How will the world end

[Blarg]

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There will be a series of events-whether natural disaster OR "MAN-MADE", the sum of which will be the Apocalypse. And while it will be the biblical prediction of the end of time, science will be ready with answers for all....hence the verses 2 Thessolonians 2:11-12...And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned who believed not the truth...


Ouch.

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That God fellow sounds like a fun guy.

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I think disease is an extremely unlikely cause for extinction. I would guess there have been no recorded infectious agents with a 100% kill rate (assuming a reasonable sample size). I think disease is a pretty good candidate for the end of civilization, but we're too genetically diverse for it to have much likelihood of causing our extinction.

ActionJeff- Rather than me finding and reading a book, I would much rather you just tell me what theory has supplanted accelerating expansion as a viable universal endgame.

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You're thinking of natural diseases. We are making them ourselves now. The Russian smallpox variant supposedly has a kill rate above 99%.

[GTL]

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I think disease is an extremely unlikely cause for extinction. I would guess there have been no recorded infectious agents with a 100% kill rate (assuming a reasonable sample size). I think disease is a pretty good candidate for the end of civilization, but we're too genetically diverse for it to have much likelihood of causing our extinction.

ActionJeff- Rather than me finding and reading a book, I would much rather you just tell me what theory has supplanted accelerating expansion as a viable universal endgame.

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I agree with you, the chances of disease wiping out the entire human population are very slim. I still think that disease is probably the number one candidate. However, if the human population is wiped out, I think it would most likely be a combination of disease and natural disaster/enviromental changes. Basically a series of coincidental unfortunate events.

[GTL]

Also, many anthropologists believe that the human population was reduced to around 10,000 individuals at some point in the last 300,000 years. we've been close to extinction and bounced back. It is still unclear what caused the reduction in population, but environmental changes are the most probable cause.

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I'm curious how they might have come to that conclusion. What's the story behind that? 10k is just the size of a single town.

[IlliniLou]

monkeys in some way

[Sephus]

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And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned who believed not the truth...

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this sentence doesn't even make sense. in order to damn everyone who believes not the truth, god sends people a delusion so that they believe not the truth.

so i guess in order for god to damn unbelievers, there must be at least some minimum number of them. since he was going to fall short of that number, he needed to induce more unbelief in order to damn those who don't believe.

[admiralfluff]

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Let's say you're some big shot scientist assigned to rate risks of various threats etc. Do you place extinction of the human race as any more significant than the end of civilization?

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If our civilization is wiped out tomorrow, let's say down to the last 10k people scattered in 100 or so small pockets around the globe, there is a reasonable chance a new human civilization will emerge within 100k years. If the species is wiped out, there is not.

I think it's etremely unlikely either of these events will happen in my lifetime, but it is an absolute certainty that both will happen. It's hard to assign a value to either, because both are equally irrelevant to me. So no, I would not place any more significane on one or the other, but that does not mean they are the same thing.

[Blarg]

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And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned who believed not the truth...

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this sentence doesn't even make sense. in order to damn everyone who believes not the truth, god sends people a delusion so that they believe not the truth.

so i guess in order for god to damn unbelievers, there must be at least some minimum number of them. since he was going to fall short of that number, he needed to induce more unbelief in order to damn those who don't believe.

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Don't you love guys like that?

[GTL]

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I'm curious how they might have come to that conclusion. What's the story behind that? 10k is just the size of a single town.

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my understanding is that the theory first came from the field of genetics. mitochondrial dna is passed down from mother to child and is easier to trace than regular dna. perhaps you have heard the popularized theory that "all humans have a common mother". this is based on the idea that mitochondrial dna in all human populations can be linked to a single individual.

the lack of variation in human DNA led certain scientists to believe that there could have been a population bottleneck. they tried to pinpoint a time and came up with a guess of about 70,000 years ago. then they turned to geologists to see if there were any catastrophic events that occured during this time period. apparently, there is evidence that a supervolcano erupted and may have quickly changed the climate in the area where the human population was living at the time. this spawned the theory that there was a population bottleneck around this time period due to a catastrophic natural disaster.

this theory is still highly debated. from my brief time learning about it, I lean towards accepting it rather than rejecting it.

Here is a brief Wiki entry on it.

Humans

Human mitochondrial DNA (inherited only from one's mother) and Y chromosome DNA (from one's father) show coalescence at around 140,000 and 60,000 years ago respectively. In other words, all living humans' female line ancestry trace back to a single female (Mitochondrial Eve) at around 140,000 years ago. Via the male line, all humans can trace their ancestry back to a single male (Y-chromosomal Adam) at around 60,000 years ago.[1]

However, such coalescence is genetically expected and does not, in itself, indicate a population bottleneck, because mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome are only a small part of the entire genome, and are untypical in that they are inherited exclusively through the mother or through the father, respectively. Most genes in the genome are inherited from either father or mother, thus can be traced back in time via either matrilinear or patrilinear ancestry.[2] Research on many (but not necessarily most) genes find different coalescence points from 2 million years ago to 60,000 years ago when different genes are considered, thus disproving of the existence of more recent extreme bottlenecks (i.e. a single breeding pair).[3][4]

But this is not inconsistent with the Toba catastrophe theory which suggests that a bottleneck of the human population occurred ca. 70,000 years ago, positing that the human population was reduced to a c.15,000 individuals[4] when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change. The theory is based on geological evidences of sudden climate change, and on coalescence evidences of some genes (including mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome and some nuclear genes)[5] and the relatively low level of genetic variation with humans.[4] On the other hand, in 2000, a Molecular Biology and Evolution paper suggested a transplanting model or a 'long bottleneck' to account for the limited genetic variation, rather than a catastrophic environmental change.