Probability: Civilization Threatening Event
What are the odds of a civilization threatening event occurring in the next 50 years?
I guess this is a number that is difficult to quantify because there are just too many variables, but I think it is something that often gets overlooked. There's just so many things that can go wrong. Yellow Stone explosion, World War 3, real life Skynet, a mistake in the particle accelerator, super virus, biological/chemical/nuclear warfare, zombie apocalypse, environmental issues, the list just keeps on going. Mutually assured destruction prevented civilization from blowing itself up during the 20th century, however the 21st century is quite different. As technology continues to evolve, it becomes exponentially easier for small, non-governmental organizations to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction. Not to mention that governments themselves probably have a bunch of crazy shit they're not telling us about.
Enough of my rambling though. We are professionals and we quantify risk. So let's set the odds. I'm going for 1 in 5. I guess that makes me a pessimist. I guess I should stock up on gold bars and guns.
PS: I was thinking of this when I went to see This Is the End last night. Funniest movie made in the last 10 years. Go see it and don't be like James Franco and be stuck with nothing but booze, 15 hits of ecstasy, shrooms and an unloaded gun when the shit hits the fan.
Sadly, I think this is a possibility. I just hope that world destroying weaponry doesn't fall into the hands of a suicidal psychopath. There are (were?) people out there who have demonstrated a willingness to blow themselves up to take out a half dozen people. Imagine if they were given the opportunity to take out the entire population. Someone would push the red button.
On the bright side, I don't think it makes sense to stock up on gold bars and guns. For those to be useful, not only does the world need to end, but you'll need to be a survivor and find other survivors willing to accept gold bars as payment for whatever. Not gonna happen.
Agree with everything CB said. Add-on: how do we know that some space phenomena that we haven't seen won't happen that destroys us? What if the sun has a massive storm that destroys the ozone layer?
Time to colonize another planet bitches.
If by gold bars you mean twinkies, I concur. If you actually mean the precious metal...I doubt that's going to be worth much in a "Book of Eli" type scenario.
Agreed with rickyross. Gold won't do you much good if society's collapsed. Better to stock up on gasoline; that has pretty realizable value and will be far more useful than gold in the case of some major apocalypse.
I can't give a numerical value, but I believe that over the course of the next 50 years it's highly unlikely we'll see any drastic events that would threaten humanity. Widen the time window a bit (~100-200 years) and I'd be willing to raise the odds.
Not going to happen in the nearest future. Relax. I remember reading an article about how much "power" would it take to realy destroy the whole planet, with TNT and nuclear weapons and other scary stuff, turned out to be that we do not have enough and will never have.
You can't really store gasoline for long periods of time.
There is no probability. There's just uncertainty.
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