rate the chances that you will experience a cataclysmic, world-threatening event before you're 70

Voted resource scarcity due to global warming. 60% chance before I'm 70, but I reckon 90% by 2100.

Oh good. I was struggling to think of a topic to bring up at Thanksgiving.

that's 34 years away for me. i'd say there's pretty much 100% chance of something climate-change-related further fucking up the planet and creating massive numbers of climate refugees with associated xenophobic unrest / violence / military-police-statery. hoping i'll be lucky enough to be dead before the worst of it hits but i suspect i won't be

arguably we're already living through a cataclysmic, world-threatening climate change, it's just that it hasn't directly impacted most of us ilxors yet

if it depended on individuals' ability to assess risk, predict the future and calculate probabilities then I'd be more concerned

there is no benefit to thinking about the apocalypse (unless it helps you to enjoy your unapocalyptic life more) and lots of ways in which it can be harmful

surely the benefit of thinking about the apocalypse is trying to act to change it? otherwise humanity is basically happily oblivious cattle on the road to the slaughterhouse

you can stop climate change without envisioning the end times

Assuming the likelihood of a breach in the space time continuum which causes my 70th birthday to happen sometime before January 20, I'll go with 0%.

xp there's really lots of specific issues & subsuming them all into a cosmic existential dread serves no purpose imo

xp wish I had that much faith in President Trump

there is no benefit to thinking about the apocalypse (unless it helps you to enjoy your unapocalyptic life more) and lots of ways in which it can be harmful

― ogmor, Wednesday, November 23, 2016 11:00 AM (fifty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes this

also I find myself answering this as if I were a contestant on card sharks, "Turtle, I think that is a low number I will go w 1%"

But there's also a psychological difficulty with climate change in that it's quite easy to slip out of thinking about it on a day-to-day basis. I don't think an excess of apocalyptic thinking around climate change is currently the problem. We could do with more conscious anxiety.

100%

http://thebulletin.org/timeline

I'd like to think there were solutions to the problems of compartmentalisation besides apocalyptic anxiety but who knows

and the whole issue of there being piles of nuclear weapons all over the world, controlled in many cases by completely insane people (that category will soon include the united states), isn't even, really, something that most people think about. it's been superceded by other things, understandably

How do we know when it's "cataclysmic" -- massive reduction in world population?

i'm in my mid 5oS and it's def happening. fine w/ being dead before then tho

lived through 9/11 so i guess that makes it 100%

lived through the closure of What.cd so i guess i'm in the same boat

10%

hate hysterics

can we have a companion thread to discuss if one is instantly killed by w/e event does it count as experiencing it

the continued existence of humanity is a cataclysmic, world-threatening event.

dmac, have you caught up w/ the news of late?

If WW3 is going to match WW2 in terms of the proportion of the total body count to the total human population, it would have to kill 210 million people.

I was going to vote 50% but remembered that I'm going to be 45 next month, so that's only 25 years away. Upped it to 70%. (Of course, I'm diabetic, so I figure my odds of seeing 70 are below 50% anyway.)

80% it just seems really likely but nothing in life is certain

nb that even without climate change as the likely culprit i think a dispassionate reading of history suggests that civilization is tenuous and cataclysms are likely in any time

Atypically for ilx, that's a mere 8 years away for me. I voted 0%, but only because I decided it was nearer to reality than 10% would be.

(the likelihood of any of us experiencing something that wipes out 2-3% of the world's population in our lifetimes is hopefully close to zero)

the number of cataclysmic, world-threatening events that have been averted due to conscientious worrying vs. the total number of years wasted in fear and anxiety by the paranoid over the course of human history

pandemics, man. don't forget pandemics.

someone born in 1946 (yr after ww2 ended) would be 70 now

has that person experienced a cataclysmic / societal shifting event (if so, what) ?

dmac, have you caught up w/ the news of late?

― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 23 November 2016 17:42 (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yep i just dont like to masturbate over it

depends on where they lived. in the US probably no. in the former USSR? or the Middle East or many places in Africa or Southeast Asia, etc. xp

depends on where they lived. in the US probably no. in the former USSR? or the Middle East or many places in Africa or Southeast Asia, etc. xp

― Mordy, Wednesday, 23 November 2016 18:30 (fifty-six seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this poll is on ilx

someone born in 1946 (yr after ww2 ended) would be 70 now

has that person experienced a cataclysmic / societal shifting event (if so, what) ?

the cold war was a thing? constant reminders that the world may be nuked tomorrow? teaching grade school kids to hide under desks in case of an a-bomb?

not easy to quantify, but still, i think it had a major psychic impact on multiple generations the world over.

the threat of a cataclysmic event != a cataclysmic event

deems otm

maybe cataclysm is simply outsourced.

like fractional banking, technology brings us fractional cataclysms

dunno, like 0%?

depends on where they lived. in the US probably no. in the former USSR? or the Middle East or many places in Africa or Southeast Asia, etc. xp

Yeah, this gets closer to it for me. What do we mean by "cataclysmic?" Culturally we always revert to Hollywood post-apoc visions of destroyed societies and wastelands but, as I've read elsewhere, that shit exists for large parts of people existing literally at this second. And they still exist thru it. For whatever reason(human brain wiring, cultural myopia, intestinal problems, et al), the apocalypse is only something we consider happening to us, of when 3rd World conditions happen in the 1st World, to put it broadly.

And I don't think we'll nec have WWIII over more regional insurgencies popping up hither and yon. Even if there was another American Civil War, you wouldn't have massed armies of uniformed troops blasting away at each other rather than smaller, regional insurgent groups fighting it out in the countryside or suburbs.

I am more concerned about a catastrophic incident directly aimed at me or my family than I am about a global cataclysmic event.

Lmao NV

Voted 100%. Not because of masturbating over bad news, but the probability is just very, very high. I believe mankind is unable to learn from history, and that life on this planet is cyclical. It's rather arrogant to think this/our generation will not experience a disastrous global event tbh. 'We're' not exactly showing we learned from past mistakes. There has never not been war, there have never not been loonies in powerful positions etc etc.
That's macro. Micro, closer to home: not sure. But evidently something is changing for the worst, all over the globe. Never before have I been confronted with such virulent racism that hits my everyday life, nor the reality tv politics and fact free/trolling/fake news shit entering the collective consciousness and having such a huge impact.

I'm 2200 people could read history pdf's about this period as a build-up to some sort of catastrophe, and think "ah well, it was only thirty years". But those will be my last thirty years alive. So 100%.

But they'll never take my what.cd flacs away from me

TL;dr: the end of this interbellum is nigh(ish)

" It's rather arrogant to think this/our generation will not experience a disastrous global event tbh. "

i feel quite the opposite tbph. the louder the doommongering the greater the ego kick, albeit by proxy or wev

But there's no precedent. I don't think a generation has lived on earth in the last 2000 years that didn't experience a shock event. Why should we? We're certainly not making an effort.

Why put your head in the sand deems, if LCFC's PL win wasn't a sign the world is ending I don't know what is.

wasnt liverpool tbf

Well there's "cataclysmic events" and complete, nuclear holocaust

one day i'm going to die and everybody i love is going to die and we will never see each other again and there will be nothing for eternity and that's probly cataclysmic enough

17 years away for me -- I figure it's 50/50 or better, but I voted 40% to make myself feel better.

i've got 42 years to go- not surprisingly thinking about this stuff occupies more of my idle brain time than i'd like. i've also mostly mentally settled on 60 as a 'decent old age to get to' instead of 70 :(

Yeah I think about this question way too often.

100%

Voted 0%

honestly the fact that humanity still exists almost makes me want to believe in the existence of a providential god, which these days seems crueler than no god at all. but mostly i think we've just been "lucky" up until now; we haven't had the capacity for self-annihilation for all that long, really.

voted 10%. We're gonna need another poll to determine what "cataclysmic, world-threatening" means. I would say the last thing that fits this definition that happened is ww2. As bad as things get, I just don't see it getting that bad in the next 30-something years. We are very slowly going in the right direction despite all the dumb and irreparable shit we are causing to ourselves and this planet. I mean, things have always been terrible for most people, that is just the human experience.

Ppl lived thru WW2, but it wasn't a great deal of fun. Voted 80%.

we are very slowly going in the right direction

https://openclipart.org/image/2400px/svg_to_png/110257/citaton-needed.png

gotta zoom out pretty far on the ol moral arc these days

longer life spans, generally less world-wide poverty, that kind of stuff. Don't get me wrong, humanity obviously still needs a lot of work to get into any kind of decent shape, and the destruction of the world's ecosystems seems to still be going pretty strong, but you know, not everything is terrible. Things have certainly been way worse.

xp

Things have been way worse before, if you only consider the the general condition of humans everywhere, but never before have the natural systems within which we are embedded been so weakened and unstable as now.

I think that's true, but the "cataclysmic, world-threatening events" that those will cause seem likely to be more than 30 something years away. I won't pretend to be any kind of expert, but human has proven to able to adapt to many extreme situations. People will die, but we will figure it out a way out of this eventually. It's what we do. The only thing that will stop us is the heat death of the universe.

(maybe)

gotta zoom out pretty far on the ol moral arc these days

― difficult listening hour

tough to do because there are all these potential endpoints, and most of them is because humans as a species don't have very good judgment, but i'm really not convinced humanity will recognizably exist in 100 years.

climate change isn't a discrete cataclysmic event but could eventually cause one. went with 30%

one day i'm going to die and everybody i love is going to die and we will never see each other again and there will be nothing for eternity and that's probly cataclysmic enough

― brex yourself before you wrex yourself (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 23 November 2016 21:31 (two days ago)

Genuine truth-bomb.

Uh tbh most adults get that, surely

Be funny if we're all dead before this poll closes

looked up nuclear blast radii and their effects on midsized american cities today. disappointed that a hiroshima-sized bomb would merely leave me with 2nd/3rd degree burns and crawling over debris rather than immediately incinerating me. as i'd much prefer the latter i'm pleased to read that most hydrogen bombs would probably turn me to ash in about 2 seconds.

doing fine though! honestly. we all die someday. as mentioned. and the self/ego is an illusion, etc

you all should order a pizza tonight- that's a thing you can do, it's pretty awesome

also a lot of life is actually very mundane- i have been freaking out a ton lately about this and evil things do happen but at the same time, sometimes life is just... boring. and that's a good thing

Cataclysmic = affecting our ability to post to ILX.

lol

The Ilx server needs moving a bit further away from the Yellowstone caldera blast zone, otherwise the Trump thread might get destroyed:p

isn't seattle gonna be destroyed by an earthquake in like 10 years

Where do we keep the tape backups?

Ppl lived thru WW2

hmm

everybody making a pt abt relative geography shaping this otm i think ?, like w/o having to taxonomise what cataclysm means things are probably pretty apocalyptic nothing-will-be-the-same-again feeling anywhere where resources are scarce or where bombs are going off, ie to those poll voters. i feel like nuclear war just became 5000x more likely & the thing where some kind of implicit ice barrier erodes & the world is just immediately & cascadingly a different planet seems p feasible. maybe change this poll to before 2017 ???

Has there ever been a generation of humans that didn't ruminate about whether they might be the second-to-last?

(and that there was probably nothing they could do about it? woe is us, cursed to roam this etc.)

the people on this board will almost certainly be fine imo

i don't think it'll be so bad for humans who are born after the cataclysm bc this will be the only life they know. it'll be hardest for those of us who remember what it was like now and how great it was.

Like the younger people in this rather good film http://www.gstatic.com/tv/thumb/dvdboxart/75293/p75293_d_v8_aa.jpg

this is how i feel abt the switch from cd -> mp3s xp

i feel lucky to have experienced how good things can be and have been, but it will be especially frustrating to live with this (likely) suffering and misery, just knowing that it didn't *have* to be this way. hopefully can drive and motivate me politically?? (?)

things will be fine.

Has there ever been a generation of humans that didn't ruminate about whether they might be the second-to-last?

Respectfully, this is such a trite dad argument. It's exactly the kind of banal hindsight fallacy that would be taken as received wisdom on places like Reddit. Like others said, other generations weren't facing climate change with denialist resolve. I don't think global climate change will likely reach cataclysmic proportions in the next 30 years, but in the next 80 I'd say odds are approaching fair to middlin'.

I don't know, how many people have to starve before it reaches a cataclysm?

Wow, good job reading a bunch of nonexistent sentiment into my question!

Speaking for myself, I'm defining a "cataclysm" for the purposes of this thread as 2-3% global population loss.

So, roughly 200 million deaths at current global population of roughly 7 billion. Sounds cataclysmic enough to me to qualify.

http://www.livescience.com/14251-200-million-rapture-12.html

Be funny if we're all dead before this poll closes

― Never changed username before (cardamon)

if a punchline lands and nobody is there to hear it, is it still funny?

watched "pale cocoon" last night. touched on a lot of thoughts i've been having lately, particularly wrt this thread.

np: frank zappa, _does humor belong in a post-apocalyptic hellscape?_

just the other day i was wondering which science fiction dystopia seems most plausible from the perspective of 2016 and--if you allow for some imaginative license--it almost seems like it might be The Time Machine.

(not just the extreme inequality or biopolitical schisms, or even the idea that there will be habitable and uninhabitable zones but because it portrays human civilization as just...dwindling away into time and a decaying universe.)

& Orlando Jones rocking a Caesar cut, boggling at our sad descendants who don't take advantage of the vast institutional knowledge that he contains!

http://i.imgur.com/R3T8bih.jpg

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/a-human-extinction-isnt-that-unlikely/480444/

Global Challenge Foundation roughly answers the poll question for ILX:

Across 100 years, that figure would entail a 9.5 percent chance of human extinction.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i don't think it'll be so bad for humans who are born after the cataclysm bc this will be the only life they know. it'll be hardest for those of us who remember what it was like now and how great it was.

― Mordy, Friday, November 25, 2016 9:44 PM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

we are legend

still feeling good about this

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

clutch mutch?

16 people leading the revolution

http://i.imgur.com/1eWtMFd.jpg

I'm about to turn 42, and I feel like I am living through one right now.

You are confusing the scaldingly high potential for a cataclysmic event with the actual event, which is scheduled for later this year.

51 and I feel as if everything has gone mad.

You're getting worked up over nothing. Everything is going to be fine. So just relax, okay? You're really overreacting.

http://www.theonion.com/multiblogpost/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entire-mideast-regio-11534

silicon valley hedge fund types certainly think they will

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich

“I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

yeah man yr the only one who can tell

i read that piece and my real feeling about it was that there's a certain stripe of rich person that's constantly paranoid that something might bring an end to the lavish, crass lifestyles which they need yet scarcely deserve, the latter fact being something they're probably aware of.

When Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo executive who is now a partner at 500 Startups, a venture-capital firm, considered his preparations, he decided that his caches of water and food were not enough. “What if someone comes and takes this?” he asked me. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”

...

Huffman has calculated that, in the event of a disaster, he would seek out some form of community: “Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”

lol nerds (bolded part submitted for use on species tombstone obv)

love the implicit acknowledgement that there will be slaves -- just def not him

typical of these libertarian shitheads that their first and only thought in response to potential civil unrest is 'omg i'd better build a secret bunker' rather than 'omg how can i use my boundless wealth and influence to prevent this?'

lord of the flies is not a fucking instruction manual you dolts

http://s8.postimg.org/4qjmvxc5x/tumblr_ned75nk_LFX1s6efcxo2_500.gif

just for the record, this is the chinless manchild who believes he has the right stuff to go full immortan joe in the nightmarish hellscape world of the future:

http://www.deathmetal.org/wp-content/uploads/Steve-spez-Huffman.jpg

hmm, it appears deathmetal.org doesn't like hotlinking - try this:

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/11/29/17/3ADB96D400000578-3982922-image-a-23_1480439368880.jpg

if you want a vision of the future, imagine a flip-flop stamping on a human face - forever.

You can't fool me, that's Liam McPoyle.

Silicon Valley execs who think their leadership skills will transfer seamlessly to the post-apocalyptic economy of tomorrow might just maybe be in for a fun surprise.

Immortan Joe was the CFO at Fruit Ninja devs Halfbrick, iirc?

otoh psychopathy probably v useful

yeah was gonna say, he's got the right eyes at least

Sean Connery may still be alive when ZARDOZ comes true

It just occurred to me that the illusory nightmare world the more extreme factions of the right had been fearing under Obummer is exactly the world that the new GOP administration seems hellbent on ushering in for real. And those same people are probably cheering now. Probably because they'll finally get to use those shelters they spent their life savings on.

love the implicit acknowledgement that there will be slaves -- just def not him

― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, January 24, 2017 4:41 PM (fifty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i like the implication that there will be slaves and he'll be in charge off them

i talk to a few chinese people at work and theyve told me its obvious that china will go to war in less than 5 years

they said this about 1.5 years ago

the potential for destruction is there, but how much of it china is willing to risk is another matter

makes sense tho

The Cascadia Subduction Zone rupturing & the Yellowstone Caldera erupting definitely have a greater than 0% of happening within 37 years. Though those would mostly threaten just the Western US and Canada.

What really scares me is when giant asteroids make close pass-by's and NASA's like "oh we didn't see that one coming!" and the fact that even if we knew one was headed on a direct path towards Earth, we really don't have any way to divert it. They're working on that but currently there is no consensus that exploding a big nuclear missle near it/on it would be strong enough to nudge it enough to miss us.

But most likely, IMO, is that the effects of climate change get so severe there's a serious disruption in the global agricultural and energy sectors which would definitely lead to a panic that collapses the global economy. Though, in all likelihood that would happen at least 50 years from now. So, sorry teenagers!

I might just be a naive optimist, but I highly doubt President Trump is going start wars or cause events that are globally destabilizing. Fucking over poor people, minorities and women within the US, however... unfortunately very likely.

a greater than 0% of happening within 37 years

That 37 year window may apply to you, but as the poll was written, every respondent will have a differently sized window. In my case it is somewhat less than 8 years, which reduces the odds considerably closer to 0%. btw, if the Yellowstone Caldera erupts we can kiss our sweet lives of luxury goodbye.

if i dont see my pension and lump sum imma be soooo mad but really i dont see anything like this happening

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170418-how-western-civilisation-could-collapse

Eventually, investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy reaches a point of diminishing returns, leading to fiscal weakness and vulnerability to collapse. That is, he says “unless we find a way to pay for the complexity[”]

bump

nah

https://media3.giphy.com/media/114YFLTN8BIQDe/giphy.gif

would need to be something much, much worse than this

this is more of a test run

well yes