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Old 08-25-2007, 08:34 PM
Blarg Blarg is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2004
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Default Re: How will the world end

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I'm surprised to see nuclear war listed. I give a higher probability to biological/chemical war. The Russians have supposedly already bred an incurable smallpox, and the barriers to entry when it comes to creating that stuff are far lower than they are for making nuclear bombs, much less making them on any scale.

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wouldn't some tribe in some forest in south america or africa survive that kind of stuff?

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Could be, but some people could possibly survive a massive nuclear attack too. Nuclear winter, I've read, isn't a certainty. Of the two, it seems to me more likely that biological warfare would be tried because so many people could try it, and on the cheap.

Now it's not easy to imagine everyone everywhere wiped out, but with air travel and such, you can spread a plague world-wide within hours. And there will probably be research done, sooner or later if it isn't already, to make killing this way ever easier. You have to make it not kill everyone right away, so it can spread further, and not die easily, so people coming near bodies and contaminated surfaces can still catch a bug/virus. Maybe they'll even find a way to weaponize prions, the extremely hard to destroy proteins said to be responsible for mad cow disease and some other diseases.

I'm not sure that whatever survivors might be left over from a nuclear or biological attack would be self-sustaining, either. So that's another reason a worldwide disaster may not have to kill everybody instantly. Maybe they would wipe themselves out, be in inhospitable lands that can't feed them, or not know how to get food out of those lands. Maybe unattended nuclear power plants will break down and irradiate them, or the breakdown of the world would destroy water supplies thousands of miles away in some odd protected nook of the world. I'm not sure if you got a bunch of people with plenty of guns but not enough food and water, they wouldn't just all slaughter each other immediately or die out fairly shortly.
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