The end of humanity betting pool
-
@Zecc said in In other news today...:
@Bulb We should start a betting pool on how humanity ends. Do we:
- die of a natural catastrophe, like get hit by an asteroid dinosaur-style or the Yellowstone super-volcano deciding it's finally time to fart?
- die of a super-resistant infectious disease we have created?
- get killed by a sapient super-robot we created?
- break the very fabric of space-time on an accidental physics experiment?
- kill each other over who has the best idea or gets to keep the shiniest trinket?
In the end, no one wins.
Give me "population falls below sustainable threshold due to
"
-
@izzion said:
I'll take "How the world ends" for 400$, Alex
: "Dust blows across the dessicated corpse of the last human, still clutching in one hand a bag, from which golden discs occasionally roll, buffeted by the wind."
-bzzzzt- What is "driven into extinction by the insatiable greed of the corrupt few"?
-
@Vixen as he took turns, blindfolded, to bite into juicy-looking red tomatoes and apples, @anonymous234 said:
I bought 6 apples and they taste like literally nothing. It's almost like eating styrofoam.
Deprived of nutrition, all those flavors will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
-
Also, fear not, as (contrary to popular belief) the human population is apparently exactly constant:
Filed under: WA - Computational Stupidity
-
@topspin said in The end of humanity betting pool:
Depraved
de·praved
/dəˈprāvd/
adjective
morally corrupt; wicked.
"a depraved indifference to human life"Depraved nutrition does sound lit it would rather efficiently end existence.
:-D
-
@Vixen hey, no fair, I noticed and fixed it before you posted that!
-
@topspin said in The end of humanity betting pool:
@Vixen as he took turns, blindfolded, to bite into juicy-looking red tomatoes and apples, @anonymous234 said:
I bought 6 apples and they taste like literally nothing. It's almost like eating styrofoam.
Depraved of nutrition, all those flavors will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
My local burger joint adds two sauces, that they make themselves, to their deliveries. One is some tomato based salsa thing, which is ok. The second they call aioli, but it doesn't taste like aioli. It doesn't taste like anything. It has consistency of mayonnaise or maybe sour cream, and absolutely zero taste.
We call it 'compressed air sauce'.
-
@topspin said in The end of humanity betting pool:
@Vixen hey, no fair, I noticed and fixed it before you posted that!
it wasn't fixed on my screen.
also it's a delicious mental image. depraved nutrition.
nutrition that is corrupted.
It satisfies hunger but is corrupted so the feeling of fullness does not last so you eat more, and feel full, but it's not feeding you so it doesn't last so you need to eat more. Each cycle you need to eat more to feel full, and the feeling lasts less and less time, until you eat so much you rupture internal organs and die from the bleeding inside.
Or maybe you're one of the lucky ones that don't eat yourself till you explode and instead realize what is happening so you stop eating the depraved nutrition, but you're still hungry, and now you're afraid.... is that apple regular food or depraved food? will it feed you or your addiction.... you don't know.... and you're scared... so you don't eat. you stop drinking.... and you starve to death, surrounded by food you're too scared to eat. It doesn't take long, you were pretty far gone by the time you realized what was happening...
-
@izzion said in The end of humanity betting pool:
population falls below sustainable threshold
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320702003464
The mean and median estimates of MVP were 7316 and 5816 adults, respectively.
So we need about <0.0001% the people currently alive needed to keep the species going.
Of course if you want to talk about sustaining "modern civilization", that number could be estimated as high as 15% (the global population in 1800).
-
My guess is some kind of npm/AI/blockchain bug causes a worldwide Internet crash and then most of the world's population starves and freezes to death because their IoT thermostats and refrigerators and toilet paper dispensers quit working.
-
@anonymous234 I'd say that's history-dependent. We could sustain 1800's tech base with 1800's population size. I doubt we could sustain 2020's tech base with 1800's population size. At least if we chose that population semi-randomly instead of cherry-picking the specialists. Things just come from too far and require too many specialist steps along the way.
-
Also, I meant to put this in the
, which probably would have made my original post more biting. C'est la vie
-
@Vixen said in The end of humanity betting pool:
it wasn't fixed on my screen.
Yeah, the bug where edits don't update posts affects other people viewing the thread, too.
-
@error said in The end of humanity betting pool:
@Vixen said in The end of humanity betting pool:
it wasn't fixed on my screen.
Yeah, the bug where edits don't update posts affects other people viewing the thread, too.
-
@anonymous234 said in The end of humanity betting pool:
Of course if you want to talk about sustaining "modern civilization", that number could be estimated as high as 15% (the global population in 1800).
Depends on which 15%.
If all the skilled people go, then no.
Also depends on how fast.
A sudden loss of population would fracture the infrastructure, and if it doesn't recover, result in a loss of moderness.
-
@xaade Just the telephone sanitizers
-
@Vixen said in The end of humanity betting pool:
It satisfies hunger but is corrupted so the feeling of fullness does not last so you eat more
That's not corruption; that's now normal food works.
-
@Benjamin-Hall said in The end of humanity betting pool:
@anonymous234 I'd say that's history-dependent. We could sustain 1800's tech base with 1800's population size. I doubt we could sustain 2020's tech base with 1800's population size. At least if we chose that population semi-randomly instead of cherry-picking the specialists. Things just come from too far and require too many specialist steps along the way.
Basically, at best we'd end up with a bunch of Paul Twisters: people who know a lot of common knowledge about modern technology, but have no idea about the details of how it's all built.
-
@topspin said in The end of humanity betting pool:
Also, fear not, as (contrary to popular belief) the human population is apparently exactly constant:
Looks good! It interpolated from today with negligible error.
-
@Mason_Wheeler said in The end of humanity betting pool:
@Vixen said in The end of humanity betting pool:
It satisfies hunger but is corrupted so the feeling of fullness does not last so you eat more
That's not corruption; that's now normal food works.
but normal food actually feeds you, not trick your brain into thinking it did when it didn't.
-
@gleemonk World population today, x-axis unitless and unrelated
-
@hungrier WolframAlpha are you serious
-
@hungrier Hmm, it obviously has not identified that the world population (of humans) is a function of time. Which explains the crazy graph too.
-
@dkf The first one ITT looks like just
y = current world population; x between 1800 and 2020, no unitse:
by myself three posts up
-
@dkf It does know about the world population in the past, with some prompting
-
Success!
-
Hmm.
Who knows where it gets these values from, but hey, go random extrapolations.
Either way, my guess that the first time we go officially extinct is because a computer system that keeps track of the human population has a hiccup and temporarily returns 0.
-
@hungrier said in The end of humanity betting pool:
@gleemonk World population today, x-axis unitless and unrelated
Why quibble how it was made? That graph shows what was requested: human population over time. It's correct to one order of magnitude even at the extremes. That's pretty good for AI overall you have to admit!
-
-
@gleemonk said in The end of humanity betting pool:
That graph shows what was requested: human population over time.
Since the x axis is unitless, it doesn't show time. Just some arbitrary x within this range of numbers.
-
@hungrier I clearly see years under the x axis:
I don't see why you're so critical about it. Given the context it would be really overkill to add a years label. If a human made that graph you'd probably laud it a good first attempt. But no, because it was a machine you drag out all kinds of reservations.
-
estimate throws it off.
"human population estimate in the year 1800" also works.
-
@izzion said in The end of humanity betting pool:
Give me "population falls below sustainable threshold due to
"That will only mean the end of the West. Outside of secular Western culture, no one cares about
and they actually value children.EDIT: That last part was better suited to the garage. My apologies for starting a small flamewar.
That said, you can put me down for "terrorists discover EMP and take down the power grid. Since all the stores depend on regular deliveries and the trucks don't show up because the gas stations depend on electricity for pumping gas, everyone starves."
-
@antiquarian said in The end of humanity betting pool:
take down the power grid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZWA_cw9tss
***
Put me down for "water main breaks down in downtown LA"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAp5UNYApHA
Bambi's dead, Bambi's dead!
-
@gleemonk said in The end of humanity betting pool:
If a human made that graph you'd probably laud it a good first attempt. But no, because it was a machine you drag out all kinds of reservations.
One moment please while I make graphene.
-
@antiquarian said in The end of humanity betting pool:
and they actually value children.
Please don't use the USA as your sole yardstick for "the West".
-
@Rhywden Do people believe that overpopulation is a problem that needs to be solved by family planning and limiting birth rates in the part of "the West" where you live?
-
@Rhywden The USA makes a good yardstick though.
The rest of the world is an effective metrestick.
-
@Mason_Wheeler said in The end of humanity betting pool:
@Rhywden Do people believe that overpopulation is a problem that needs to be solved by family planning and limiting birth rates in the part of "the West" where you live?
In the part of “the west” where he lives, people don’t think they have an overpopulation problem. So no.
Unless you mean if people believe that “overpopulation“ is something that can possibly exist and you think the mere concept of that is equivalent to not valuing children.Filed under: you best start believing in straw men, Miss Wheeler. You’re in one.
