One mildly interesting fact that MANY Christians get wrong:
There is no lead-up to the apocalypse. The Messiah will return "like a thief in the night" and "nobody, except my Father, knows the hour of my return" (I probably butchered those two quotes). Either way, the Bible is pretty clear (as was Jesus): there will be zero indication the apocalypse is coming. None. It'll just... start.
The book of Revelation also cites various signs that are metaphorical enough to be applied to just about anything.
It's pointless to cite the Bible to defend a theological position, because someone else can cite a different part that can be interpreted to say the exact opposite.
That's why the Catholics have a guy in charge who infallibly tells you how to interpret the damn thing. Instead of having every Tom, Dick and Harry have a stab at misunderstanding scripture.
The homeless man currently yelling outside my window is an equally authoritative source of information about the apocalypse as the Bible, and he thinks it's coming soon.
A billion people don't believe there's some truth to what the homeless man outside of your window is saying, and someone leading a legitimate-enough revolution that they're put to death by the King of Rome is probably a tiny bit more believable.
But I get what you're saying either way. I just think it's an interesting factlet.
Who's the King of Rome? The Romans famously got rid of their kings long before anyone ever thought of Christianity, and later it took until the fall of the Empire before anyone was both a king and in charge of Rome.
After the Roman Republic, they switched to having an emperor. Jesus was crucified during this Roman empire. The kings of Rome were around 600 years before this. They meant the emperor, not the king.
I think they've gotta maybe define what counts as an "Apocalypse." The active "Fourth Turning" hypothesis expects a crisis on the scale of the Civil War. That degree of crisis has happened lots of times. Certainly the Civil War itself was accurately predicted for decades leading up to it.
Agree. You can always claim prescience by being vague enough. "Something really bad will happen" will eventually come true. I suppose the point of this site is to call out the ones who dare to be more specific.
For anyone curious about academic studies of historical societal collapses, check out Joseph Tainter [1]
> As described in Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, societies become more complex as they try to solve problems. [...] Such complexity requires a substantial "energy" subsidy (meaning the consumption of resources, or other forms of wealth).
> When a society confronts a "problem," such as a shortage of energy, or difficulty in gaining access to it, it tends to create new layers of bureaucracy, infrastructure, or social class to address the challenge. Tainter, who first identifies seventeen examples of rapid collapse of societies, applies his model to three case studies: The Western Roman Empire, the Maya civilization, and the Chaco culture.
> For example, as Roman agricultural output slowly declined and population increased, per-capita energy availability dropped. The Romans "solved" this problem by conquering their neighbours to appropriate their energy surpluses (as metals, grain, slaves, other materials of value). However, as the Empire grew, the cost of maintaining communications, garrisons, civil government, etc. grew with it. Eventually, this cost grew so great that any new challenges such as invasions and crop failures could not be solved by the acquisition of more territory. [...]
> It is often assumed that the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a catastrophe for everyone involved. Tainter points out that it can be seen as a very rational preference of individuals at the time, many of whom were actually better off. Tainter notes that in the west, local populations in many cases greeted the barbarians as liberators.
Right, but there's no doomsday prophecies around the Year 2038 problem as far as I can tell. I think it falls in the same kind of category of known problems that are certain to happen at some point. Some other things I was thinking of were the theorized ARkStorm, and also an earthquake that could happen in the Cascadia subduction zone.
Not quite; the first attack happened at approximately UNIX time 1000210380, which isn't quite as round as "1 trillion milliseconds". (It was about 2 days after 1e9).
The whole universe may end at any moment without warning. There could be another universe on a collision course and speed so fast you will never know it.
Or we could be living in universe inside like a raindrop of larger universe that may hit the ground and burst any moment.
Do they specify exactly what qualifies as a successful apocalyptic prediction?
In particular they count a US civil war as an apocalyptic event… lots of countries and societies have been completely wiped out, though, which must(?) be more apocalyptic.
Maybe the point of the site is just that apocalypses tend to happen unexpectedly?
Yea im not sure how a civil war in the United States would affect me as an European... It certainly would, but I'd survive. Isn't the whole point of apocalyptic events to not survive them?
Europe would curb stomp Russia in a conventional war even without the US.
Ten times the GDP, three times the population and our military stuff mostly works, Ukraine has done a phenomenal job with what they had but Russia turned out to be even more of a Basket case than expected.
The problem is how much damage they can do before we put them back in their box and whether getting the shit kicked out of them would triggger a nuclear exchange which would get really out of hand.
The Limits to Growth book is an interesting read. To quote Box, "All models are wrong, but some are useful". I wouldn't take the dates-ranges estimated from the modelling that seriously, but the modelling assumptions are worth reading about and reflecting on. The overall modelling and dynamics seem pretty plausible to me.
From memory, the rough argument was that society depends upon input flows of energy, resources (metals etc) and food. Society needs to allocate resources and energy to extract these inputs. Energy sources such as fossil fuel reserves are finite stocks, some are cheap to extract (high energy return on energy invested). Over time we consume and deplete the high EROEI reserves and have to move on to consuming the lower EROEI reserves. This means that the fraction of energy society needs to allocate for energy extraction increases over time, so there's less energy for other uses. Similarly, we deplete the cheap to extract stocks of metal required to build and maintain industry, leaving stocks that require higher inputs of metal and energy to extract. Similarly for agricultural yields, as we mine and deplete accumulated stocks of nutrients out of the soil.
The business as usual scenario leading to "overshoot and collapse" behaviour is that we have increasing population, increasing industrial capital and increasing demands for energy, food and resource inputs, while the fraction of energy and resources that need to be allocated to energy, resource and food production grows over time. The fraction of remaining surplus energy and resources that can be allocated to things like education, healthcare, research, art decreases over time. At some point the growing fraction of energy and resources that needs to be allocated to energy and resource extraction becomes so large vs the existing population and industrial base that there simply isn't enough surplus to maintain healthcare, education, research, etc at the same level.
The "Overshoot and collapse" dynamic describes stocks of population, industry etc growing to peaks well beyond sustainable levels before the above dynamics catch up and cause them to rapidly decline.
The researchers did a bunch of modelling of alternative scenarios, exploring how to avoid these "Overshoot and collapse" dynamics.
But is that the apocalypse? I hate the fact that we're destabilizing the environment, but humans (and wildlife) are pretty good at adaptation. Our ancestors have obviously survived massive extinction events in the past.
I've been in the "doomer" camp for over a decade and been surprised how many things I thought were far off in the future have come to fruition earlier.
But, the one thing I always find interesting, philosophically, about believing the world-as-we-know-it is coming to an end is that all of the things people are concerned about will happen no matter what.
Being afraid of the end of the world is ultimately being afraid that we will lose the things we have, that our work will be lost to time and history, that ultimately we will return to a void and all of "this" will have been for nothing.
However, all of that is true either way. You will lose everything you've ever loved over time in life, all the work you've done will be lost to time, in the end all of your efforts will be for nothing and even that won't matter.
The "end of the world" scares people because it forces them to discard the normal tools they use combat these many existential anxieties, but the world continuing to go on doesn't actually resolve any of those anxieties.
For me the problem is managing the transition minimizing unnecessary suffering.
The world is inevitably going to end, our work isn't going to be forever preserved into the future and there will be no "end of history" until there are living humans.
The thing is that the world can end in many ways. My world can end in many ways. I'd rather pass on with a clear consciousness, with my faculties preserved more or less, and with a legacy of having at least tried to make the lives of other that tiny bit better, so I'm aware if I'm not vigilant I can spend my final days suffering from an avoidable disease or accident or regretting I wasted my life chasing a better tomorrow that never came while neglecting what I already have today.
This is virtually the same for all society. It's going to fade into oblivion, but it matters a great deal that the process is as gentle as possible for everyone involved.
I am reminded of Roy Scranton's essay Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene [1]
> I found my way forward through an 18th-century Samurai manual, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s “Hagakure,” which commanded: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” Instead of fearing my end, I owned it. Every morning, after doing maintenance on my Humvee, I’d imagine getting blown up by an I.E.D., shot by a sniper, burned to death, run over by a tank, torn apart by dogs, captured and beheaded, and succumbing to dysentery. Then, before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive. “If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead,” wrote Tsunetomo, “he gains freedom in the Way.”
People like Ray Kurzweil, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Paul Christiano see a pathway out of this inevitability through technological singularity. In their vision humans are a seed to something greater, something noticeable on cosmic scales. In their vision, like early humans who emerged on the other end of genetic bottlenecks, today's humans will have a disproportionate effect on the future. According to the current models of cosmology heat death of universe in still inevitability but that's on a completely different timescale than human life.
Please don't take this to be dismissive of your comment, because that's not my intention, but...
I think people like Ray Kurzweil are essentially religious. Instead of a messiah and heaven, they think of salvation in terms of a singularity, immortality, or a way of ascension. It feels very religious to me, and as such, detached from reality and physical possibilities.
'The world continuing to go on' is the status quo and has been for millenia at this point. Sure, the argument can be made that the world will end eventually, but if we do not have our reference timescale, what do we have? People aren't afraid that the world will eventually end (because 'eventually' should be thousands of years from now), people are afraid the world will end NOW, which does nullify your experience and efforts on the subjective human timescale. Life as we know it continuing to go on without ambiguity on our confidence to prevent world-ending events does resolve those anxieties.
If you have ever believed in the butterfly effect and if you believe that the world will keep marching on, then your actions undeniably do leave a permanent change to the world, forever after you are forgotten.
It’s also worth noting that Strauss, Howe, and Turchin all repeatedly stress in their books that firm dates aren’t a guarantee, that sometimes the cycle doesn’t line up correctly (like the Civil War cycle), and that none of their words are meant to be taken as literal predications so much as cautious warnings that history often rhymes.
Having finished both The Fourth Turning and End Times recently, Strauss and Howe’s specific guesses as to what might fuel the next crisis are laughably off track even if their broad strokes still paint a compelling (and at times, frightening) picture, while Turchin feels more prescient in his observations.
Ultimately, though, Turchin has the better message: even when a crisis destroys an empire, the world continues onward. That gave me some bleak hope to hang onto.
Yeah I was fully expecting this site to be making fun of all the wacko conspiracies about armageddon, such that it would make me feel better. But instead, the "Limit to Growth" summary seems entirely plausible.
What qualifies moving from "pending" state to "active". There seem to be many predictions at the bottom that are only a few years out that are not "active" Some are even end of year.
I could see why the ones with several hundred years deadline are "pending"
Pending means we haven't reached the start of the predicted time range for that event yet. If I predict a collapse in November of 2025, it would be pending for the rest of October, then active on November 1st until either the collapse happens and it becomes successful or December 1st arrives and it becomes failed.
Out there, somewhere, is a nerd, laser etching Wikipedia onto metal plates, and burying them to be dug up later, just to be able to say, I knew this would happen!
A bit in the doomer camp, and what worries me the most are the lifestyle changes needed to not fuck up the climate in the next few hundreds years. I believe I heard that we should slash 7/8th of our emissions (as individuals living a modern lifestyle) to keep the wet bulb temperature in check worldwide by the end of the century. This is, in my opinion, a target that we'll surely miss and it won't be nice.
Europe is already struggling with few millions people trying to enter over several years. I can't imagine what happens when large parts of India/Pakistan/Bangladesh become literally deadly during the hot season. That would displace ~1B people basically at once (if you stay and you don't have Air Conditioning you die). The following turmoil will be like nothing we ever saw before as a species (IMHO).
As a society if we care about our fellow humans - generally seen as a virtue to have - then we need to reduce our emissions etc etc.
As a rat race where the competition is between humans then rich people have a comparative advantage regarding how to survive the ravages.
So the future is less about avoiding climate catastrophe completely - that won't happen when the rich and powerful don't care.
The future is about surviving the issues until enough people die that emissions takes care of itself.
Either a lot of people die thus reducing emissions, or specific groups die thus reducing the capability to generate emissions on behalf of others. Or maybe enough tragedies happen that moral conscience does hold sway. Likely a combination of the above.
For supporting the continuation of my genes, maybe I should invest in property in Siberia/Alaska/Canada/Greenland/etc etc.
The emissions are only a problem initially; it doesn’t matter if enough population perish, the warming will continue by self-reinforcing effects for an era.
There might be the emergency brake of geoengineering making life miserable enough that rapid decarbonizing and negative emmisions become attractive, preferably before global supply chains turn to mush.
Very disingenuous to put second-coming style prognostications from religious nutsos in the same list as people trying to use science, pattern analysis, or surveys of scholarly literature to identify when society will gradually break down from writing too many checks the environment or the economy can't cash.
I gotta say I didn't know about this Johnny Silverhand post, but I hope that if these things don't come to fruition he still finds time to stick it to the corpos in the most rockerboy way possible.
That's why global nuclear disarmament seems only slightly more plausible to me than (e.g.) global artillery disarmament. For the foreseeable future there are going to be some nations that see nuclear weapons as the more affordable (or the only affordable) deterrent against rival nations that can field much larger armed forces.
That's basically the point the meme is making. It's not arguing that nothing literally happens in spacetime; it just asserts that we rarely, if ever, see events that fundamentally change the world from its slugging baseline.
The prediction aren't for total extinction events or even events where the internet wouldn't be around. Also, it' just a silly site provided for our entertainment.
It can show 0 successful predictions all it wants, but we'd been through global lockdowns and forced vaccination, there's an ongoing war in Europe with casualties in hundreds of thousands on both sides, Gaza is being demolished by Israel, Internet as we knew it is about to turn into whitelisted fiberoptic/5G TV, surveillance is rampant, and the rise of the global technofascist police state as the public is being entertained by the clown shitshow of top level politicians is not obvious only to those who've been trying to save their sanity by remaining in denial.
Don't disagree with any of that, and I don't want to minimize the seriousness of the issues you've cited, but that kind of reinforces the implication of the scorecard?
People are persistently presented with perils (plagues, parasites, pollution, power-hungry politicians, propaganda, plutonium-powered projectiles, etc...) and humanity keeps finding a way through (though certainly at great personal and population-wide cost sometimes).
Some pretty serious chokepoints in the full history (including research suggesting that something reduced our ancestors numbers by ~99% a little under a million years ago) and yet this particular strain remains.
One mildly interesting fact that MANY Christians get wrong:
There is no lead-up to the apocalypse. The Messiah will return "like a thief in the night" and "nobody, except my Father, knows the hour of my return" (I probably butchered those two quotes). Either way, the Bible is pretty clear (as was Jesus): there will be zero indication the apocalypse is coming. None. It'll just... start.
One mildly interesting fact MANY programmers get wrong about the is_computer_on function:
It is threadsafe. The documentation is very clear about this.
The book of Revelation also cites various signs that are metaphorical enough to be applied to just about anything.
It's pointless to cite the Bible to defend a theological position, because someone else can cite a different part that can be interpreted to say the exact opposite.
> The book of Revelation also cites various signs that are metaphorical enough to be applied to just about anything.
If someone plans to, they should first read Revelation 22:18–19.
And Revelations isn’t the only prophetic work. Try Ezekiel.
> It's pointless to cite the Bible to defend a theological position
Understandable, but citing the Bible is fairly important in theology, though it should be done within context.
Sure, Judaism was word of mouth a long time, and that’s great. I personally can’t remember much, so I think referencing text is fine.
>If someone plans to, they should first read Revelation 22:18–19.
See, that's when you use literal reading. "I'm not adding anything to the text, I'm just interpreting it."
>And Revelations isn’t the only prophetic work. Try Ezekiel.
Ezekiel is clearly about events in our past, though.
>Understandable, but citing the Bible is fairly important in theology, though it should be done within context.
Meh. There's no internally consistent Christian theology that cites the Bible and doesn't involve generous amounts of cherry picking.
That's why the Catholics have a guy in charge who infallibly tells you how to interpret the damn thing. Instead of having every Tom, Dick and Harry have a stab at misunderstanding scripture.
Not that that stops individual Catholics from having their own opinions anyway. It's fractal cherry picking.
It's a good thing there's always exactly one pope.
Okay, where's the "falsehoods programmers believe about ..." article for popes?
Well that's provably false.. there've been three popes[0] and zero popes happen now and then (2025[1], 2013[2], 2005, 1978..)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Schism
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Leo_XIV
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Francis
Signs were given, not dates.
The homeless man currently yelling outside my window is an equally authoritative source of information about the apocalypse as the Bible, and he thinks it's coming soon.
A billion people don't believe there's some truth to what the homeless man outside of your window is saying, and someone leading a legitimate-enough revolution that they're put to death by the King of Rome is probably a tiny bit more believable.
But I get what you're saying either way. I just think it's an interesting factlet.
Who's the King of Rome? The Romans famously got rid of their kings long before anyone ever thought of Christianity, and later it took until the fall of the Empire before anyone was both a king and in charge of Rome.
After the Roman Republic, they switched to having an emperor. Jesus was crucified during this Roman empire. The kings of Rome were around 600 years before this. They meant the emperor, not the king.
argumentum ad populum and argument from authority in one sentence... :-)
I think they've gotta maybe define what counts as an "Apocalypse." The active "Fourth Turning" hypothesis expects a crisis on the scale of the Civil War. That degree of crisis has happened lots of times. Certainly the Civil War itself was accurately predicted for decades leading up to it.
Agree. You can always claim prescience by being vague enough. "Something really bad will happen" will eventually come true. I suppose the point of this site is to call out the ones who dare to be more specific.
For anyone curious about academic studies of historical societal collapses, check out Joseph Tainter [1]
> As described in Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, societies become more complex as they try to solve problems. [...] Such complexity requires a substantial "energy" subsidy (meaning the consumption of resources, or other forms of wealth).
> When a society confronts a "problem," such as a shortage of energy, or difficulty in gaining access to it, it tends to create new layers of bureaucracy, infrastructure, or social class to address the challenge. Tainter, who first identifies seventeen examples of rapid collapse of societies, applies his model to three case studies: The Western Roman Empire, the Maya civilization, and the Chaco culture.
> For example, as Roman agricultural output slowly declined and population increased, per-capita energy availability dropped. The Romans "solved" this problem by conquering their neighbours to appropriate their energy surpluses (as metals, grain, slaves, other materials of value). However, as the Empire grew, the cost of maintaining communications, garrisons, civil government, etc. grew with it. Eventually, this cost grew so great that any new challenges such as invasions and crop failures could not be solved by the acquisition of more territory. [...]
> It is often assumed that the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a catastrophe for everyone involved. Tainter points out that it can be seen as a very rational preference of individuals at the time, many of whom were actually better off. Tainter notes that in the west, local populations in many cases greeted the barbarians as liberators.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
It's missing the January 19, 2038, the unix epoch end. Only 12 years and a bit from now. Very much in our time.
Right, but there's no doomsday prophecies around the Year 2038 problem as far as I can tell. I think it falls in the same kind of category of known problems that are certain to happen at some point. Some other things I was thinking of were the theorized ARkStorm, and also an earthquake that could happen in the Cascadia subduction zone.
9/11 happened 1 trillion milliseconds after the unix epoch.
Not quite; the first attack happened at approximately UNIX time 1000210380, which isn't quite as round as "1 trillion milliseconds". (It was about 2 days after 1e9).
Who finds this shit out lol
The whole universe may end at any moment without warning. There could be another universe on a collision course and speed so fast you will never know it.
Or we could be living in universe inside like a raindrop of larger universe that may hit the ground and burst any moment.
They seemed to have missed peter turchin
"In 2010, Turchin published research using 40 combined social indicators to predict that there would be worldwide social unrest in the 2020s"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin
The way Cliodynamics, Turchin’s field, is explained feels like a very early and remedial version of psychohistory from the Foundation universe.
Have a look in the Fiction section of the Cliodynamics article.
When is there not social unrest?
Do they specify exactly what qualifies as a successful apocalyptic prediction?
In particular they count a US civil war as an apocalyptic event… lots of countries and societies have been completely wiped out, though, which must(?) be more apocalyptic.
Maybe the point of the site is just that apocalypses tend to happen unexpectedly?
Yea im not sure how a civil war in the United States would affect me as an European... It certainly would, but I'd survive. Isn't the whole point of apocalyptic events to not survive them?
Without US involvement in your Eastern flank, it might get tougher.
Europe would curb stomp Russia in a conventional war even without the US.
Ten times the GDP, three times the population and our military stuff mostly works, Ukraine has done a phenomenal job with what they had but Russia turned out to be even more of a Basket case than expected.
The problem is how much damage they can do before we put them back in their box and whether getting the shit kicked out of them would triggger a nuclear exchange which would get really out of hand.
I think Comrade Krasnov is too busy purging his own country of dissidents to care; we are on our own on this one.
People know that they are not living at the start of anything. All through history people imagine they be living near the end of everything.
No one want to live in the middle.
Here's python code to simulate one of the still-active doomsday predictions (The Limits to Growth)
https://github.com/TimSchell98/PyWorld3-03
The Limits to Growth book is an interesting read. To quote Box, "All models are wrong, but some are useful". I wouldn't take the dates-ranges estimated from the modelling that seriously, but the modelling assumptions are worth reading about and reflecting on. The overall modelling and dynamics seem pretty plausible to me.
From memory, the rough argument was that society depends upon input flows of energy, resources (metals etc) and food. Society needs to allocate resources and energy to extract these inputs. Energy sources such as fossil fuel reserves are finite stocks, some are cheap to extract (high energy return on energy invested). Over time we consume and deplete the high EROEI reserves and have to move on to consuming the lower EROEI reserves. This means that the fraction of energy society needs to allocate for energy extraction increases over time, so there's less energy for other uses. Similarly, we deplete the cheap to extract stocks of metal required to build and maintain industry, leaving stocks that require higher inputs of metal and energy to extract. Similarly for agricultural yields, as we mine and deplete accumulated stocks of nutrients out of the soil.
The business as usual scenario leading to "overshoot and collapse" behaviour is that we have increasing population, increasing industrial capital and increasing demands for energy, food and resource inputs, while the fraction of energy and resources that need to be allocated to energy, resource and food production grows over time. The fraction of remaining surplus energy and resources that can be allocated to things like education, healthcare, research, art decreases over time. At some point the growing fraction of energy and resources that needs to be allocated to energy and resource extraction becomes so large vs the existing population and industrial base that there simply isn't enough surplus to maintain healthcare, education, research, etc at the same level.
The "Overshoot and collapse" dynamic describes stocks of population, industry etc growing to peaks well beyond sustainable levels before the above dynamics catch up and cause them to rapidly decline.
The researchers did a bunch of modelling of alternative scenarios, exploring how to avoid these "Overshoot and collapse" dynamics.
Where have I heard that name … oh this little apocalypse https://failure.museum/marchfirst/
First thing I thought of as well! Despite being short lived, MarchFIRST was influential on Apple's branding and comeback.
Need a scoreboard for bubbles!
Are the predictions from the 2nd and later IPCC reports in there? Last I checked they were on track.
But is that the apocalypse? I hate the fact that we're destabilizing the environment, but humans (and wildlife) are pretty good at adaptation. Our ancestors have obviously survived massive extinction events in the past.
Yes, obviously, but our ancestors weren't human then.
All of these can be summed up as: "Bangs are more interesting than whimpers."
I've been in the "doomer" camp for over a decade and been surprised how many things I thought were far off in the future have come to fruition earlier.
But, the one thing I always find interesting, philosophically, about believing the world-as-we-know-it is coming to an end is that all of the things people are concerned about will happen no matter what.
Being afraid of the end of the world is ultimately being afraid that we will lose the things we have, that our work will be lost to time and history, that ultimately we will return to a void and all of "this" will have been for nothing.
However, all of that is true either way. You will lose everything you've ever loved over time in life, all the work you've done will be lost to time, in the end all of your efforts will be for nothing and even that won't matter.
The "end of the world" scares people because it forces them to discard the normal tools they use combat these many existential anxieties, but the world continuing to go on doesn't actually resolve any of those anxieties.
For me the problem is managing the transition minimizing unnecessary suffering.
The world is inevitably going to end, our work isn't going to be forever preserved into the future and there will be no "end of history" until there are living humans.
The thing is that the world can end in many ways. My world can end in many ways. I'd rather pass on with a clear consciousness, with my faculties preserved more or less, and with a legacy of having at least tried to make the lives of other that tiny bit better, so I'm aware if I'm not vigilant I can spend my final days suffering from an avoidable disease or accident or regretting I wasted my life chasing a better tomorrow that never came while neglecting what I already have today.
This is virtually the same for all society. It's going to fade into oblivion, but it matters a great deal that the process is as gentle as possible for everyone involved.
I am reminded of Roy Scranton's essay Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene [1]
> I found my way forward through an 18th-century Samurai manual, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s “Hagakure,” which commanded: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” Instead of fearing my end, I owned it. Every morning, after doing maintenance on my Humvee, I’d imagine getting blown up by an I.E.D., shot by a sniper, burned to death, run over by a tank, torn apart by dogs, captured and beheaded, and succumbing to dysentery. Then, before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive. “If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead,” wrote Tsunetomo, “he gains freedom in the Way.”
[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20...
That's in line with the Stoics too. Memento Mori.
People like Ray Kurzweil, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Paul Christiano see a pathway out of this inevitability through technological singularity. In their vision humans are a seed to something greater, something noticeable on cosmic scales. In their vision, like early humans who emerged on the other end of genetic bottlenecks, today's humans will have a disproportionate effect on the future. According to the current models of cosmology heat death of universe in still inevitability but that's on a completely different timescale than human life.
Please don't take this to be dismissive of your comment, because that's not my intention, but...
I think people like Ray Kurzweil are essentially religious. Instead of a messiah and heaven, they think of salvation in terms of a singularity, immortality, or a way of ascension. It feels very religious to me, and as such, detached from reality and physical possibilities.
'The world continuing to go on' is the status quo and has been for millenia at this point. Sure, the argument can be made that the world will end eventually, but if we do not have our reference timescale, what do we have? People aren't afraid that the world will eventually end (because 'eventually' should be thousands of years from now), people are afraid the world will end NOW, which does nullify your experience and efforts on the subjective human timescale. Life as we know it continuing to go on without ambiguity on our confidence to prevent world-ending events does resolve those anxieties.
If you have ever believed in the butterfly effect and if you believe that the world will keep marching on, then your actions undeniably do leave a permanent change to the world, forever after you are forgotten.
beautifully stated thank you
the two active predictions with the time frames of <5 years by MIT, and How & Strauss still look scary and not impossible
It’s also worth noting that Strauss, Howe, and Turchin all repeatedly stress in their books that firm dates aren’t a guarantee, that sometimes the cycle doesn’t line up correctly (like the Civil War cycle), and that none of their words are meant to be taken as literal predications so much as cautious warnings that history often rhymes.
Having finished both The Fourth Turning and End Times recently, Strauss and Howe’s specific guesses as to what might fuel the next crisis are laughably off track even if their broad strokes still paint a compelling (and at times, frightening) picture, while Turchin feels more prescient in his observations.
Ultimately, though, Turchin has the better message: even when a crisis destroys an empire, the world continues onward. That gave me some bleak hope to hang onto.
Yeah I was fully expecting this site to be making fun of all the wacko conspiracies about armageddon, such that it would make me feel better. But instead, the "Limit to Growth" summary seems entirely plausible.
It might not even be an apocalypse.
The Limits to Growth predictions are laughable.
I think that they Simon–Ehrlich wager showed how laughable they were but I guess we have to revisit every couple of decades.
What qualifies moving from "pending" state to "active". There seem to be many predictions at the bottom that are only a few years out that are not "active" Some are even end of year.
I could see why the ones with several hundred years deadline are "pending"
Pending means we haven't reached the start of the predicted time range for that event yet. If I predict a collapse in November of 2025, it would be pending for the rest of October, then active on November 1st until either the collapse happens and it becomes successful or December 1st arrives and it becomes failed.
Gradually and then suddenly.
Reminds me of the old gem of the Web 1.0 internet that was Exit Mundi
Survival bias. I get this is a joke but...
There are many societies which have collapsed. We can't know who predicted it because they are dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse
And of course, this list will no longer exist after societal collapse.
Societal collapse does not necessarily mean the loss of all writing or knowledge of that society. The wikipedia article you linked to proves this.
Out there, somewhere, is a nerd, laser etching Wikipedia onto metal plates, and burying them to be dug up later, just to be able to say, I knew this would happen!
Needs to carved in stone if they are serious.....
I think it's glass actually? Or something like glass.
Then Ruin would be able to influence what is written.
sort of like The Order of St. Liebowitz the Engineer from _A Canticle for Liebowitz_
"Days until next prediction might begin". Cute.
A bit in the doomer camp, and what worries me the most are the lifestyle changes needed to not fuck up the climate in the next few hundreds years. I believe I heard that we should slash 7/8th of our emissions (as individuals living a modern lifestyle) to keep the wet bulb temperature in check worldwide by the end of the century. This is, in my opinion, a target that we'll surely miss and it won't be nice.
Europe is already struggling with few millions people trying to enter over several years. I can't imagine what happens when large parts of India/Pakistan/Bangladesh become literally deadly during the hot season. That would displace ~1B people basically at once (if you stay and you don't have Air Conditioning you die). The following turmoil will be like nothing we ever saw before as a species (IMHO).
As a society if we care about our fellow humans - generally seen as a virtue to have - then we need to reduce our emissions etc etc.
As a rat race where the competition is between humans then rich people have a comparative advantage regarding how to survive the ravages.
So the future is less about avoiding climate catastrophe completely - that won't happen when the rich and powerful don't care.
The future is about surviving the issues until enough people die that emissions takes care of itself.
Either a lot of people die thus reducing emissions, or specific groups die thus reducing the capability to generate emissions on behalf of others. Or maybe enough tragedies happen that moral conscience does hold sway. Likely a combination of the above.
For supporting the continuation of my genes, maybe I should invest in property in Siberia/Alaska/Canada/Greenland/etc etc.
The emissions are only a problem initially; it doesn’t matter if enough population perish, the warming will continue by self-reinforcing effects for an era.
There might be the emergency brake of geoengineering making life miserable enough that rapid decarbonizing and negative emmisions become attractive, preferably before global supply chains turn to mush.
Serbia is a nice place.
Very disingenuous to put second-coming style prognostications from religious nutsos in the same list as people trying to use science, pattern analysis, or surveys of scholarly literature to identify when society will gradually break down from writing too many checks the environment or the economy can't cash.
I gotta say I didn't know about this Johnny Silverhand post, but I hope that if these things don't come to fruition he still finds time to stick it to the corpos in the most rockerboy way possible.
Was the Bronze Age Collapse a doomsday event? Mount Toba eruption? I think they were.
I'm not saying anyone predicted those or something. It's just that the notion of doomsday is quite vague.
I'm trying to broaden some notions here. Prediction might not be exactly absolute prediction, and doomsday might not be exactly absolute doomsday.
Perhaps some great threats were averted precisely because someone predicted them (for example, the great leaded gasoline poisoning).
One of the currently active events is predicting something on the scale of the Great Depression
I mean that's bad but it's much better than what I picture in my head as an apocalypse
Until we have nuclear disarmament, there’s a sword having over us.
It’s bound to happen eventually
Then we’re back to conventional warfare and the casualties of that. Just look at Russia and Ukraine.
Do you think Russia vs. Ukraine would happen with any similarity with the real conflict if Russia didn't have nuclear weapons?
Because, IMO, Russia would be destroyed the first time they threatened NATO.
That's why global nuclear disarmament seems only slightly more plausible to me than (e.g.) global artillery disarmament. For the foreseeable future there are going to be some nations that see nuclear weapons as the more affordable (or the only affordable) deterrent against rival nations that can field much larger armed forces.
In your scenario, does NATO have nuclear weapons?
I know this is mostly for fun, but it would be great to see how we are trending on the predications which has more scientific approach to it.
...remember it only takes one to be right!
We do have this dashboard https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2
Basically, the ultimate, "Nothing ever happens" scoreboard [0].
If any of your acquaintances are ever in doubt of anything ever happening, this will be a handy guide for them to consult.
[0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nothing-ever-happens
Plenty happens, but:
1. Events, including big ones like 9/11, don't unfold like in the movies as even direct consequences are often far removed.
2. Pax Americana + Hypernormalization + Cheap Food + Digital Escapism = a drug which convinces its users of neverending stability and order.
That's basically the point the meme is making. It's not arguing that nothing literally happens in spacetime; it just asserts that we rarely, if ever, see events that fundamentally change the world from its slugging baseline.
Doesn't make much sense given that we wouldn't exist to observe a timeline/reality where doomsday has been realized/effectuated.
The prediction aren't for total extinction events or even events where the internet wouldn't be around. Also, it' just a silly site provided for our entertainment.
That is also tautological. Anyways, beneath the silliness is a smugness everyone here knows all too well, including me. Let's not pretend.
"The end of the world as we know it" != "Eradication of humanity"
The world as we know it dies every second creating the new new one. What's the cutoff?
Which world do you know?
It can show 0 successful predictions all it wants, but we'd been through global lockdowns and forced vaccination, there's an ongoing war in Europe with casualties in hundreds of thousands on both sides, Gaza is being demolished by Israel, Internet as we knew it is about to turn into whitelisted fiberoptic/5G TV, surveillance is rampant, and the rise of the global technofascist police state as the public is being entertained by the clown shitshow of top level politicians is not obvious only to those who've been trying to save their sanity by remaining in denial.
Don't disagree with any of that, and I don't want to minimize the seriousness of the issues you've cited, but that kind of reinforces the implication of the scorecard?
People are persistently presented with perils (plagues, parasites, pollution, power-hungry politicians, propaganda, plutonium-powered projectiles, etc...) and humanity keeps finding a way through (though certainly at great personal and population-wide cost sometimes).
Some pretty serious chokepoints in the full history (including research suggesting that something reduced our ancestors numbers by ~99% a little under a million years ago) and yet this particular strain remains.