engineers will manage to create a smart robot. Smart enough to consider humans as a pest.

[jephthah]

The world will end in 2038 when the "real" millenium-bug hits.

eh, i doubt it's going to be a big deal. there might be a few more glitches than there were at the Y2K.... but truly mission critical stuff will be upgraded before this happens.

[sneekula]

The world will end in 2038 when the "real" millenium-bug hits.

The vast majority of embedded systems (which are designed to stay in place for decades) do not use a 64 bit integer to store time (In seconds since the UNIX epoch on 1/1/1970) and will overflow, leading to errors.

The problem is that most of these systems are mission-critical systems usually in an embedded role, meaning it will be hard to rectify this problem.

Most of that stuff will be hopelessly outdated by that time. Maybe a few museum pieces will croak.

[NicAx64]

>>This poll will close on 17th Sep 2010 at 16:22

or now it's 2010 ???? I can remember something on 2009 and something on
2012.

I can say one thing that those floks will never show up their face in TV after the
2012 , he he heh. world will run , without even us. May be you will die on 2012 but it's not the end of man kind.

So try hard and learn , work or do whatever you have to do.

Time is money and money is time. That's it.

[NicAx64]

Sooner or later some engineers will manage to create a smart robot. Smart enough to consider humans as a pest.

they will never destroy us , Yes I will believe computers will be able to think, But
what is the reason they against us. They will be there for the reason to make the
life easy. So it's under the control of the human beings. Yes they will be smarter
then humans.

But one thing is sure when after thinking machines. Job title named "Computer
programmer" will be replaced and most of current employees will be door outed
by top software companies even. Not only computer science , Teaching ,
agriculture and many more fields. :( I should learn C++ better and apply for a job
quick and earn some money quick before that happen. So I don't have time to
waste.

[GrimJack]

I just heard a theory that in about 500,000 years that so much Carbon Dioxide is being sequestered via bones on continents (bones like coral) that there will be none left in the atmosphere and the earth will just be a hot, life-less desert. The Medea Hypothesis by Dr. Peter Ward (local hero and outspoken believer in technology as the savior of mankind). The Medea Hypothesis is the opposite of the Gaea Hypothesis:

one states that the Earth is a single entity that will adjust the world to keep us alive
The other states the Earth is a single entity that has no control over her appetite and runs amok when ever she can and kills off life in cycles from snowball to hell.

[iamthwee]

I think I'll wait around waiting for the world to end and not do anything proactive within that time. Yes!

[Ene Uran]

Carbon is actually a fairly rare element. Elements like silicon, aluminum and iron are much more common. So yes, the robot would have a much better chance to survive once given enough intelligence. The robot could eventually reach the idea that there is no sense to waste that precious carbon on humans and their food.

[Ancient Dragon]

Humanity will become extinct with the next nuclear war. Nuclear war is much more likely to happen in our lifetimes than a nasty metor or solar flare.

An interesting film on the History Channel this morning speculating about why the dinosaurs became extincet some 65 million years ago. Current scientific thinking is that it was causes by a number of different actions -- volcanic ash, metors, and changing weather conditions. All those conditions could happen again, but I suspect nuclear war will wipe us out first.

[serkan sendur]

Sooner or later some engineers will manage to create a smart robot. Smart enough to consider humans as a pest.

i dont think any robot can have feelings or ego or identity. in its escence everything computer does is just loading one register with some value then move to other one, everything is just illusion. computer is not aware of what it is doing and will never be.

[jephthah]

i dont think any robot can have feelings or ego or identity ... is not aware of what it is doing and will never be.

yeah, what do you know anyhow? the human brain is just a soggy bag of electrochemical switches. voltage-gated ion channels, to be precise, a bio computer composed of hydrocarbons.

besides, don't you have someone to stalk or a stripper bar to go to? I'll take opinions on future trends in AI from someone with a little more credibility, if you dont mind.

.

[serkan sendur]

i dont think science was able to explain development of identity yet.
you are talking just to oppose me. if they knew where identity comes from, they would be able to cure schizophrenias.

[MosaicFuneral]

Defective AI in a robot might come from some sort of electric components suffering a voltage depression effect, and then creating missteps in logic that at first seem like "self-awareness." But being defective they'd eventually wreck themselves or crash.

[Ancient Dragon]

Mr. Data had nearly human qualities when he left Star Trek. Quite a few gadgets invented on that show have now come to pass, so maybe it wasn't so far off with Mr. Data either.

[scru]

yeah, what do you know anyhow? the human brain is just a soggy bag of electrochemical switches. voltage-gated ion channels, to be precise, a bio computer composed of hydrocarbons.

You need to get out more.

[vmanes]

Attack of the killer zombies. That's what's gonna do us in.

[NicAx64]

Humanity will become extinct with the next nuclear war. Nuclear war is much more likely to happen in our lifetimes than a nasty metor or solar flare.

Oh really ! then think who invented this stupid nuclear thing ? who throw nuclear waste to the oceans ?

anyhow that's an old story. Now the no .1 nation who can't sleep in peace is
AMERICANS ! . Too sad , elder generations of Americans make these weapons
and invent those technologies , but current generations are suffering from it.The truth is Americans are the no.1 feared nation in this planet.

I have read an article about this nuclear bomb electronics and assembly , it's said that any baby who had a simple physics + electronic knowledge can easily
assemble a mass damage nuke with the devices and components in the open
market. High energy Physics expert said in that article not me.

Nuclear secrets will no be longer secrets !
Think if you can assemble a nuke as you can assemble a computer !
Each nation have troubles with each other !

so yes ! Earth is in a great danger ! And there is no explanation after the death.

[NicAx64]

think about the current unemployment problems !
ppl will eventually unemployed and died with starved ,when those robots
are going to write computer programs instead of humans.

as many nations honer that too . Even they don't computerize jobs
even they can , because of this employment problem. Think about the future
teenagers will fail these problems.The problems that they never created.

we are in an exponential times ,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUMf7FWGdCw

Everything have to be changed ! Eduction system even , then those traditional
computer science subjects today a learner is learning will not be useful in the
future. what if first year courses contents will be outdated when you come to the
3rd year ? yes that will happen.

and brain == 100$ computer in 2010 .

These are the current problems in front of human beings.

[sneekula]

Humanity will become extinct with the next nuclear war. Nuclear war is much more likely to happen in our lifetimes than a nasty metor or solar flare.

An interesting film on the History Channel this morning speculating about why the dinosaurs became extincet some 65 million years ago. Current scientific thinking is that it was causes by a number of different actions -- volcanic ash, metors, and changing weather conditions. All those conditions could happen again, but I suspect nuclear war will wipe us out first.

With Pakistan seemingly falling into the hands of extremist religious elements, it won't take too long and they will have their hands on the nuclear arsenal there. India will have to respond.

[GrimJack]

I was just thinking about this when I ran across this quote:

I don't think we're likely to get much more than a terabit per second of bandwidth out of any channel, be it wireless or a fibre-optic cable, because once you get into soft X-rays your network card becomes indistinguishable from a death ray...

- will gamers be the death of life on earth?

[vegaseat]

The Spanish Flu after WW1 was mostly a bird flu and killed about 50 million people worldwide. Of course nobody in those days even knew what a virus was.

In this modern age influenza kills about 36,000 people in the USA every year. Of course mostly the elderly and very young.

[GrimJack]

The difference between the Spanish Flu of WW1 and modern flues is the Spanish Flu killed the healthy leaving the elderly, the very young and the very, very lucky (genetic or otherwise) alive; the SF co-opted the immune system of the healthy into attacking the body - conversely, it might be that the immune system went into overdrive and attacked everything; experts disagree.

[sneekula]

Genetically altered grain for instance could create something like a misfolded protein called a prion. This was the agent that caused mad-cow-disease in the brains of cows and other animals and then spread to humans. It is more hideous than the flu because it takes several years to develop and the prions are not destroyed by cooking. With the ever increasing population, there is pressure to improve grain yields by genetic means.

Just trying to be cheerful!

[Ene Uran]

Genetically altered grain for instance could create something like a misfolded protein called a prion. This was the agent that caused mad-cow-disease in the brains of cows and other animals and then spread to humans. It is more hideous than the flu because it takes several years to develop and the prions are not destroyed by cooking. With the ever increasing population, there is pressure to improve grain yields by genetic means.

Just trying to be cheerful!

Something like that, where you mix old fashioned greed and modern science could very well spell disaster! A new Hollywood movie is born!