1-10 years? Well I say we can count off asteroid or supervolcano - as these things arte monitored and even if so the estimated time of a threat is counted in centuries - as for now I'd say World War 3 - enough countries still have enough nuclear missiles to annihilate all life on earth and all it takes is just for one of them to do something very very stupid and other one to react in a stupid stupid manner.
A global pandemic is also a possibility - but it's impossible for any disease to kill 99% of population. First - no knows desease have death ratio of 99%.Smallpox had a death ratio of 35-40%. Ebola's most vicious viruses have merely 90%, while most of them have 60-70% death ratio. Even if Ebola was to leave Africa for example or wildly spread to another countries - it would only spread widely in less civilized countries. Africa, some Asian countries, some South American and so on and on could see 20-25% population reduction, but in western countries it would get quarantined into minor areas - ofc it would still be massive - 50% of population of big city dying is a tragedy, but there is no way any disease can kill 99% of world population. Other story is the fact that even death of 10-15% of population would have unbelieveable economical and social impact that could easily lead to society collapsing, major hunger problems and so on and on.
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How about rabid space bear dinosaurs falling from the sky with laser beams for ey---oh wait you said no scifi.
Ehm... I will just repeat everyone by saying maybe some super mutated lab engineered virus, nukes or unlikely asteroid impact.
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Plausible? There's plenty of things.
Famine. Running out of certain materials. The eruption of various volcanoes all at once. No meteors are scheduled to make near passes or hit us that I know of in the next 10 years. Viruses and lots and lots of diseases, both plant and animal and human.
But the most likely scenario is still probably going to be entirely caused by us.
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Zombie Apocalypse (No one is safe!)
Ebola (Don't let it spread.)
Giant meteor collision (Yeah... No comments.)
The announcement of Half-Life 3 (The gaming world can't take it!)
Alien invasion (Don't trust them aliens.)
Nuclear war (Boom.)
And before you ask, yes, all of these are plausible, if not yet scientifically proven. :P
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Maybe the world will be thrown into anarchy and humans will kill themselves off in the absence of HL3?
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A mass release of chemical warfare never before used. The mass amount of obese (Name your preffered race here) people using biological toxins. AKA- the noxious eminations of the flatulent.
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I got Madagascar on my second game. I only later learned how incredibly lucky I'd been.
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Radicalization of some religions and an extremist getting hold of the power of one country with nuclear weapons... so, in short, WW3 with nukes, I just said that about religion to sound deeper and make it look like it was a brand-new idea such such Apocalypse when it is just a remastered version of WW3 suggested before.
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At least you're honest about it.
Although it does make the good point that, while firing all nuclear weapons we've got would be devastating, this isn't a very likely scenario. If a nuclear war happens, most likely it'll be one nutcase firing a nuke at his enemies in one of the hot areas of the world, and the rest of the world retaliating by conventional means. It might develop into WW3, but the amount of nukes used would probably be limited. In the Cold War (well.. the previous one), when it was just US vs. SU, the threat of total global retaliation was a lot more likely.
Then again, other studies suggest that even firing "only" 100 small weapons over cities in one particular region would devastate the climate, so yeah. Given the risks involved, whoever's doing that would probably get shut down real quick by the rest of the world.
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Problem would arise if this particular nutcase-driven (I just imagined a car being driven by an actual, literal nut case, my brain's weird) has warfare aid from some big country (US or Russia or Greenland, don't trust the penguins). One plausible scenario is this crazy-ass goverment attacking the US for example, the US being stupid enough to counterattack with nukes or some pretty damn constant aerial bombing, then the bigger brother of this crazy-ass goverment stepping up and shit scalates really quickly...
Anyways, don't crush my dreams for "Fallout 4" or "War Games 2". And I don't mean War Games 2 as that shitty remake made in the 2000s.
As I gay guy, I despise religion, and I would have suggested that humanity may die because of either war because of religion... or a natural phenomenon (meteorite, global warming, etc, etc) we may not be prepared for because of stupid religion getting in the way of our technological advancement.
But I'd be accused by almost everybody here, so just ignore what I just said.
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Religion is as much a part of the human condition as homosexuality is. Hating on either is counterproductive.
But yeah, this is getting a little too hot for a forum such as this. Let's go back to discussing ways to kill off humanity, that's a much more mellow topic.
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But at a sociological level, it isn't a normal, demographic feature that should be kept around... but yeah, better get back on track.
A mega volcano counts as Si-Fi?
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Oh, I don't think this one's been suggested yet -- but if you absolutely, positively, have to kill as much as possible on the face of the earth, you can't go wrong with a gamma-ray burst from a supernova. We can't predict these, let alone prevent them. If one of these babies hits the Earth at full strength, it'd do a pretty good job of sterilizing the globe instantly, and even if it doesn't, whatever's left of the ecosystem won't be enough to support human life. Man-made nukes are toys compared to that.
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The trouble with most astronomical events is that our measuring equipment is still not accurate enough to make very definitive statements about whether they will or will not pose a threat to Earth. At these scales, even a slight measuring error makes a huge difference, since the Earth is just a mote of dust on a cosmological scale. Today's extinction-level event is tomorrow's harmless observation -- and vice versa.
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Maybe if we send all those nukes right into the sun... But I don't know why you would even do that (plus they would probably burn up before actually reaching the sun)
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As awful as Superman IV is, this movie had the right idea: throwing all the world's nukes into the sun will just burn the nukes.
Even if you could detonate the nukes near (or in) the sun somehow, the massive, massive nuclear fusion reactor we call the sun would laugh at your pitiful attempts to harm it. I mean, it's hard to convey the size mismatch here -- imagine a pin pricking an elephant, except the elephant is the size of Mount Everest, and even then I'm orders of magnitude off.
We can't even harm the Earth in any significant way, let alone the sun (harming life on Earth, and our own in particular, is of course another matter -- unfortunately we're pretty good at that).
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The Super volcano eruption still has a good following I still think the Yellowstone caldera has potential tho blow soon ( geologically speaking ) .
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Here is the link about list of Global catastrophic risks that can make human extinct:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risks
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If anything, I bet it's mankind that will lead mankind to extinction.
More and more idiots get serious power already, power that can be abused to start a war. Especially now with military drones, war could get really out of hand (since the limit becomes money, not amount of human life available. If there is a small group of people left to control an army of drones, there's still an army. While without drones, there's no army with only that small group of people)
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A virus that specifically targets GRASSES.
Why? Because almost all the food we consume (wheat, rye, rice, corn etc) all are variants of grass.
If there were a virus to destroy or kill off most of the grasses on the planet; then, humanity would quickly follow.
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FYI - it is so MUCH easier to engineer a virus to kill off plants than it is to kill off people or animals.
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Yeah but considering how dependent we are on electronics for creation and transportation of food and water a good chunk of the population would die from simple starvation or tainted food and water. Then you would have to consider the conflicts that would rise over resources or the collapse of the major world powers.
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