World leaders exchange missile strikes and argue over who has the most nuclear potential. Vital resources, such as fresh water, are dwindling and there are more people. Glaciers continue to melt, changing sea levels and climate. New diseases appear, and bacteria no longer die from antibiotics. Perhaps it is not for nothing that the best minds of the era are actively working on the colonization of Mars and the Moon?
The end of the world: what options does humanity have?
In 2017, astrophysicist Stephen Goking stated: if humanity does not colonize neighboring planets, then it is doomed to death. Evacuation from the Earth, in his opinion, must begin in 30 years. In 2018, the distinguished scientist evacuated himself, leaving us to face the challenges of the future on our own.
And if the Mayan predictions did not come true six years ago, this does not mean that we are insured against the end of the world. In the end, after 3-5 billion years, our Sun will go out, incinerating the surface of the nearest planets in front of it.
Stone kiss of the cosmos
In fact, the end of the world is not such a fantastic phenomenon. The earth went through four ice ages, a huge meteorite that came to visit 65 million years ago, killed dinosaurs, dozens of other species, and also tilted the earth's axis. In fact, each end of the world pushed the planet and its inhabitants to adapt, that is, to evolve and develop.
By the way, the next fall of a celestial body on the surface of the Earth remains a real threat even today. So, according to experts, over the next 200 years, a dozen asteroids may collide with the Earth. These scenarios are being worked out at NASA. They came to the conclusion that the most dangerous for humanity among them is the asteroid Bennu, which was noticed back in 1999. He was baptized only in 2013. Then NASA announced a competition for the best name for a celestial body. An American schoolboy won, proposing to name the asteroid after the bird that symbolizes the resurrection of the ancient Egyptian god Osiris. Quite ironic.
Bennu could crash into Earth between 2169 and 2199. If the asteroid does strike on land, it will leave a five-kilometer crater up to 400 meters deep. This despite the fact that he himself is about half a kilometer in diameter. The problem here is its speed. Experts estimate that the asteroid will fly into the Earth at a speed of 12 kilometers per second, which is 43 200 thousand kilometers per hour - the second cosmic speed. Such is the blow comparable to a nuclear explosion with a capacity of about a thousand megatons. The most powerful bomb ever created by mankind was tested by the Soviets in the 1960s. The power of their Tsar Bomb ranged within 60 megatons. That is, Bennu is a simultaneous explosion of 17 Tsar Bombs. In addition, the collision of an asteroid with our planet will provoke a 7-point earthquake, and stone rain will cover everything within a radius of 10 kilometers from the impact site.
Bennu may not be as scary as the 10-kilometer meteorite that destroyed the dinosaurs, but no one is going to test this in practice. Unlike dinosaurs, we can fly into space and study the potential threat. NASA did just that.
In 2016, specialists from the American space agency launched a special probe to the asteroid. In 2019, he will approach Benn to take samples on its surface and determine the exact orbit. If the asteroid really flies at us, then there is an old-fashioned method to get rid of it - to send a space drone with nuclear charges and change its flight trajectory by means of an explosion. But the researchers came up with another cunning plan - to paint part of this space stone with white paint. Like, this will change the thermal properties of the asteroid, it will reflect more solar particles and eventually rise from the apocalyptic course.
Scientists say that this method is much safer than the idea with nuclear charges, but the question remains how and how to deliver so much paint into space.
Artificial intelligence - a killer or an assistant?
Here, of course, robots and artificial intelligence come in handy. But they cannot be relied on too much, because they are another potential threat to humanity. And not because the works will start shouting "Free cash" at McDonald's, but because artificial intelligence can "guess" that people are not very necessary for him. And also - our species harms the planet, itself, and in general we control a conventional switch that will turn off all machines.
True, opinions on this issue were divided into two camps. Conditionally - on optimists and pessimists. It is the latter who prophesy a robo-apocalypse - the extermination of mankind by intelligent machines. Among them are the late Stephen Goking, the creator of SpaseX Elon Musk, the founder of DeepMind, Mustafa Suleiman. In 2017, they and 113 other specialists from 26 countries signed an appeal to the UN to ban the creation of killer robots.
In early May this year, it became known that scientists from the University of Southern California have created a neural network, thanks to which American troops will learn 13 times faster. These, of course, are not terminators with red eyes, but they are not a robot vacuum cleaner either.
By the way, about the terminators. In 2012, the so-called “Terminator Center” was opened at the University of Cambridge, where the best academics research the threats that work brings to humanity. Officially, the office is called the Center for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER).
In addition to the dangers of artificial intelligence, scientists are monitoring climate change, the possibility of nuclear war and the threat of biotechnology. They do not say directly that work will kill us, but insist on the need for a positive and beneficial development of artificial intelligence, both in the short and long term. And, it seems, everyone agrees with them, but the CSER team does not exclude that something may go wrong, and all these developments will destroy humanity. Well, in general, the more powerful and intelligent the artificial intelligence is, the more chances it has to turn into a superintelligence.
It is difficult to predict what will happen next, but people are not good at it, says Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher and professor at Oxford University. Superintelligence can subjugate people, or even want to remain the only intellect on Earth. Humanity is not ready to meet with superintelligence and will not be ready for a long time, Bostrom notes, so we need to learn to keep technology under control.
In the optimist camp, the opposite is true. They say that artificial intelligence will help us and improve our lives. Of course, work will take away some jobs from us, but they will also create new ones - at least the machines will need to be serviced, designed, repaired, in the end. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak encourages young people to pay more attention to these areas when choosing a future profession.
And Wozniak also says that artificial intelligence is not intelligence at all, but its imitation. The thing is that we humans still do not fully understand how our brain works, and therefore we will not be able to reproduce it using chips and microcircuits. And if we do, it will all happen so quickly that we will not even notice. This, in his opinion, fits perfectly into all sorts of Moore's laws, when the number of transistors on the circuit doubles every 24 months.
Similar ideas are shared by his colleague, Siri creator Adam Cheyer. He says that when communicating with Siri, it may seem that we are communicating with a living being. But she is not alive and did not even come close to this. Cheyer is convinced that artificial intelligence will remain artificial and will not threaten people in any way.
Well, futurist Ray Kurzweil is convinced that in 2025 there will be a mass market for implant gadgets, and people will actively start using them to improve their lives. According to his forecasts, the Earth will eventually turn into a single computerized space, where everyone will live in peace and harmony.
Now smart machines are developing within the framework of the three laws of robotics, which were formulated back in 1941 by the American science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. The most important of these laws First - a robot cannot harm a person. And here it is logical to add that a person can harm a person, but cases often indicate that Azimov's laws do not work. Recently in Arizona (USA) an unmanned Uber car hit a woman to death. The sensors recognized the pedestrian, but the car did not slow down, “deciding” that this was a “false alarm”, which the developers were struggling with. Another similar incident occurred in March - then a drone shot down 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, who rode her bicycle onto the road.
Not "rubbery"
And here we come to the most likely scenario - overpopulation. There are already more than 7, 3 billion people today, and this figure is growing daily. Such a large number of people inevitably leads to the depletion of resources. At this rate, the current oil reserves will last for (plus or minus) two generations - 50 years. We will run out of coal and gas, and this will already throw our civilization back into the Stone Age.
But if you can somehow exist without oil, coal, gas, then without fresh water - nothing. Despite the melting of glaciers, the water on Earth is getting less and less. In Ukraine alone, 400 rivers disappear a year. What can we say about Africa, where water has always been valued more than gold and diamonds.
This is directly related to the increase in population on Earth. We have to dry up the swamps to break up the fields and house all these people. They need to be fed, provided with light and heat, and this all leads to deforestation. The less forests, the fewer rivers. And the volumes of factories and plants will also increase - this is even more emissions into the atmosphere. In the end we will suffocate, strangled by each other's bodies. Take, for example, India, where 361 people live per square kilometer.
That is why the possibilities of colonizing other planets are now being actively explored. The earth is not rubber, there is not enough space and resources for everyone. By the way, the latter also want to extract from space. Experts even have heated discussions about who exactly should own space resources and how ethically it is to extract them.
In addition, an increase in the population will inevitably lead to an increase in the number of diseases, to their mutation. Scientists are already reporting bacterial resistance to antibiotics. That is, we are returning to pre-penicillin times, when pneumonia was fatal in more than 90% of cases. And if now we are actively killed by oncology, HIV, then in 10-20 years another Ebola virus may appear, from which there is neither immunity nor drugs.
We must not forget that the process of evolution is irrepressible, and not only you and I are evolving, but also other species, which include viruses and bacteria. And the more people on the planet, the more mutations become, and, therefore, one day a certain retrovirus will mow us down, like the bubonic plague mowed down Europe in the 15th century. This is because the universe is striving for balance. And if this proportion is not regulated due to the pandemic, then total wars will decide everything. They are inevitable in an overpopulated world. The struggle will go on not according to ideology, as before, but for resources and territory.
The end of the world will come when two suns rise
The Quran says that the end of the world will come when two Suns rise simultaneously: one in the east, the other in the west. It so happened that the Sun always rises in the same place, therefore, what rises in the west is artificial. It is logical to assume that such an artificial Sun will be a nuclear fungus or some other explosion. This also fits into a number of religious apocalyptic theories related to fiery rain, continuous darkness and the dead who rise from their graves - a nuclear explosion will simply ruin the graveyards and cover everything around with bones.
Today, according to official figures, nine countries have nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Pakistan, India, Israel (unconfirmed) and North Korea. As of January 2017, according to the Stockholm Peace Research Institute, there are about 15,000 nuclear warheads in the world. 93% of these are owned by the United States and Russia.
An array of documents recently obtained by Israeli intelligence, Mossad, prove that Iran did not continue its nuclear program, despite the agreements Tehran reached in 2005 with the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France (that is, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany. On the basis of these data, President Donald Trump announced that the United States is withdrawing from the nuclear deal, which it eventually concluded in 2015, and returning all sanctions on Iran. Then Tehran will once again begin to enrich uranium on an industrial scale. Trump promises to make another "good and fair deal with the Iranians, because" they cannot be allowed to have nuclear weapons."
Against this backdrop, Saudi Arabia began to throw out statements that as soon as Tehran resumes its nuclear program, Riyadh will begin to create its own atomic weapons in order to "protect its people."
The air is so saturated with military miasmas that the Dalai Lama is already commenting on them. According to him, the Third World (read nuclear) war will destroy all living things. The Buddhist authority called for attention that the Earth belongs to all seven billion people, and not to a handful of political leaders in one country or another. It's good that at least Kim Jong-un more or less approached the West and began to dismantle his nuclear test site.
But, be that as it may, the unfortunate Syria constantly goes: the United States and its allies bomb it for chemical weapons, then Israel hits Iranian targets. And then Washington moved its embassy to Jerusalem, which caused large-scale clashes in the Gaza Strip.
The latest nuclear threats are heard by the world precisely from Muslim regions. Through this, the prophecies of the Koran - the holy book of Muslims - are placed at the beginning of the section. Perhaps the ancient sages knew what we now do not take into account?
Technogenic and natural disasters
In fact, in order to destroy humanity, it is not necessary to press the red button. The manufacture of nuclear or any other weapons of mass destruction (chemical, bacteriological, climatic) already carries a potential danger. That is, the process itself is dangerous, because it is not insured against accidents and failures. Take Fukushima or Chernobyl, for example. It seems that they did not make weapons, but how many people suffered. What can we say about natural disasters.
Forests burn every year in the world, now Hawaii is bursting at all seams, earthquakes and hurricanes are increasingly occurring. Can humanity control nature? Perhaps in Hollywood films like Geostorm. We are, in fact, ants in the face of nature, so it is possible that some Vesuvius will once again flood us with lava and cover us with ash.
The ocean is also dangerous. Its depths have been studied only by 5%, and we do not know what it hides in its waters, and what threats it can bring to humanity. There is even research that octopuses are aliens. Scientists from the University of Chicago argue that the DNA of these mollusks is too complex and generally has a structure similar to that of humans. It was possible to decipher the octopus genome in 2015. Then it turned out that they have about 34 thousand coding proteins, despite the fact that people have less than 25 thousand of them.
And while we are planning an escape to other planets, calculating the threats that the colonialists will have to face in space, Mother Nature can prepare a very unpleasant surprise for us.
Survive the end of the world
Consequently, humanity has enough options for how to perish. But is it really possible to survive the End of the World? American preacher Jim Becker recently announced that he found the perfect place for this. Any cataclysm, according to Becker, can be experienced in Missouri on the Ozark plateau.
The preacher convinces that he did not invent it himself, but relies on NASA data. That is why Becker is building the Morningside village there and invites everyone to buy houses, which will have everything they need to survive - a supply of food, water, medicine. Reminds of the scheme of 2012, when cunning entrepreneurs began to build personal bunkers for big money.
Seriously though, surviving the end of the world is quite possible. All over the world, special military facilities have been built, which were built in the 20th century in the event of a nuclear war. Most of them, of course, are in the USA. In our reality, you can count on the metro. For example, the Arsenalnaya metro station in Kiev is the deepest in the world. It is laid at a depth of over 105 meters and can serve as a good shelter.
In fact, it is not so difficult to survive the end of the world, it will be difficult to survive later. And the most difficult thing is the first few months, because the benefits of civilization will end very quickly, you will have to return to the “old-fashioned” methods of obtaining food (hunting, fishing), water and its purification, kindling a fire. Therefore, survival depends on everyone personally. By the way, on the Internet you can find many thematic communities where experts in extreme survival, military experts tell you how to survive Armageddon.
Be that as it may, humanity has already experienced hundreds of prophecies about the end of the world, so it is not a fact that at least one of those that is yet to come will come true. But it will not hurt to collect the alarming suitcase.
