"Results from Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" poll
60,020 people submitted doomsday picks in Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" interactive feature (Here's my post about it). "Loose Nukes" was the top pick, with 10.5 percent of readers choosing it.
While "Israel-Arab War" (picked by 7.6 percent of users) represents another worry that's generations old, the "Peak Oil" (9.3 percent) and "China Unloads U.S. Treasurys" (8.2 percent) scenarios are new apocalyptic visions. Peak Oil—"Petroleum production reaches terminal decline. Oil becomes too expensive to extract, and alternative energies can't maintain our fossil-fuel-dependent lifestyle"—is the hobbyhorse of widely read collapsists James Howard Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov. It's the scenario of choice for the modern doomsayer who thinks Western civilization has industrialized its way to destruction. Fears of an economic collapse triggered by China pulling out from the American economy are a symptom of both our worries over the current economic crisis and anxiety over America's place in the world.How Is America Going To End? The apocalypse you chose.
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"10.5 Readers?" Did somebody get nuked halfway through voting?
"alternative energies can't maintain our fossil-fuel-dependent lifestyle"
That's not The End, that's sanity. So many things were *so easy* with oil and plentiful resources. We didn't have to plan, think, innovate to accomplish a lot ... just guzzle.
We Americans bamboozled ourselves about how easy it all is. We ... got fat. When we burned up all our easy oil, we started buying other people's easy oil. So now that's biting our ass. To get all movie-blurbish: Stopping it isn't The End -- it's The End of The Beginning.
I was going to vote for Ennui...
...but I just... I dunno...
What a vain creature man is. Only one scenario isn't something we manufactured.
My money's still on a supervolcano, with a big honkin' space rock we never saw a close second. Now THERE'S some grade A fuck-you-up stuff straight from ma nature's nightmares closet.
FNC has it: given the example of Katrina and our inability to recover from that storm, something non-manmade is far more likely to be unsurvivable.
Israel-Arab war? Shoot, five minutes after the USSR collapsed I knew that one was off the table. Even with the 200-300 nukes in the region now.
#4, If we wreck the earth, it'll be in the next two to three centuries, or basically less than half a millennium at full industrial tilt.
Time between those big disasters is measured in millions of years. If I were a betting man, I'd bet on a 75% chance of destruction over a 0.5% chance of somewhat worse destruction, any day.
So ah, probably less vanity than practicality.
No, it's pretty much the end. Each barrel of oil provides energy equivalent to owning a bunch of slaves. It isn't just your gas guzzlers that will disappear. A lot of social arrangements we enjoy become a lot less tenable. Maybe we don't go all the way back to reintroducing slavery, but we will go back. Life in a state of nature isn't all hippies and goat cheese.
I'm hoping for the return of an angry, vengeful God.
Failing that, I'd prefer extermination by intelligent supercomputers.
I await the arrival of our dystopian future with bated breath, though it probably won't occur until 2029/2036 when 99942 Apophis pays us a visit.
That's Apophis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99942_Apophis) not Pop Tarts.
What about Triffids?
Apocalypse was a weasel word here, the author even admits it. As banal as it is, the real topic was the end of the current form of the USA. I personally find the secessionist arguments more believable.
Most civilisations end due to war (which to me seems unlikely) or environmental degradation. In Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" he charts several civilisations from history which have collapsed or survived and looked at the reasons behind each. He is particularly concerned with modern Montana (dependent on Federal aid) and Australia.
My personal view is that unfair trade between the West and the rest of the world has become so extreme that poverty will force great changes in our world - either riot or migration. We already see these changes happening today, but wherever land is not being farmed sensitively this will cause problems - especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
I chose Corporations and Privatization. That's why any of the other stuff is a problem.
I find Peak Oil to be one of the most annoying "apocalypse" scenarios there is. I mean, yes, on the face of it it's hard to argue with: there's a finite amount of oil in the world, if we keep using it, someday we'll run out. But that still doesn't tell us ANYTHING about when it will happen, what we should do to prevent it, and what happens after we've peaked.
First off all, the theory was first predicted in the 1950s, and back then it was "right around the corner!". And then it's cropped up as a fashionable prediction every decade or so, always "right around the corner". Some people say it's happened already, other ones say it'll happen in 2030. Who the fuck knows? The predictions tend to be as accurate as those people that predict Malthusian catastrophes.
Second, the whole point about Peak Oil is that it's a fucking bell-curve! The supply of oil wont suddenly disappear into thin air and no one will be able to drive their cars. The production is going to start slowing down slowly, decreasing outputs over a long period of time. This will make oil prices go up, and we will have plenty of time and market pressure to develop alternate technologies. No biggie, in other words.
Seriously, can people lay off the whole Peak Oil thing? Lets just face it, the slow decline of oil production isn't going to end the world. We've lived through far worse.
When I was a kid I was sure it was going to be nuclear war, killer bees, or bigfoot. owadays I'm pretty sure it won't be bigfoot.
I can't believe "zombie apocalypse" wasn't an option. :(
Regarding peak oil: we can convert coal to gasoline-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_process. The cost of the refineries is a barrier, as with desalination plants, but not an apocalyptic one. As evidence: South Africa gets most of it's diesel this way-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasol
Global warming is a much more serious concern, although I really doubt any single thing is going to bring down America-- when that happens, it'll probably be a highly ambiguous confluence of disasters and slow decline.
Oskar: Predicting Peak Oil is quite simple, it's the point where demand outstrips supply. We're there already. Yes, the supply is a bell curve, but that doesn't mean the reactions follow such smooth lines. All conflict can be traced to resource competition. "Technology will save us" is the new religion, and blatant hubris. All ancient civilizations before us that ultimately failed probably said the same before they fell.
I tend to believe humans will find a way to muddle along, and maybe even make small bits of progress here and there toward becoming civilized beings. But on dark days when my faith in humanity is at all time low and I see the crash around the corner, I'm sure of one thing: If things fall apart, it will be due to human stupidity.
I'm hoping for a paralyzing virus to attack the Y chromosome only, rendering all males of the species inert --we can leave them all plugged in somewhere watching sports or porno (their choice). Then we can get on with the feminist nirvana of the post-apocalypse. *cackles wildly*
@Racer X: I know, right? 'Alien Invasion' was choice #49 though! That's just weak.
I'd take a huge meteor striking the earth over any of those!
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm
for those of you interested.
Me, I'm starting to get worried about -complexity-.
Although the current financial meltdown might be attributable to pure greed, I think an underlying motif was that there was not a general understanding of what all these complex securities would do to the economy under certain scenarios.
Apply a similar scenario to technologies such as self-replicating nanomachines or perhaps something in the genetic engineering domain and we could be talking about a whole range of bizarre possibilities, "gray goo" being just the most extreme.
Only a few of these really seemed apocalyptic. The rest were just things that would dramatically change our lives. Last time I checked, change != apocalypse. If it did, I'm sure Obama would've chosen a different campaign slogan.
@15: Sadly, people aren't going to lay off "Peak Oil" because people all seem to have a slightly different notion as to what it means, and that coupled with our slightly different approaches to even the topics we can all agree on all results in this miasma of possible solutions.
@19: I agree that "technology will save us" is blatant hubris. In fact I think that it could be right up there at the "Jesus will come back and save us from global warming" level of hubris.
As a population we are not placing enough of an emphasis on education and hard work. Technological breakthroughs do not happen in short order. It takes many great minds many great years to create a few great technologies. Sadly, many minds don't get to become great through lack of access to education or to the money to pay for it. Even if they're lucky enough to get the education, there's precious few opportunities to get paid real money to do research and development (i.e. creating new technologies) to pay back the money after they've gotten the education. Until such time as this changes, we may be headed to a future more in line with "Idiocracy" than anything else.
@#8 Ernunnos, I read your "hippies and goat cheese" in the same way you'd say "Life's not all skittles and beer, you know." Or in this case, hippies and goat cheese.