Doomsday scenarios are the bread and butter of our modern society, in spite of being such old news we should have tired of them by now. But what are the odds of one happening in our lifetimes?
The odds are very slim, considering how much we are prepared for them as well as our heightened sense of fear. So the question remains, why do we continue to tell such stories?
The answer is found in an evolutionary trait that plagues our species, in the past this trait called suspicion helped us to survive. So ultimately, suspicion is not a bad thing, but because of it we have prepared for the worst so much as to render our fears obsolete.
Many hours of media are dedicated to highlighting these fears, even the famous and brilliant Stephen Hawkings has bought into them. So first, let's examine the possibility of AI destroying us.
Digital technology is bound to the laws we hardwire into the machines. With the advent of the "Three Laws of Robotics" we have developed the answer to this threat.
The laws are basic morals for any machine, ones which can be hardwired into any digital intelligence. Notice I do jot refer to it as artificial, this is for one basic reason, intelligence must evolve.
The very fact that we cannot just create intelligence has been discovered recently, a fact I actually realized over two decades ago. Not to dwell on the fact that when I presented these findings I was promptly ridiculed and discarded from all serious efforts of AI development, this is the primary reason we have nothing to worry about from the mechanical organisms we will eventually create.
As an intelligence evolves, we will be the effect known as natural selection, deleting those intelligences which prove to be psychotic will lead to sane and rational intelligences remaining. In Hollywood terms, we will create JARVIS long before Sky-Net becomes more than a wet dream.
This is not to say that we should not be cautious, we are still responsible for how these intelligences evolve. Which leads us to the nanotechnology, a relatively new advance that could be our salvation or our doom.
Nanotechnology has the potential of becoming a weapon out of control, which means we simply have to regard how we use the technology as we develop it. The potential for benefit is much like vaccines, proper use and regulation could help us more than harm us.
Now the big one, climate change. This is a very real and obvious threat now, one which more than half of the laymen still deny.
Climate change is based on the observation that climate is becoming very unpredictable, and this change coincides with our species advance through the globe. My choice of wording is very purposeful, because there are a lot of scams involved in this subject which use this threat to sell new products.
Our use of some old technologies does impact the amount of damage we do, but ultimately it is our population size which poses the biggest threat. Luckily we see that this problem may actually be solving itself.
As our vices improve and increase in number, our population growth is slowing in spite of the over extended lifespans we now enjoy. This will impact climate change for the better, if we stop trying to alter our world.
Currently we hunt, and destroy, other species which we insist are invading our society. Even then domesticated species are targeted out of old fears which we know are baseless and dangerous.
We encroached on their territory, and by doing so we have upset the balance of the environs, causing new species to evolve in the place of those we eradicate. The answer is simple, stop doing anything, literally.
So to solve climate change we just have to let the planet itself heal, the rest is already taking care of itself by our losing the drive to reproduce. Which leads us to the biggest threat to our species, zombies.
Or more realistically, the super virus or bacteria. As scary as it sounds, this would ultimately be a huge benefit to our species.
We owe the existence of our species to the appearance of a super virus, one that caused a large enough of a mutation which gave us the brains we now possess. It is also likely that a super virus or bacteria caused the destruction of the dinosaurs, which paved the way for mammals to dominate the planet.
The chances of other mass extinction events is negligible, or in most cases unstoppable. So yes, barring our own mistakes, we should just sit back and enjoy what we can.
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Supernatural doomsday stories are mythology, to even consider them is insanity. They make great tools in recruiting fools to follow these prophets, though we all know that they are foolish nonsense proven false for thousands of years.
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