Bye Bye Society?

[rexbeccarox]

As far as water goes, my roommate and I keep buckets in our showers to reclaim water we're not using.  We also "let it mellow". I've been learning survival strategies since I was little (involved with Scouts and beyond), and we've both been learning further survival skills. I would never be this concerned if I didn't live in the coastal San Diego area, but it is what it is.

These are my neighbors, though... and that makes me very nervous. We're going to be opening our spigots to yield nothing... like, soon, if these people don't do something to decrease their water usage.

[Minimalist]

Our fucktard of a govt here in Au has built a billion dollar desal a few years ago.
Guess what, it hasn't been needed as yet!
Free to good home!

Min, being a historian, when/if do you think there'll be another world war?
I though the world was just about ready for a resetting?

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Albert Einstein

I can't see it happening.  The world is too fractured.  Consider the whining of the neo-cons bitching about islam being at war with the west.  Mainly, islam seems to be at war with itself and we should do what is needed to keep that going.

[ignoramus]

And in the meantime, the chinese and Indians take over the rest of the world peacefully.
The Chinese are about to invest another 3T dollars buying up prime Aussie farmland so they can feed their own people back home.
It won't be long.

[Vincent]

There's been end-of-the-world scenarios all throughout history. I personally subscribe more to the view as told by T.S. Elliot in his poem "The Hollow Men":

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I don't think that there's going to be an explosive apocalypse to destroy us all within a short span of time (unless we and this planet survive until the day the sun dies, millions of years from now). I believe it will be a slow, gradual end influenced by a variety of factors (war, disease, climate change, etc). 

[Napoléon]

Judgement free zone here.  I'm just curious what the average non-believer from around the globe feels about the possibility of an apocalypse.

99% of all other life that has ever existed on Earth has died out, don't see why we're much different. It was only 70 years or so since we had a war involving the entire world.

[Longhorn]

Yes, probably. That seems to be the intrinsic property of all life: dying.

[abaris]

Depends on what you call a society. If it's about states, there hasn't been a single century in history where some didn't collapse and new ones were born. Same goes for ideologies.

If you're talking about a general doomsday scenario, again, it depends just how stupid the political leaders of the world are. Global warming will lead to the flooding of big coastal hubs sooner or later. So a global economical crash of unknown dimensions is a likely scenario. The more important question would be the day after.

[The Grand Nudger]

Judgement free zone here.  I'm just curious what the average non-believer from around the globe feels about the possibility of an apocalypse.

99% of all other life that has ever existed on Earth has died out, don't see why we're much different. It was only 70 years or so since we had a war involving the entire world.

Take another look around you, shouldn't be too difficult to see how different we are.  One day we'll be among that number, but I don't expect it to be anytime soon.

I think that we're about to see our best days, myself.  All of this apocalypse business seems to center around the end of technology.  Well, it's not as though we haven't had our turn at being roaming savages....and that turned out pretty well for us, eh?

Climate change- Take a look at the impressive infrastructure in ag and cities, and how we've moved both over great distances and time, many times.  

War- It would have to be a bigger war than anything we've been in before.

Viral outbreak- Probably the most worrying of things I don't worry about.  I don't worry so much about viruses that -we- get though, it would be more troubling if our livestock or crops were decimated.  Rust, blight, and rootworms yall...scary shit.

Economic collapse-  If the whole world collapsed together, there would be no change in the relative value or worth of any of us.  If the whole world didn;t collapse together....then we're just in the same situation we're in today, and the world hasn't ended on that count.  

[Napoléon]

Take another look around you, shouldn't be too difficult to see how different we are.  One day we'll be among that number, but I don't expect it to be anytime soon.

Depends what you're looking for. You could just as easily argue how similar we are. Besides, I don't expect it any time soon either, but it only takes one big rock to come our way.

I think that we're about to see our best days, myself.  All of this apocalypse business seems to center around the end of technology.  Well, it's not as though we haven't had our turn at being roaming savages....and that turned out pretty well for us, eh?

Seems like a very optimistic way of viewing things, too optimistic IMO. You say to look around, if anything this technology has given us more of a reason to fear apocalypse. Between self-inflicted global warming and nuclear weapons that could one day decimate the entire earth, I honestly see no reason to think technology is some determining factor that goes in our favour. Don't get me wrong, I think we could achieve amazing things. I think the only probable way of us escaping death on this earth is to escape the earth itself and eventually explore the stars. But how far off is that? I don't see it happening any time soon. I'd say it's way more likely we fuck ourselves over before we save ourselves.

[Napoléon]

Climate change- Take a look at the impressive infrastructure in ag and cities, and how we've moved both over great distances and time, many times.

Humans haven't been around all that long. Have we seen anything on the scale of the last ice age? We survived through that but we were effectively cave men at that time. In fact it's probably fairer to say the human species back then was an entirely different one to what we are now. I don't think there's any comparison between surviving a global climate event like that and the occasional natural disaster. I think you're underestimating how hostile this earth can be, and how disastrous a global climate change might be. It's really quite impossible to say whether we'd survive anything of that scale and still have our technology, our cities and our agriculture, because we've never really faced anything on that scale.

War- It would have to be a bigger war than anything we've been in before.

Ofcourse, but that's not any indication that it can't happen. Like I said, it was only 70 years ago that we saw the biggest war of our species. What makes you think wars are going to get any smaller? As technology grows, so does the destruction that can be sown with it.

Viral outbreak- Probably the most worrying of things I don't worry about.  I don't worry so much about viruses that -we- get though, it would be more troubling if our livestock or crops were decimated.  Rust, blight, and rootworms yall...scary shit.

Two words, spanish flu.

Economic collapse-  If the whole world collapsed together, there would be no change in the relative value or worth of any of us.  If the whole world didn;t collapse together....then we're just in the same situation we're in today, and the world hasn't ended on that count.

Of everything, economic collapse wouldn't bring about a doomsday. The economy is of our making and our control anyway for the most part.