Personally, I am terrified of a world like The Road. An asteroid impact, supervolcano eruption or some kind nuclear war kills the majority of the population, blots out the sun with dust that lasts for a hundred years. Plant life cannot survive, animals die off and everything gets cold. Everything becomes very dark, the air is toxic and poisonous which irritates your throat and lungs. There is no more government, there is no more police or army, there is absolutely no more civilization or anybody that can save you or help you. Scratch off a living scavenging and eating bread crumbs you find on diner tables just for those tiny extra calories to keep living. You end up back at year one in a hellhole full of cannibal gangs and not much else. That is truly terrifying to me, the lack of hope and helplessness that I would feel in that scenario is something I hope to never experience. The world will never go back to how it was. The sanest choice in a world like that is suicide and that is truly depressing. So, from a zombie apocalypse to a full on entropy and eventual heat death of the universe, which end of days scenario do you dread the most and why?
You live long enough to see the sun go red giant, and then poof like a match. Bye people, stuff, Earth as we know it will be a literal hell on earth as the oceans and lakes evaporate. And people just kinda cook alive on the surface. Sure living underground in a wasteland like that would suck the big one. Stranded on a moon or planet alone, would also suck.
I think I can say with some confidence there's no need to worry yourself about the apocalypse scenario becoming a reality
I don't know about which one I'd dread the most, but the most depressing is easily the heat death scenario. A tiny rock floating in complete blackness, barely surviving by leaching energy off of a black hole's gravitational field, just waiting until it's no longer able to extract enough to support even a single living thing, either biological or synthetic. Actually, I take that back. The worst I can think of is the stream of consciousness multiverse idea (I don't know what it's really called; I'm not sure it's even out there in the mainstream). It's a distant cousin of the anthropic principle, in that ultimately the only universes you observe are ones in which you survive to observe them. The idea is like this. If there's any possibility at all that you will survive a given moment, then in an infinite multiverse a version of you will survive in some of those universes. Extrapolate this to the extreme, and some version of you is virtually guaranteed to outlive everyone else, with random processes always just barely keeping you alive until all universes agree that the odds of you surviving past a certain point are literally absolute zero. Since the most probable course of events will lead to your body's and mind's decay at the time in your life everyone else does, and it's more probable that you'll stay in bad health than recover, this forces the vast majority of instances of you, and hence your most likely experience, to basically be you as a decayed, dementia-ridden husk for near-eternity long after everything else has gone kaput.
All of them, really. I feel like my innate survival instinct is very low - if I can't have creature comforts and the people I love with me protected in a safe environment, I'd kind of rather self-select out.
Pretty much any one where I could conceivably be a survivor. Kill me fast so I don't have to deal with any of that malarky.
I pretty much DO NOT want to live forever, or even to a hundred. I'm goin sky-diving on my 99th birthday, wearin my genuine WWI parachute, packed by hand in Hungary. Probly die in flight, anyway, from pressure differential. People-things aren't made to want to live forever. We have our time, then the world changes into something we no longer identify with. I'll get tired and be done. I'm running toward anything that happens, not away! Everyone seems to forget the Moon. The Moon is leaving us. We have seasons (wobble) because it is no longer close enough to stabilize the spin of Earth. Long, long before red-dwarfs or entropy consume us, the earth will spin wildly, the poles will melt, the magnetic field will collapse, the core engine will shut down, and the heat deflected away by surface water will allow the planet to freeze. It's a damn long ways off, of course. Our hope is not Mars. Our hope is to learn that if we survive to Mars, we don't need it in the end. We will travel indefinitely through space, slinging around galaxies instead of planets. We'll draw energy and matter from nebullae, to sustain us. We are nearly capable of modifying our evolution to accomplish this. We will leave way before the Moon leaves. Or die stupid. Anytime I hear about global warming, I laugh. Farther away Moon, slower spin, more Sun for longer. Sure, it's only part of the equation, but it will be the biggest part, sooner or later. So, I'll whittle away my time thinking about a plan for the survivors of whatever giant Godzilla foot stomps civilization. We just have to live here long enough to leave the nest. (My apocalypse is gonna be a helluva lotta fun to read, though!)
I don't know about worst, but the current dystopia trending toward people in government believing bizarre conspiracy theories becoming the norm concerns me quite a bit.
Which means you must be one of .... THEM! *pulls GingerCoffee's face off Scooby Doo style to reveal a giant lizard thing*
Living in a cabin with bearskins and a shotgun seems more like the high fantasy to me. The major challenge would be to impress [in the naval sense] one of those zombies and procreate. By Chapter 111 I am all grey beard and rocking chair, disciples at my feet, easy, probably writing my Boble or K-Ran guidebook to future generations. I fear rather more a morning the world awakens to discover all philosophy, legal precedent, all logic and wisdom of the ages has been wiped. Intellectualism is the new capital crime. We begin again with duffers' justice, like a court of facebook, an entirely undiluted populism. Of course, I'd be all right, it's the rest of you I worry for. I imagine future-world prosecutors - 'Hang him. Why? Because he is an asshole...' [WILD APPLAUSE] Meanwhile from the dock, the defendant attempts to recall distant habeus corpus arguments, ad hominem, straw man...anything Latin. 'Ehmm, err...well...your honour, I, mmm...in my opinion...the poem...err...first they came for the...then they came for the...let me start again...' 'NEXT PRISONER!'
Being totally alone, no human contact, is of course very scary when you think about it. For whatever reason, zombies and their ilk kind of get to me as well. Not in a practical, logical sense, but emotionally. Something about the brutality of it, maybe. A harsh wasteland type situation is something I would very much hate to see, but hasn't ever provoked much of a reaction from me seeing it depicted.
The idea though with global warming is that it could cause significant consequences for our species within a generation or two. Within even a few decades maybe according to some. Not really an actual "apocalypse" though as it's unlikely to really damage broader life long term which should recover okay.
I thought the subtext of 90% of all apocalypse stories were that society was and is the biggest problem with the world. Best case for survival: I ride out oblivion with a few close friends and a few hundred cases of liquor; worst case: I live through that hell only for people to start rebuilding just so we repeat all the mistakes that put us in this situation to begin with.
I thought the subtext of 90% of all apocalypse stories were that society was and is the biggest problem with the world. Best case for survival: I ride out oblivion with a few close friends and a few hundred cases of liquor; worst case: I live through that hell only for people to start rebuilding just so we repeat all the mistakes that put us in this situation to begin with.
But I think it's more of a criticism of society and how it could undo itself than promoting the idea we should abandon society. I mean, that's why an "apocalypse" is a bad thing and is portrayed as scary.
Getting addicted to crystal meth is pretty scary, too, but few people would argue that Skeet, the white rapper in your hometown that keeps getting fired from fast food jobs and no longer has to worry about dental hygiene is a constructive criticism on how they should handle their habit in the future. It's much more prudent to just not. Say no to droogs!
