Your personal Scariest apocalypse? [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

Soras Teva Gee

2012-05-24, 10:24 PM

What do you find most scary as an apocalypse?

The heat death of the universe.

Personally for me is this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0wEYtmmuFQ&feature=relmfu). Seriously. Nothing scares me as all life becoming irrelevant and becoming this big ball of pointless mindlessness.

Hmm not enough ponies, but otherwise looks good to me.

Jokes aside, mine would have to be a zombie apocalypse. Just the thought of running from things that were once humans, trying to find a place away from them, finding supplies as they run short, and keeping your friends and family safe. If one of them turns, you're probably going to have to save you and the other survivors and kill them.

Heh maybe least scariest apocalypse to me because it can't actually happen. I mean conceptually, even if you create some infectious zombies somehow its not actually a major threat. Nothing that removes all of humanity's beneficial traits to replace them with utter brainless idiocy is to be feared.

Could go all night on that. Might if this is going to morph into the periodic zombie thread that pops up every once in awhile.

The Extinguisher

2012-05-24, 10:27 PM

ArlEammon

2012-05-24, 10:34 PM

Hmmm... Living through the Biblical Apocalypse.

Look it up, since all I have to do for an infraction is sneeze when just thinking about the Bible.

Lurkmoar

2012-05-24, 10:37 PM

ArlEammon

2012-05-24, 10:39 PM

The one were every person and animal disappears, leaving me alone with 50+ years to kill.

And I never find out why the big vanish happened. Did I miss out on the Rapture? Mass alien abductions? I fell into a coma?

Eh, like I said, I risk a MAJOR infraction that takes a year to shake off just by mentioning the Bible. :smallfurious: :smallfurious: :smallfurious:

I'll just say that the death of well over half the world, probably more occurs. Oh heck, just PM me and I'll send you a link in PM .:)

Lurkmoar

2012-05-24, 11:03 PM

I'm not religious. Just used the phrase, because typing rapture seemed to capture the idea more then just typing mass disappearance.

Sort of like that guy who survives a nuclear war by reading in a vault during his lunch break from the Twilight Zone, only no explosions. Just stillness that I would never be able to explain. That kind of thing keeps me up at nights when I'm feeling restless.

ArlEammon

2012-05-24, 11:05 PM

SowZ

2012-05-24, 11:46 PM

Ants. Seriously. If they wanted to, and all arose at once, they could easily destroy all mammalian life and much of the rest of it, too. Ants live on 6 out of 7 continents, work better in a group, and can rapidly devour things to make piranhas jealous if you factor in an ants proportionate size. Where ants live, they live in the millions. They form colonies in the millions and spread and spread and find food wherever it is. Are you on standing on the ground right now? You are probably on top of some ants.

Ants don't know pain or fear or emotion, they are even more pitiless than ravenous wolves. Ants can dig and burrow and scurry. Through wood, sometimes, and they can weaken the structural integrity of anything given enough time to entrench around it. Some ants can fly and swim.

Do you want to know why there aren't movies about all the ants forming one collective hive mind and wiping out all humans, (no, the one about giant ants does not count, those are much less frightening.) It is because the movie would be about thirty-eight minutes long. I suppose it could focus on those in airplanes or steel bunkers but there would never be a world to go to because given all of our advancing tech we could never engineer a world safe from ants.

At least with birds and wasps there are SOME tactics we could use to fight back. Not so with ants. It is the worst and they are the scariest. I mean, just the way they move and inspect things with their antennae and their brutal efficiency and use of energy to work all the time and their strict caste system... No fighting back at all.

Scowling Dragon

2012-05-25, 12:42 AM

Aotrs Commander

2012-05-25, 04:43 AM

Well their also puny and stupid. In return for being able to work well together their incapable of thinking other then "Forage for sugar".

Sure if they gathered into mounds of millions then Maybe they could kill a person (More likely just die under their own weight).

You... havn't heard of army ants, then? Which are one of the more voracious predators in their locations? Because if things can't run away from them, they will kill it (even vertebrates unfortunate enough to be trapped).

Ants rising up to annhilate humans is no more likely that birds...or trees... But if guided by the same sort of malign intelligence or whatever that directed them, it would be equally, if not more devasating, as theire are, in the end, a lot more ants than humans, and super-colonies of ants (i.e. interconnected colonies) have been found across hundreds of kilometres, can can contains millions of nests and billions of ants.

Beacon of Chaos

2012-05-25, 05:08 AM

It is the worst and they are the scariest. I mean, just the way they move and inspect things with their antennae-
I happen to find ants cute for that very reason.

Personal scariest for me would probably be something like the world burning. Say that the Earth, for whatever reason, is moving towards the Sun. Nothing you can do about it, just the world slowly heating up. The seas start to boil. The air is like an oven. All you can do is step inside, turn on the AC, and wait to be slowly incinerated.

Lothston

2012-05-25, 05:43 AM

Jokes aside, mine would have to be a zombie apocalypse. Just the thought of running from things that were once humans, trying to find a place away from them, finding supplies as they run short, and keeping your friends and family safe. If one of them turns, you're probably going to have to save you and the other survivors and kill them.

Zombie Apocalypse is fun. You get to kill lots of things and do whatever you want with the stuff left from humanity.

Hmmm... Living through the Biblical Apocalypse.

That would be pretty fun as well. Plenty of interesting opportunities and plenty of time to explore them. Also, a lot of people will be "saved" and all that, so it's not all bad.

The heat death of the universe.

The timeframe for that is about (10 to the order of 100) years, and even today we already have nuclear fission and are close to figuring out nuclear fusion. That alone would give enough energy to sustain humanity.

As for me, a scary kind of apocalypse is the one outlined in Lars von Trier's Melancholia, with the arrival of a rogue planet and unavoidable destruction of Earth. His version is of course very fantastical, but there are theories about a "Nemesis" star (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(hypothetical_star)) on a very long orbit returning to the Solar System every 26 million years or so. Now that would be scary.

Meph

2012-05-25, 06:28 AM

I'd be glad to see any one of the above. I'm afraid the most that there will be no apocalypse in my lifetime.

Giegue

2012-05-25, 06:45 AM

Traab

2012-05-25, 06:47 AM

You... havn't heard of army ants, then? Which are one of the more voracious predators in their locations? Because if things can't run away from them, they will kill it (even vertebrates unfortunate enough to be trapped).

Ants rising up to annhilate humans is no more likely that birds...or trees... But if guided by the same sort of malign intelligence or whatever that directed them, it would be equally, if not more devasating, as theire are, in the end, a lot more ants than humans, and super-colonies of ants (i.e. interconnected colonies) have been found across hundreds of kilometres, can can contains millions of nests and billions of ants.

Meh,ants arent that bad. Yes driver ants (or army ants if you prefer) make huge swarms and devour everything in their path. They move at a rate of 20 meters an HOUR. My 89 year old grandmother in a walker could stay ahead of that while trying to trek through the woods. A guy with any preparation time at all could spend hours slaughtering that swarm by the thousands and never be in any real danger. A nice case of ant poison spray and walk backwards. Drop a crate of ant poison traps, the kind that dont kill right away so they can be brought back to feed everyone? Millions of dead ants.

As for me, my personal scariest apocalypse is one that you cant do anything about. A world killing meteor strike, or the plot from the movie, The Core. The kind of thing that outside of a movie cant be averted at the last moment by bruce willis. That will leave few to no survivors, and there is no way short of dumb luck to survive it.

Aotrs Commander

2012-05-25, 06:56 AM

My personal worst nightmare armageddon would be global flooding, either via climate change or something else. I have a terrible fear of drowning and am not a water person by any means. I can't even stand to put my head underwater in a pool and am a poor swimmer.

In a quite literal sense, the sea rising up to flood the world is definately one of my nightmares, in that it is a not infrequent occurance in my dreams if they happen to be situated near the coast or something.

Scowling Dragon

2012-05-25, 06:57 AM

Personal scariest for me would probably be something like the world burning. Say that the Earth, for whatever reason, is moving towards the Sun. Nothing you can do about it, just the world slowly heating up. The seas start to boil. The air is like an oven. All you can do is step inside, turn on the AC, and wait to be slowly incinerated.

Thiers a twilight zone episode about that. The twist ending is that they all freeze to death

Brother Oni

2012-05-25, 07:10 AM

Sure if they gathered into mounds of millions then Maybe they could kill a person (More likely just die under their own weight).

You must not heard of jack jumper ants then. They have an extremely toxic venom, which can cause death in susceptible people (~3% of the population).
That 3% accounts for more fatalities than spiders, snakes, wasps, and sharks combined in Tasmania.

Even if you're not allergic to the venom, according to the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, being stung by one rates between a 3.0 (bold and unrelenting, somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail) and 4.0 (pure, intense, brilliant pain; like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail grinding into your heel), so too many of those will probably kill you (or make you wish you were dead).

Meh,ants arent that bad.

It's not an issue if you get a massive swarm marching towards you like an army. It's far more of one when you get solitary ones ambushing you when you least expect it, especially poisonous ones like I've mentioned above.

The annual fatalities caused by Jack jumper ants them indicate that they have some success with this tactic and that's before they're involved in some concerted effort to kill you, rather than you just accidentally antagonising them.

Scowling Dragon

2012-05-25, 07:25 AM

I just don't see them rising to be anything apocalyptic.

Comrade

2012-05-25, 07:32 AM

Probably some sort of wide-spread, extremely contagious, extremely fatal disease that comes out of nowhere.

Traab

2012-05-25, 07:42 AM

You must not heard of jack jumper ants then. They have an extremely toxic venom, which can cause death in susceptible people (~3% of the population).
That 3% accounts for more fatalities than spiders, snakes, wasps, and sharks combined in Tasmania.

Even if you're not allergic to the venom, according to the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, being stung by one rates between a 3.0 (bold and unrelenting, somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail) and 4.0 (pure, intense, brilliant pain; like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail grinding into your heel), so too many of those will probably kill you (or make you wish you were dead).

It's not an issue if you get a massive swarm marching towards you like an army. It's far more of one when you get solitary ones ambushing you when you least expect it, especially poisonous ones like I've mentioned above.

The annual fatalities caused by Jack jumper ants them indicate that they have some success with this tactic and that's before they're involved in some concerted effort to kill you, rather than you just accidentally antagonising them.

And the day after these ants start going nuts and attacking people, the world governments do a nice air dropped poison run that settles on the ground and kills any ant that pokes its head out for the next few days. They are ANTS. Yes some can be dangerous, but even that horrifying jumping ant still leaves 97% of the worlds population alive, and extremely pissed off. Its like zombie flicks. They are only dangerous in vast swarms, and in any reasonable world, those swarms would suffer horrible attrition in short order by people fighting back and quickly lose effectiveness.

Aotrs Commander

2012-05-25, 07:50 AM

And the day after these ants start going nuts and attacking people, the world governments do a nice air dropped poison run that settles on the ground and kills any ant that pokes its head out for the next few days.

Of course, once you've done that, you've also done irrepairable damage to the ecosystem (and even assuming you can actually manage to kill all the ants off) that way - the planet is very, very big, and coating it with ant-pesticides is going to take more production time than I care to imagine (not toomention all the aviantion fuel to cover all the land). Unless you can make a magic ant-specific poison, you're going to have critical collateral damage to other animal life (and regardless to anything that eats ants), likely leading to an ecological collapse worsened by the fact you've just spent a horrific amount of money air-dropping poison everywhere... So you get an ecological catastrophy nearly as bad as the ant-one you just prevented...

(And what's to stop the rest of insects getting in on the act? Actually, that would be fatal, for humanity, because there are a frag-ton more insects in the world than humans and if they all suddenly decided to go humans all at once... It wouldn't be pretty.)

Traab

2012-05-25, 08:04 AM

Of course, once you've done that, you've also done irrepairable damage to the ecosystem (and even assuming you can actually manage to kill all the ants off) that way - the planet is very, very big, and coating it with ant-pesticides is going to take more production time than I care to imagine (not toomention all the aviantion fuel to cover all the land). Unless you can make a magic ant-specific poison, you're going to have critical collateral damage to other animal life (and regardless to anything that eats ants), likely leading to an ecological collapse worsened by the fact you've just spent a horrific amount of money air-dropping poison everywhere... So you get an ecological catastrophy nearly as bad as the ant-one you just prevented...

(And what's to stop the rest of insects getting in on the act? Actually, that would be fatal, for humanity, because there are a frag-ton more insects in the world than humans and if they all suddenly decided to go humans all at once... It wouldn't be pretty.)

So now its not just ants, but every insect in the world suddenly develops conscious thought and is out for revenge? And there is ant specific poison, there is a reason raid ant spray doesnt work on bees and vice versa. Im not saying there wouldnt be collateral damage, but it would hardly destroy the ecosystem.

Beacon of Chaos

2012-05-25, 08:25 AM

Thiers a twilight zone episode about that. The twist ending is that they all freeze to death
Really? How?

Scowling Dragon

2012-05-25, 09:50 AM

Well watch the episode.

If you realy want to know:

At first they thought the earth lost its orbit and was hurtling towards the sun. It turns out it was just a dream........It was hurtling towards the void of space.

Arcane_Secrets

2012-05-25, 09:57 AM

The Vacuum Metastability Event (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum#Vacuum_metastability_event)

Basically, the idea is we live in a false vacuum, a local minimum, but not a true vacuum. Now if enough energy was produced to overcome the well we live in, the universe would revert the the next lowest vacuum state, which would be a completely different universe, one that everything as we know it couldn't exist in. The bubble would propagate at the speed of light and the universe would be over. Sure, something else would take it's place, but not anything we'd recognize or be able to exist in.

And there's nothing we can do to stop it, if it does happen.

It's actually kind of hard for me to be scared of that for two reasons:

1) If it did happen, how big is the universe anyway? Billions of light-years across-so it could take billions of years for it to happen depending on where the bubble originated and assuming that it propagated spherically (which might be wrong). Its entirely possible that if people never find some way of 'cheating' wrt interstellar travel that we'd be stuck on the earth when the sun goes red giant and kills us already by then.

2) When it kills you its so fast that unless there were distortions as the bubble approached that made regions slowly uninhabitable, you wouldn't really feel it.

Arcane_Secrets

2012-05-25, 10:01 AM

So now its not just ants, but every insect in the world suddenly develops conscious thought and is out for revenge? And there is ant specific poison, there is a reason raid ant spray doesnt work on bees and vice versa. Im not saying there wouldnt be collateral damage, but it would hardly destroy the ecosystem.

A better approach (since ants can adapt to poison, and I think fire ants are immune to some of the insecticides used against them) might be ant-specific parasitic fungi. I'm not sure if one exists that infects all ant species, but if one could be found, mass cultivated, and released, then they could be dealt with.

Hopeless

2012-05-25, 02:49 PM

Mine is discovering I'm immortal and have to spend my remaining years staying out of the attention of those who want to discover how its done, which if it only effected me would be bad enough but they would obviously also go after any of my relations as far back or forward as they can go just to double check their findings to see what was so different about me from them...

The other almost as scary apocalypse is discovering all of the new shows i like are only for release in the US and will never be released over here because some idiot over there doesn't understand that the United States isn't the only nation on the planet...

Oh hold on thats actually true and ongoing, sorry never mind!

Scowling Dragon

2012-05-25, 03:01 PM

Well thats kinda unfair. If it makes more money, they will release it as much as possible.

It may be that its simply not possible to release it elsewhere.

Aotrs Commander

2012-05-25, 03:05 PM

The other almost as scary apocalypse is discovering all of the new shows i like are only for release in the US and will never be released over here because some idiot over there doesn't understand that the United States isn't the only nation on the planet...

Oh hold on thats actually true and ongoing, sorry never mind!

Multiregion DVD players are your friend (or appropriate media players on your PC, preference depending). A good 50% of my DVD collection are US or Australian imports off Amazon.co.uk (via specialist sellers) or more rarely, Amazon.com or ebay.

Brother Oni

2012-05-25, 07:59 PM

I just don't see them rising to be anything apocalyptic.

Which is why it's going to be scary when it happens. :smalltongue:

Bear in mind Sowz's post about how they can become so dangerous. If it worked for birds, I don't see why it can't happen for ants.

So now its not just ants, but every insect in the world suddenly develops conscious thought and is out for revenge? And there is ant specific poison, there is a reason raid ant spray doesnt work on bees and vice versa. Im not saying there wouldnt be collateral damage, but it would hardly destroy the ecosystem.

Most ant poisons are rather non-specific, ranging from solutions of boric acid to arsenic to standard nerve toxin insecticides, and we're not even getting into anything exotic yet.
You dump tonnes of that on the ground and even if it does kill all the ants, you've just washed it into the local water supply the next time it rains. If that doesn't completely completely knacker the local ecosystem, I don't know what will.

The other almost as scary apocalypse is discovering all of the new shows i like are only for release in the US and will never be released over here because some idiot over there doesn't understand that the United States isn't the only nation on the planet...

Oh hold on thats actually true and ongoing, sorry never mind!

Further to Aotrs Commander's post, there's also various digital distribution methods of varying legality for acquiring whatever show you want.

Well thats kinda unfair. If it makes more money, they will release it as much as possible.

Or they can't afford to license it to a new distributor; they don't want to bother with localisation; re-editing it to fit with local laws; insufficient number of episodes for syndication to another country...

There's a variety of reasons why they can't release it outside of the US, ranging from logistical, political, cultural, economical, to simply they don't want to.

Lateral

2012-05-25, 09:02 PM

Someone already said mine.

The Vacuum Metastability Event (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum#Vacuum_metastability_event)

Basically, the idea is we live in a false vacuum, a local minimum, but not a true vacuum. Now if enough energy was produced to overcome the well we live in, the universe would revert the the next lowest vacuum state, which would be a completely different universe, one that everything as we know it couldn't exist in. The bubble would propagate at the speed of light and the universe would be over. Sure, something else would take it's place, but not anything we'd recognize or be able to exist in.

And there's nothing we can do to stop it, if it does happen.
So... yeah. One thing to note, since it would propagate at the speed of light, there is literally no warning. By the time we could see it, it would already be here. One second we exist, the next... poof. We're gone.

It's actually kind of hard for me to be scared of that for two reasons:

1) If it did happen, how big is the universe anyway? Billions of light-years across-so it could take billions of years for it to happen depending on where the bubble originated and assuming that it propagated spherically (which might be wrong). Its entirely possible that if people never find some way of 'cheating' wrt interstellar travel that we'd be stuck on the earth when the sun goes red giant and kills us already by then.
Again, there'd be literally no warning since it propagates at the speed of light, so... the scary part is the idea that it's already happened, millions of years ago, and that it's expanding towards us. Since we don't have any way to tell if it's began, it could literally hit us at any second.

2) When it kills you its so fast that unless there were distortions as the bubble approached that made regions slowly uninhabitable, you wouldn't really feel it.
Honestly, the 'sudden nonexistence' part of it is the part that scares me the most. Although if I did have to die, dying instantaneously in a space apocalypse doom wave of high-level science wouldn't be a bad way to go.

Bulldog Psion

2012-05-25, 09:03 PM

Hydrogen sulfide emissions on a global scale is pretty rough in my book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Dying#Hydrogen_sulfide_emissions

I mean, not only would it be a slow, lingering death as the gases slowly built up in the air, but there's nothing grand, apocalyptic, or darkly poetic about it. It's just grubby, agonizing choking to death in inescapable bacterial flatulence.

Remmirath

2012-05-27, 01:55 AM

Probably some sort of wide-spread, extremely contagious, extremely fatal disease that comes out of nowhere.

I was going to go with essentially this, and in some ways to me it is the most terrifying, but then I thought about it more. I think I'll have to go with the somewhat vague answer of 'anything that would wind up with the end of the universe/the end of time/complete nonexistence of all things'.

The disease thing is still rather nasty, however.

Tvtyrant

2012-05-27, 02:16 AM

Probably the "one bad summer" onset ice age. If we get a spring and summer in the northern hemispheres which can't melt the winter ice, the snow will reflect enough heat off of the earth to start an ice age. Some ice ages take as little as ten years to begin major glaciation!

What it means in terms of the modern world is that the temperate grain belts (providing 80% of the worlds agriculture) will be under a layer of frost almost instantly, with the result that our population will buckle under the worst famine in human history.

Thanqol

2012-05-27, 04:29 AM

Thermonuclear Warfare.

Because it's the most preventable one.

Bulldog Psion

2012-05-27, 09:25 AM

Thermonuclear Warfare.

Because it's the most preventable one.

Which is exactly why it hasn't happened. :smallsmile: And, IMO, won't, either. Ah, peace is very enjoyable ...

The Extinguisher

2012-05-27, 12:01 PM

Someone already said mine.

So... yeah. One thing to note, since it would propagate at the speed of light, there is literally no warning. By the time we could see it, it would already be here. One second we exist, the next... poof. We're gone.

Again, there'd be literally no warning since it propagates at the speed of light, so... the scary part is the idea that it's already happened, millions of years ago, and that it's expanding towards us. Since we don't have any way to tell if it's began, it could literally hit us at any second.

Honestly, the 'sudden nonexistence' part of it is the part that scares me the most. Although if I did have to die, dying instantaneously in a space apocalypse doom wave of high-level science wouldn't be a bad way to go.

Well I'm more worried that we would cause it. We know cosmic ray collisions don't give off enough energy to do it, but if we create a particle accelerator that gives off more energy than cosmic ray collisions, then who knows?

Traab

2012-05-27, 12:10 PM

Well I'm more worried that we would cause it. We know cosmic ray collisions don't give off enough energy to do it, but if we create a particle accelerator that gives off more energy than cosmic ray collisions, then who knows?

On the plus side, if we DO cause it, we will never know. Oh sure the handful of scientists that are working at the time might be aware that they just screwed up and cant stop what is about to happen, but the other 99.9999999% of the world would blink and be gone.

JCarter426

2012-05-27, 12:26 PM

Strange matter. False vacuum is a scary thought too, though.

I'm not really afraid of the Singularity because if it would actually be really cool, and humanity would stand a chance I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

TheLaughingMan

2012-05-27, 12:30 PM

Care Bears invade, Care Bear Stare everything into forced utopia of smiles and friendship.

/end thread

thegurullamen

2012-05-27, 03:16 PM

An unknown cosmological event that would alter life on Earth but that we could feasibly live through if only barely. Why? Well for one, it's unknown which means that no one knows what the hell just happened. Next, after the initial effect, who knows what chaotic aftereffects will show up or when? It's the same as every other doomsday scenario, except there's a pervasive sense of doubt--what can anyone do when there's no guarantee the world will be the same tomorrow?

Traab

2012-05-27, 04:49 PM

I would like to clarify that for me the worst part of any apocalypse is waiting for it to happen. You see the meteor coming, or the giant tsunami that will make kansas ocean front property, or the storms from Day After Tomorrow are forming up. There is nothing that can stop them, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Thats why these instant end of reality scenarios dont bother me much. There is no impending doom, no watching the end of the world approach while knowing it cant be stopped, just flash and done.

Our new insect/robot overlords is a different issue. Thats not so much an end of the world as a war for survival as a species. Its something that can be fought, that there is hope of overcoming. So it holds less fear for me because there is something we can DO about it.

Lateral

2012-05-27, 05:27 PM

Strange matter.
The thing about strangelets destroying the Earth is that we're not really sure if that's how they would behave. If strangelets don't have the required surface tension, or if Bodmer and Witten's strange matter hypothesis is incorrect, then they wouldn't actually convert ordinary matter to strange matter. Besides, strangelets are supposed to be positively charged and so repel nuclei (at least in their ground state).

I'm not really afraid of the Singularity because if it would actually be really cool, and humanity would stand a chance I for one welcome our new robot overlords.
Also, the Singularity wouldn't necessarily end in the death of us all, or anything. Besides, we could theoretically engineer it so that the robot overlords are friendly towards humanity.

Forum Explorer

2012-05-27, 06:39 PM

Scariest for me would for the sun (and Earth) to be caught in the grasp of a black hole. We get a few years, perhaps less, before we are pulled too close

Lateral

2012-05-27, 06:55 PM

Scariest for me would for the sun (and Earth) to be caught in the grasp of a black hole. We get a few years, perhaps less, before we are pulled too close

Mmm, I don't really find that all that scary since we do know, from observation, that it isn't happening. If it were, though, then that would be really scary, since we have no way to stop it.

Soralin

2012-05-27, 08:03 PM

The counter to the ant apocalypse (And potentially an even worse apocalypse itself): Cordyceps (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8)

Cikomyr

2012-05-27, 10:16 PM

The Grey Goo of Doom

Creating and losing control of a horde of nanites which self-replicate and absurd all matter, molecule by molecule..

Consuming the entire Earth... And all of it's mass...

Thanqol

2012-05-28, 04:26 AM

Which is exactly why it hasn't happened. :smallsmile: And, IMO, won't, either. Ah, peace is very enjoyable ...

Ah.

Optimism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov).

Omergideon

2012-05-28, 09:32 AM

2 for me.

1) Nuclear Armageddon as it seems at times so very potentially likely.

2) Being left. Alone. In all the world. With no-one else to talk to or communicate with. That to me is the definition of Hell.

Tyndmyr

2012-05-28, 11:45 AM

Jokes aside, mine would have to be a zombie apocalypse. Just the thought of running from things that were once humans, trying to find a place away from them, finding supplies as they run short, and keeping your friends and family safe. If one of them turns, you're probably going to have to save you and the other survivors and kill them.

I'd consider that fun and games! Seriously, it's a world in which most problems can be solved by shooting them in the face. I'd crush it in that world.

Things I can't fix, like heat death, are a bit more troubling.

My personal worst nightmare armageddon would be global flooding, either via climate change or something else. I have a terrible fear of drowning and am not a water person by any means. I can't even stand to put my head underwater in a pool and am a poor swimmer.

Good news, even if every bit of ice melted round the entire world, and we factored in heat expansion of the oceans...we'd only get like 200 feet of height. There's just not enough water to flood everything.

So, if your altitude is notable at all, this isn't a problem.

Scariest for me would for the sun (and Earth) to be caught in the grasp of a black hole. We get a few years, perhaps less, before we are pulled too close

I have good news for you. Black holes are not the popularized death machines they are made out to be. You know what would happen if our moon suddenly became a black hole composed of the same matter(highly compressed)?

Absolutely nothing. It would continue to orbit the earth exactly as it does now.

Now true, actually slamming into a black hole would be bad. Actually slamming into any star or planet would be bad. There's really no difference in the outcome.

And black holes are highly detectable, and none are anywhere near us.

JCarter426

2012-05-28, 01:55 PM

The thing about strangelets destroying the Earth is that we're not really sure if that's how they would behave. If strangelets don't have the required surface tension, or if Bodmer and Witten's strange matter hypothesis is incorrect, then they wouldn't actually convert ordinary matter to strange matter. Besides, strangelets are supposed to be positively charged and so repel nuclei (at least in their ground state).
Well, perhaps I should clarify... strange matter in a worst case scenario.

The Grey Goo of Doom

Creating and losing control of a horde of nanites which self-replicate and absurd all matter, molecule by molecule..

Consuming the entire Earth... And all of it's mass...
And the worst case scenario of strange matter is basically this, but with a kind of matter that we don't know what the hell it is. Grey goo is scary on its own, but strange matter makes it... stranger.

Hopeless

2012-05-29, 05:35 AM

1) Ants

What makes you think they haven't already?

From their point of view some of us might be far worse menaces than anything they'd do but we do produce lots of very interesting stuff they would be interested in an unlike us have no problem waiting for us to dump this stuff in bins or refuse sites for them to delve however thats not to say they don't get impatient its just that the really smart ones know precisely how to press our buttons and whilst we do seem intent on self-annihilation they just make sure that if and when it happens they're not the ones responsible and they maximise their chances of survival by being nowhere near the idiots or their wmd's...

2) Element Change
There's a new tv series coming out soon in the US where all power apparently fails and they have to go back to their most basic means of survival.
What I'm wondering is for this to happen what common elements that are shared by both gunpowder and electricity generators, nuclear power stations, planes, cars and so on so that just by a simple change in that element renders all of these completely useless?

3) Nibilus or whatever the rogue planet is called, what are the odds this could be spotted in time?

4) Day after tomorrow, how long would that have taken if kept scientifically accurate?

5) I have wondered if the planet's rotational shift is moving say the Uk closer to the equator but some are saying some of the unseasonal weather is due to weather coming across from Russia, anyone know for sure since there is supposed to be land under Antarctica and once upon a time it wasn't hidden underneath that ice...

6) Having Beyond the Mountains of Madness flashbacks after the above!

Thats enough for now...

JCarter426

2012-05-29, 06:01 AM

Nibilus or whatever the rogue planet is called, what are the odds this could be spotted in time?
You mean Nemesis, the rogue star? It probably doesn't exist.

Day after tomorrow, how long would that have taken if kept scientifically accurate?
The general consensus is it wouldn't.

I have wondered if the planet's rotational shift is moving say the Uk closer to the equator but some are saying some of the unseasonal weather is due to weather coming across from Russia, anyone know for sure since there is supposed to be land under Antarctica and once upon a time it wasn't hidden underneath that ice...
That would take too long to do any real damage. I think.

Forum Explorer

2012-05-29, 04:00 PM

You mean Nemesis, the rogue star? It probably doesn't exist.

As far as I know it's just a theory. So it's more accurate to say we have no idea if it exists or not. Or if it will behave in the predicted manner. If I remember correctly the Nemesis star was presented as a possible reason behind the pattern of mass extinctions.

JCarter426

2012-05-29, 08:08 PM

Yeah, but the mass extinctions that Nemesis was supposed to account for turned out to not require Nemesis. And while we know there must be something out there to account for Sedna's orbit, it's probably not a star, and not necessarily there anymore. So in the traditional sense, it's not a theory... merely an unlikely hypothesis.

But a rogue star somewhere out in the depths of space, hurling rocks at us... is too cool to not be true.

Cikomyr

2012-05-30, 06:35 AM

Sedna's weird orbit is actually par for the Dwarf Planet. Like Pluto, they don't have a normal orbit.

Scowling Dragon

2012-05-30, 06:43 AM

2) Being left. Alone. In all the world. With no-one else to talk to or communicate with. That to me is the definition of Hell.

Studies have conducted a test on a person putting him into confinement for 6 months. In that time the person became so depressed and careless about his life he didn't notice when he got hit by lightning.

Life without any human contact would have you dead in a year.

JCarter426

2012-05-30, 07:45 AM

Sedna's weird orbit is actually par for the Dwarf Planet. Like Pluto, they don't have a normal orbit.
No, supposedly Sedna is too far out for the sun to have pulled it into orbit, like it might have done with Pluto. There's a theory that Nemesis set it on its path, but I don't believe that even requires Nemesis to be there anymore, or even as close as traditionally held.

turkishproverb

2012-05-30, 01:05 PM

Tyndmyr

2012-05-30, 01:44 PM

Studies have conducted a test on a person putting him into confinement for 6 months. In that time the person became so depressed and careless about his life he didn't notice when he got hit by lightning.

Life without any human contact would have you dead in a year.

I suspect that says a lot more about confinement than it does about solitude. Being kept in a cage with others also seems to be generally undesirable. The smaller the cage, the less desirable.

What I'm wondering is for this to happen what common elements that are shared by both gunpowder and electricity generators, nuclear power stations, planes, cars and so on so that just by a simple change in that element renders all of these completely useless?

Gunpowder is what, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur? Oh, and potassium.

I believe that you can make an electric engine and power source without any of those. Would it be problematic? Well, yeah, but if oxygen or carbon ceases to exist and work as it does, you'll have larger problems.

Scowling Dragon

2012-05-30, 01:58 PM

Oops Sorry. Confinement. :smallfrown:

Another inportant factor of confinement is seeing the sky.

Lateral

2012-05-30, 02:46 PM

Well, yeah, but if oxygen or carbon ceases to exist and work as it does, you'll have larger problems.

If any element were to cease to exist and work as it does, you'd have massive problems. Granted, the consequences of, say, einsteinium doing that aren't so huge to life if that's the only change, but the consequences in science of something just randomly and completely changing, everywhere, for no discernible reason are enormous.

Tyndmyr

2012-06-18, 01:42 PM

If any element were to cease to exist and work as it does, you'd have massive problems. Granted, the consequences of, say, einsteinium doing that aren't so huge to life if that's the only change, but the consequences in science of something just randomly and completely changing, everywhere, for no discernible reason are enormous.

Well, my point is that if carbon or oxygen stop working the same way...it's not a long descent into chaos and basic means of survival without power...it's instant death for basically every living thing.

Agent 451

2012-06-18, 08:58 PM

For me it would have to be a twist on the "Time enough to Last" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_at_Last) episode of the Twilight Zone. Except that instead of breaking my nonexistent glasses, all media (whether it be dvds, books, magazines, etc) has mysteriously been replaced by either video or written accounts of Jersey Shore episodes....which keep repeating over, and over, and over.....

Edit: I was going to paint this the colour of sarcasm, but really this would be a special kind of Hell.

Brumski

2012-06-20, 03:39 PM

Well I'm going to combine some.

I wake up one day to find myself totally alone, no explanation. It takes me awhile to figure this out because all light sources and electricity appear to have stopped working. Am I just blind? Idk, but there's no sun, or even light from my alarm clock LEDs. After awhile I hear strange rustling in the distance, calling for help I investigate, but to no avail. Deciding to just forage for food to survive, the rustling happens again, repeatedly, and appears to get closer unless I actively seek it, then it retreats.

Living like this for awhile, I've grown use to ignoring the rustling, getting food how I may, when I realize that some of my food and tools have been moved, sometimes only slightly, sometimes they're missing altogether. Now my furniture starts to get moved around, I've tripped over the same darn ottoman more times then **** Van Dike, now I have to check the ground with a stick...then a cabinet door is left opened and I walk face first into it, now I have to check everywhere in front of me.

How does this end? Maybe I just die of old age, living a very frustrated life, no answers, no rest, no reprieve. Maybe I try to end things myself, but I'm always mysteriously saved. And always, that rustling...

CapnRedBeard

2012-06-20, 07:23 PM

Brumski

2012-06-21, 08:54 AM

None of them are very scary as there'd be all sorts of cool things to do if there was 99.9% less people.

I suppose I'd prefer a small group of people to hang with over being alone...but even alone...I'd have fun.

99.9%, that makes me think of some all powerful evil being, that loves D&D, having all of humanity roll three d10, only people who get three 0's get to live (not sure if that math actually works out, but you get the idea)

Then make your hypothetical apocalypse less fun, say you wake up one day , alone, to total darkness, on what becomes quickly evident to be some alien dimension, as all sound is muted, and the ground is completely flat and even, you can't even write in the dirt or anything (it's concrete or something). You're never hungry or thirsty, but can't have any kind of input, or output at all. That sounds terrifying to me.

CapnRedBeard

2012-06-21, 12:06 PM

That sounds a bit like the Christian purgatory. I'd imagine that I'd consider that quickly. Rethink the bad stuff in my life...maybe even repent. When that failed...there would be anger. When that failed...I think that I'd try meditation to learn to accept the new reality. But yeah eventually I'd go batty and be miserable

Telonius

2012-06-21, 02:20 PM

Two possibilities for me.

1: Captain Trips-like superflu ... that killed just a little bit more slowly.

2: Inexplicably, there is no more rain. Life slowly drains away from the interiors of every continent, leaving nothing but parched, cracked wastelands. Not a true end-of-the-world scenario, since the oceans and some natural springs will still be there; but the idea of it just gives me the shudders.

Brumski

2012-06-21, 02:38 PM

2: Inexplicably, there is no more rain. Life slowly drains away from the interiors of every continent, leaving nothing but parched, cracked wastelands. Not a true end-of-the-world scenario, since the oceans and some natural springs will still be there; but the idea of it just gives me the shudders.

There is a book with that premise, I think. Some crazy super-plastic ends up coating all large bodies of water, preventing any evaporation from happening, so no more rain.

Gnomish Wanderer

2012-06-21, 10:42 PM

Then make your hypothetical apocalypse less fun, say you wake up one day , alone, to total darkness, on what becomes quickly evident to be some alien dimension, as all sound is muted, and the ground is completely flat and even, you can't even write in the dirt or anything (it's concrete or something). You're never hungry or thirsty, but can't have any kind of input, or output at all. That sounds terrifying to me.You mean if your life was suddenly a (darker) sensory deprivation chamber? Every day's a dream...

Personally I also don't find any of the 'instant unforeseeable' death options scary. If I can't see it coming, why be afraid of it? It'll happen with or without me, so it really has no bearing on my life, just the death part. Which is what life is like anyway.

I like to talk about how awesome a zombie apocalypse would be and how well I'd do, but in reality it would nightmarish. The psychological torture would be unbearable (especially in the 'you always hear groaning' types) and dead bodies are unsettling enough when they're not trying to eat you. Though my childhood nightmares largely consisted of zombie apocalypses so the fear could somehow just relate to a facet of my psychology.

thubby

2012-06-21, 10:52 PM

Cthulhu

the prospect of going insane is truly terrifying.

Forum Explorer

2012-06-21, 11:02 PM

Cthulhu

the prospect of going insane is truly terrifying.

says the pony in a straightjacket. :smalltongue:

Going insane wouldn't be too bad I think. It depends on the type of insanity really.

On a slightly different note my personal scariest fate (not apocalypse) would be to slowly forget everything and everyone around me. Eventually I'd wake up in a place I've never been before surrounded by alien objects while strangers constantly showed up and talked at me.

Tavar

2012-06-21, 11:04 PM

radmelon

2012-06-21, 11:14 PM

On a slightly different note my personal scariest fate (not apocalypse) would be to slowly forget everything and everyone around me. Eventually I'd wake up in a place I've never been before surrounded by alien objects while strangers constantly showed up and talked at me.

Well, all you'd have to remember is that it isn't round.
SCP-0055

Wyntonian

2012-06-21, 11:41 PM

The one put forward in the Dying of the Light series. Basically, a random omnipotent being(or, as characters in series call it, Alien Space Bats) stop all mechanical systems using gunpower, electricity, gasoline, steampower, or the like.

Massive dead zones around every former city, as people eat everything, including eachother. Cannibal cults spring up. Massive dieoffs, and the destruction of every civilization in the world. And the life of the survivors isn't the greatest either.

Is this the one by S.M. Stirling? Can't recall the name of the series as a whole, starts with Dies the Fire, set in the Willamette Valley in Oregon? Those are about my favorite books. I was actually just going to mention that!

Dude. That plus a zombie apocalypse. Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmn.

Forum Explorer

2012-06-22, 12:35 AM

Well, all you'd have to remember is that it isn't round.
SCP-0055

what are you referencing here?

radmelon

2012-06-22, 01:11 AM

what are you referencing here?

SCP-055 (http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-055). It's... not round (http://www.scp-wiki.net/revenants). Or at least, something's not round, we can't remember what.

Actually, the SCP foundation is great for apocalypses, most of the things that I was going to post in this thread I'd originally got from here. Then I realized that a link works just as well.

Aotrs Commander

2012-06-22, 10:43 AM

SCP-055 (http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-055). It's... not round (http://www.scp-wiki.net/revenants). Or at least, something's not round, we can't remember what.

Actually, the SCP foundation is great for apocalypses, most of the things that I was going to post in this thread I'd originally got from here. Then I realized that a link works just as well.

Damn you, sir/madam. I've lost most of the day in that archive! It's as bad as TV Tropes!

Hiro Protagonest

2012-06-22, 03:12 PM

Is this the one by S.M. Stirling? Can't recall the name of the series as a whole, starts with Dies the Fire, set in the Willamette Valley in Oregon? Those are about my favorite books. I was actually just going to mention that!
I saw previews for a new series on TV a couple times. Forget what it's called, but from what I gathered, it's basically all lights go off, all cars stop (you actually have to walk), and they use a variety of old weapons like swords, bows, and crossbows. I believe the previews were on NBC, since I'm pretty sure I saw it while watching Grimm.

Dude. That plus a zombie apocalypse. Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmn.

...

New epileptic theory about the Mayans and their weapon that destroys the world*.

*doesn't actually destroy the world, but still pretty bad

Tavar

2012-06-22, 04:28 PM

I saw previews for a new series on TV a couple times. Forget what it's called, but from what I gathered, it's basically all lights go off, all cars stop (you actually have to walk), and they use a variety of old weapons like swords, bows, and crossbows. I believe the previews were on NBC, since I'm pretty sure I saw it while watching Grimm.

From what I can tell, it's not quite the same. Largely because the actual results of such a disaster would be a mass-die off of the human race: much of our current population relies on the massive food yields possible by the agricultural revolution which uses those technologies, as well as the transportation system to get the food from where it is produced to where it is consumed. In the series refereed, which is different from the TV series, 95% of Humanity dies off in the first year, largely due to starvation. Then a decent percentage of the remaining 5% die off once cannibalism is no longer an option.

This relates to the TV series because it seems centered around a pre-fall city: Chicago. Which doesn't work, given the setting, though it's not too surprising.

Hiro Protagonest

2012-07-02, 09:54 PM

Alright, I saw the preview for the show again. It's called Revolution (http://www.nbc.com/revolution/). I'm not sure if the losses are going to be realistic to the fact that, as they even said in the trailer, we use power for our fields and water pipes, so they stop working (although the world isn't utterly and entirely reliant on it, even in America there are people who know how to hunt or grow food and live near rivers or have rainbarrels, so it would never be absolute utter destruction of humanity), but it looks interesting enough.

Connington

2012-07-03, 12:39 AM

Huge space events that can wipe out life on the planet in an instant give me the creeps, because there's nothing anyone can do about them, and for all we know one could be coming our way right this moment. However, if I had to choose a logical way to go out, that would be it. I'm less worried about dying than the bit that comes beforehand.

Now, the end of the universe, that's another story. I can come to terms with the idea of humanity going extinct for one reason or another at some point in the future, and take a sort of cold comfort in the fact that there are probably other civilizations out there. But the idea that one day all possibility of people (broadly defined), life, and thought itself being snuffed out doesn't sit well with me.

As far as fantasy scenarios go, I don't think people really grasp the implications of a zombie apocalypse. Mostly because everyone seems sure that they wouldn't be one of the horde of shufflers. I'm a little more realistic in that regards.

DigoDragon

2012-07-03, 07:23 AM

I think ANY apocalypse that I'm living through is scariest >_>

But if I had to pick one... I'd go with something where I die slowly as scariest, like a nearby gamma burst kills our ozone layer and we all slowly burn to death by our own sun. :smalleek:

Hiro Protagonest

2012-07-03, 02:32 PM

As far as fantasy scenarios go, I don't think people really grasp the implications of a zombie apocalypse. Mostly because everyone seems sure that they wouldn't be one of the horde of shufflers. I'm a little more realistic in that regards.

Heh. That'd be EASIER to deal with. Unless the zombie plague originated in all military forts, and they either always leave some there or they somehow know how to dismantle the weapons, we could just fire missiles at them with barely a thought for hitting any living people.

Anarion

2012-07-03, 04:00 PM

Cthulhu

the prospect of going insane is truly terrifying.

This is close for me, though I think it would be worse to go insane after everyone else.

You basically watch all of humanity lose itself, descending into gibberish, bestial instincts and eventually just going comatose, albeit still alive (you know, guy sits there blowing spit bubbles and doing nothing forever kind of thing). And as you progressively lose everyone around you and it spreads to the whole world, you begin to feel it creeping up on you, giving you just enough time to realize that everything is gone forever before your own mind descends into nothingness.

Cyan Wisp

2012-07-04, 04:56 AM

Stephen King once described an apocalypse of sorts where a vaccine for a global pandemic was distributed via an exploding volcano. An unfortunate side effect of the vaccine was the ongoing, irreversible degradation of human intelligence...globally. Scary. (Sorry, can't recall the short story's title. Maybe the apocalypse has already started!)

My own personal nightmare scenario, however, would be any situation (such as aliens, totalitarian regimes, plague, climate change, cosmic events, zombies, cannibals, anarchic upheaval) where my children are systematically taken from me one by one, or where I'd have to choose between them. Makes me feel despondent and hollow just thinking about it.

Or... having any of the above happen and having to explain the new way of the world to my kids.:frown::smalleek::smallsigh::smallfrown:

GloatingSwine

2012-07-06, 04:56 PM

The timeframe for that is about (10 to the order of 100) years, and even today we already have nuclear fission and are close to figuring out nuclear fusion. That alone would give enough energy to sustain humanity.

I don't think you understand the concept of the Heat Death. What it means is that the universal expansion has proceeded to such a point that distances between particles are so great that no further atomic interactions are possible (let alone chemical or biological). There is nothing but a homogenous soup of protons and leptons, doing nothing, ever, forever.

Go and read Manifold: Time for more depressing thoughts of this calibre.

It's almost enough to make one wish for Case Nightmare Green, when the stars are right and elder things from the lower reaches of the mandelbrot set wake up and notice us.

dehro

2012-07-08, 09:57 AM

any kind of sudden armageddon doesn't hold much terror for me..because it would be over in a relatively short term.
the scary ones are the ones that take decades to happen...but are in fact fully documented and unavoidable.
say for instance that the earth's course is altered in such a way that seasons are disrupted, which may bring about extreme weather conditions and much reduced capability of producing food or energy.. quicken desertification and the extinction of farmable land and other resources. maybe even bring about a new ice age.. none of this would be terminally affecting any of us in the short term..but all this means is that we would be able to tell that doom is coming, that before our life ends most of the planet will become seriously difficult to inhabit, which would bring about wars, dictatorships etc etc.. and it would make it all the more likely that by the time our children reach adulthood, we've left them with nothing to eat and nowhere safe to be.

I don't see it happen anytime soon and I don't know that it is possible in the terms I set out, at least not at such a catastrophic rate of confluence of disasters as to qualify for armageddon rather than "the natural course of the planet's history".. but it is the one form of end of the world that does frighten me the most.
..and in a small proportion, it seems to me that it is already happening... but to expand on that would bring us into a political debate which is not allowed on here and for which I am ill equipped in scientific terms.

Tyndmyr

2012-07-09, 08:27 AM

Heh. That'd be EASIER to deal with. Unless the zombie plague originated in all military forts, and they either always leave some there or they somehow know how to dismantle the weapons, we could just fire missiles at them with barely a thought for hitting any living people.

Agreed. A zombie apoc is sort of like a war vs other humans. Except, the opposing side has only a single melee weapon, cannot use technology, even walks slowly, and has absolutely no intelligence. An easier foe to defeat is hard to imagine.

In short, unless you're patient zero or the first person he bites...(pure bad luck there), you should be fine. Because the creepy looking dude moaning and shambling oddly after you? Even common sense should tell you to start running then, even if you've never seen a horror movie.

Bulldog Psion

2012-07-09, 10:21 AM

which may bring about extreme weather conditions and much reduced capability of producing food or energy.. quicken desertification and the extinction of farmable land and other resources. maybe even bring about a new ice age.. none of this would be terminally affecting any of us in the short term..but all this means is that we would be able to tell that doom is coming, that before our life ends most of the planet will become seriously difficult to inhabit, which would bring about wars, dictatorships etc etc.. and it would make it all the more likely that by the time our children reach adulthood, we've left them with nothing to eat and nowhere safe to be.

..and in a small proportion, it seems to me that it is already happening... but to expand on that would bring us into a political debate which is not allowed on here and for which I am ill equipped in scientific terms.

My thoughts exactly. :smalleek: