How will it end?

[h4x.m4g3]

The world will end when a politicians start telling the truth. At which time Japan will launch a series of Ninja assinations meanwhile planting evidence that points toward other countries. Then it will all end exactly as in "The End of The World" see above post.

[Hamelin]

Overpopulation will never be a problem. Ever. Here's why: There is not an even distrobution of resouces. If this was true, right now there would not be a single starving person in the world. Because of this, no matter how many people there end up being, the food will still go to feed a few people well enough, and a bunch of people not very well at all. Those people will eventually stabilize when birth rates become so high as to reach famine levels in those areas. As for the people with food already, they'll just go on normally.

Same goes for energy, and whatever else we need.

[Stabbitty Death]

Let me tell you a story. I was playing Age of Empires with my friend over a lan conection and was losing very badly because he used cheat codes. Every thing I had was destroyed, but he still hadn't been declared the victor. I then realized that I still had one more worker. I then created a new town, better than the one before, and repopulated it with more workers, and eventually, an army. Finally, when I attacked him, I lost patheticly. But that's beside's the point. The point is that no matter how bad something like a nuclear war is, there will probably be more people living to rebuild civilization. It would take something as catastrophic like the sun exploding to completely wipe out all humans.

[Lucas]

nuclear war would kill everyone in area proximity and cause a climate change, as well as inflict radiation poisoning on huge tracts of the earth. trebuchets and bombard cannons don't do that.

[Feuermachtspass]

I think that the whole nuclear winter theory was just a scare tactic started by the pacifists during the cold war. Yes, it was stupid of us to make as many nukes as we did, but the only reason we did it was that the russians were stupid enough to try to match us. Ideally, no one else would have gotten the bomb at all. And as if the FRENCH would even have a use for it...

point being, i dont think that we ever will enter a nuclear war, and if we did, it wouldnt be widespread. even if it WERE widespread, i think the scientists that went on about nuclear winter were just pulling stuff out of their butts anyway. we would survive.

Overpopulation would never destroy us, because the strongest would steal whatever food their neighbors have and this would leave our race even stronger (and more corrupt, if you can believe it possible) than before.

Meteor strikes are possible, i guess, but strange as it may seem, a move like the one pulled in armageddon IS at least somewhat feasible (or not...who knows...does anyone else feel like there are way too many movies about the world ending by way of giant meteor?). But would a giant meteor even enter our solar system? all the asteroids in the asteroid belt are already in an orbit where they wont collide with earth. isnt it likely that an asteroid from outside out solar system will just form an orbit as well? and how many asteroids are blown out of their solar systems to escape the gravity of their sun anyway?

That pretty much just leaves someones religion being right (my money is on mine, but i am somewhat biased on that score).

[C-dog]

It will never "end". I mean, the sun will EVENTUALLY explode, but that's so far away it's not even worth mentioning. It will never END for us, but it will change. Humans are the most adaptable creatures nature has produced. A world-wide nuclear war would kill the majority of us. However, some would survive, even if their lifespans were cut short 60 years by radiation, that's still enough time to mature and re-produce. It would be an ugly 10000 years of surviving on a waste-land planet. Maybe hell-like would be a more appropriate description, but we would still survive somehow. Different senario: Disease. The current population IS too large. It's unnaturally large and it's due time for a superbug to appear and wipe out most of us. Even then, a few would survive though. That's the bennefit of sexual reproduction; there are always a few who are immune to some new disease.

I could go on with other senarios, but the result is the same. A few would survive and rebuild. The only important question is will I survive to rebuild? (assuming the world falls apart in my lifetime, which isn't an inrealistic possibility.)

Interesting fact: The mayan(sp?) calender predicts the end of the world in December of the year 2012.

[Mattias]

It will all end when I die. After I die I wont care how it will end cause it wont have any impact on me accept destroying my grave. Which hopefully wont hurt, and wont upset my thousands of boquets sent be my admirerers.

[Feuermachtspass]

We are NOT overpopulated! That is just a lie told by environmentalist wackos. You know how they say that the U.S. is becoming too urbanized and that we're sucking out all of the natural environment in the country? It turns out that a whopping five percent of our country is urbanized.

We aren't going to run out of room in the next couple of millenia. Speaking on just a national scale, the birthrate is going down, so the whole overpopulation theory is, in short, a load of bull crap.

[Elminster_Amaur]

The US produces enough food to feed everyone on earth. The real problem is that no one wants their food to be given away.

[The Tortured one]

Dammit i was gonna post the indispensible Exit mundi, but someone beat me too it.

first of all, Overpopulation in a Malthusian sense would never happen, because that perscribes to the theory that people have as many children as they can afford, which is certainly not true. In developed countries like the United States and Europe, people tend to not have as many children as they need, the average amount of children families in the U.S have is 2.7 (odd isn't it? I wonder where the other .3 went) children, compared to back during the pre-industrial revolution era, when people had lots of children. As more and more of the world becomes developed, there will be less babies coming out, it's an almost universal axiom in developed countries. Right now the main population explosion is in Africa and southeastern Asia, where people need lots of children to tend the farms and work to support them (also partly due to the oppresive dicatorship governments who steal a great deal, the United States sends huge amounts of aid to foreign countries, but most of that aid ends up going into those corrupt governments who use the food to feed their armies)

now with the advent of more advanced contraception (and the continued quest to find the perfect contraceptive) there will be even less children being born. In my opinion, the population of humans will eventually level off, unless we do something that will greatly enhance the amount of resources going around, like a second agricultural revolution or colonizing another planet or something.

Nuclear war has not been a problem since the end of the cold war, and even then, Soviet nuclear capabilities have always been greatly exaggerated. Only a third of their nuclear missiles were actually real, most of their armies carried old demilitarized rifles when they marched in parades. America was just acting paranoid and the soviets were just feigning stregnth, if war had broken out the U.S would have crushed the soviets. It wasn't until the 80's that the Soviets ever matched the Americans.

If you really are that worried about nuclear war, why aren't you supporting the SDI system?

I don't think we will ever get taken out by Robots either. I saw a quote once that I found rather amusing, it was "Deep Blue may be better at chess then I am, but i will always be the better kick-boxer" With all the paranioa surrounding robots, i don't think that it is likely.

Alien invasion is really out there. Besides the fact that in all likelyness we may never find an alien, in the event they were going to invade us, wouldn't they have done so a hundred years ago BEFORE we had these big multi-megaton weapons which are capable of turning anything within a few square miles into a mess radioactive particles, which as an added bonus leaves a messy cleanup job?

Reminds me of a short story science fiction I read, where a Soldier who died on Utah beach during WW2 had his soul captured by aliens, who wanted him to describe Earth's defensive capabilities. He found he could use his mind and merely by thinking about it, he could project an image. At first he was imagining Sherman tanks and B-17 bombers and soldiers with Garands, but when he saw the alien's look of pleasure, he began to imagine soldiers with personal shields, gigantice spaceships, super-insane weapons, and an entire battlefleet from the solarian federation of planets bringing aid to occupied France. The alien then said, "we shall return in a few thousand years, when your people have neutron torpedoed themselves into oblivion" and released him to his death.

the only way i see for humans to die out is for reasons beyond our control, such as an enviromental disaster of epic proportions. I'm not refering to pollutions and other hippie nightmares, I'm refering to things like asteriods, or supervolcanoes, or ice ages, or a friggin black hole or something.