• Question: What do you think will cause the world to end? Thank you :) :) :)

    Asked by anon-181529 on 6 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Alex Haragan

      Alex Haragan answered on 6 Jun 2018:

      Well just about every area of science (and indeed non-science) has its own apocalypse theory.
      There are several quite convincing ones too!
      The giant volcano in yellow-stone park exploding, being hit by a large asteroid, super-bacteria resistant to treatment, AI rising up and killing us all, nuclear world war 3, global warming etc etc.
      Obviously some are more likely than others!
      I think whats interesting though is that almost apocalypse scenarios is unlikely to kill off all humans, and its practically impossible to kill off *all* life on earth.
      It would require something almost beyond reckoning to result in even things like bacteria not surviving.
      As for the actual planet? I suspect it will continue on until the sun dies. Many billions of years from now. Or maybe it’ll exist as a lump of rock for even longer.
      Hopefully if we do have any of these things happen – our science will be good enough to counteract it.

    • Photo: Nathan Clarke

      Nathan Clarke answered on 7 Jun 2018:

      Like Alex says, when we think of the world ending, we’re usually thinking about a future without humans. Personally, I think some of these are more immediate than others. Antibiotic resistance is one of the scarier prospects to me. Penicillin was the first antibiotic discovered by Alexander Fleming; it wasn’t all that long ago, less than 100 years. It’s saved countless lives since then so it’s hard to imagine what life was like before this. The thought of a returning to a life without effective antibiotics is more than a little concerning.

    • Photo: Hannah Farley

      Hannah Farley answered on 10 Jun 2018:

      I think humans will probably have something to do with it unfortunately, we do tend to do first and think about the consequences later. I think you’re talking about life on Earth, Alex’s sun thing is a good point. I think that we will probably damage our planet before this happens though, but we will maybe find a new home outside of our solar system to go to (and treat it better).

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