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Apocalypse - what's the worst that can happen?

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15:49 / 12.02.03

Here's a bit of fun to take your mind off the approaching doom: make a list of all the different events that could kill all (or most of) the people on Earth, and put it into some sort of rank order of unpleasantness. So far I've come up with the following:

- Alien invasion
- Asteroid / meteor impact
- Super Volcano eruption (ie the one under Jellystone that's due to go off... now)
- Pandemic
- All-out global nuclear war
- All-out conventional war with occasional use of WOMD
- Gradual ecological disaster
- Wrath of God, Armageddon, four horsemen etc
- Tsunamis caused by big bits of islands falling into the sea
- Robots taking over
- Discovering that that bloke was right about us being a simulation (1): being switched off
- Discovering that that bloke was right about us being a simulation (2): being mucked about with in nasty ways by the creators

So...

1 - Have I missed anything out?

and

2 - How would you rank them according to potential horribleness? By horribleness, I mean pain and suffering (though you may have a different definition). The above list is just as it occurred to me and is unranked, btw. I'll give my own thoughts later...

15:54 / 12.02.03

You forgot ZOMBIES!

16:22 / 12.02.03

Or let Asimov do the hard work...

18:10 / 12.02.03

Not only did you forget zombies but Hello! Fucking ROBOTS! They're never bad. Ever. Also: Jellystone? This is no threat. This is a volcano of jelly. there is nothing that is less scary then big floppy wibbly lumps of jelly falling out of the sky and being all floppy and wibbly. For sure.

And I wish to also add someone going back in time and removing Tesla Tubes, which would mean that The City Of The Future would like really really like The City Of Today, and no dead bodies would ever get reanimated and people would never fuse with animals to make manimals and there would never be smoke to signify a dramatic moment. Also almost as bad would be the removal from our culture of those things on dentists heads that are either a light or a mirror or something, which are totally mad and evil.

A life without these would be no life at all, my friends.

18:25 / 12.02.03

How about a massive computer shutdown, brought on by a virus attack that fulfills all the empty promises of Y2K?

Power grids shut down, missiles fire by themselves, thousands stuck in elevators, malfunctioning traffic lights kill millions... that sort of thing.

Or how about a massive solar flare? It could do all that, burn out power plants planetwide, and maybe knock a few (plutonium-fueled) satellites out of orbit. If it ejects a lot of charged particles and they stick around (have no idea how valid this is, but still...) most electric stuff won't work anymore. Cancer skyrockets as survivors try to forge a world without electricity - no computers, no phones, no lights at night, no cars....

One of my favorites has been ice-9. Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle: a research chemist creates a form of water crystal that's more stable than normal ice. It won't melt at room temperature. And it acts as a seed crystal for ordinary water. You swallow a flake of ice-9, and your body freezes solid. One speck of ice-9 hits the ocean, and that's it. No more ecosystem.

Oh, and you left off the old ice age/global warming thing. Either we all freeze, or we all drown in melted glaciers & get melanoma.

19:51 / 12.02.03

The life of DNA, like all good things, comes to an end.

:-(

20:01 / 12.02.03

Or we could figure out how human consciousness actually works and consequently all die of boredom.

20:09 / 12.02.03

Let's not forget the right-wing 'homosexual anxiety' nightmare that, what with political correctness going maaad and according 'em societal acceptance, partnership benefits, the right to adopt and so on, homos proliferate like fruit flies (via the usual recruitment drives) to such an extent that the entire human race goes gay (in a 'same-sex attraction' rather than merely 'pathetic' or 'hot' way), forgets how to do hetero-sex and promptly dies out.

22:31 / 12.02.03

when i first heard the theory of a malthusian death due to homosexuality, it was susan blackmore mentioning it.

she was talking about the death of homosexuality, however, and not the whole planet.
i felt like she was not being so homophobic, more just using a really bad example of the self-caused death of a meme/plex.

22:32 / 12.02.03

[Christian BB]Not my children[/Christian BB]

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

00:45 / 13.02.03

Goats.

Don't laugh.

I'm deadly serious.

06:36 / 13.02.03

Or there's the anime apocalypse: massive robots, psychic kids, nuclear weapons, demons, strange references to mythology taken out of context, nudity (usually with missing nipples or pubic hair), old gods returning to wreak havoc in one last battle, childhood rivalries played out on a planetary scale, evil corporations reaching too far in their greed and ambition, school girls raped and torn in two, psychedelic dream sequences, spectacular takes on the supercontext, and ultraviolence upon ultraviolence.

In other words all of the above.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:29 / 13.02.03

You missed out goats.

You fools.

You poor, poor fools.

08:34 / 13.02.03

Jellystone? This is no threat. This is a volcano of jelly. there is nothing that is less scary then big floppy wibbly lumps of jelly falling out of the sky and being all floppy and wibbly

Yeah but think of how many horses would be needed to provide the hooves to make all that jelly. With the extinction of horses would come the extinction of horse racing, then the gambling industry would collapse. Not only would jobs be lost but happiness denied to billions of gamblers the world over. In the wake of this disaster cults spring up over the globe promising illusory happiness to a world of dejected people. Unusually large sales of kool-aid and poison fail to alert anyone to the threat before it is too late and the last sounds heard by human ears are the strains of dodgy folk music played badly on out of tune guitars.

09:20 / 13.02.03

Goats? I think you mean sheep. It's been proven that sheep are actually highly intelligent, yet in the Scottish countryside they wander into the middle of the road and they block the way for cars andstare at you in a highly disturbing manner. It's all going to start in the Parbh - they're planning it already, I tells ya.

09:21 / 13.02.03

And then there's butterflies. Evil little bastards. They're really poisonous, you know? And carnivorous. With fangs.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

09:34 / 13.02.03

Look, Chol, it's simple.

It may look as though the sheep and butterflies are plotting stuff... because they are . But the Lady Macbeth of the scenario is the goat.

(And yes... sheep and, for that matter, butterflies, are highly intelligent... I think they'll probably double-cross the goats once we're all dead, gone, or labouring as their slaves in their "stuff goats like" mine. Either way, it doesn't help us any.)

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

09:39 / 13.02.03

Anyway, butterflies I can live with (I have to say that, before they become our new overlords). But moths? Watch 'em, that's all I'm saying. Lovecraft knew whereof he spoke with the Fungi from Yuggoth.

Although, of course, and back on-topic,

This little fella's back...

(I bet the goats had something to do with it, though. We're still looking for the "smoking goat"- he's said to be the ringleader).

13:57 / 13.02.03

So far I don't think anyone has specifically mentioned what might (sorry, WILL) come to pass when THE STARS ARE RIGHT.

When Nyarlatheotep bestrides the earth, when the hidden bands of cultists complete their million year preperations and unleath things of unimaginable horror, when the sunken continents rise from the sea and Cthulhu and it's minions return to full strength and lay claim to what is theirs, when the Old Ones return and the whole human race is confronted with the true insignificance of it's existence and comes face to face with the blind, laughing idiot Gods and the nuclear chaos at the centre of the universe..

All that jazz. Can't beat it.

But on the other hand, if we're just making stuff up, wouldn't it be terrible if it started to rain knives? I mean, great big buther's knives, falling from the sky everywhere.. those who were outdoors would be cut to shit and die in horrible pain and those who unlucky enough to be under cover would either have to wait until the roof gave way under the weight of falling knives, or else slowly starve to death.. hmm.. maybe I've thought about this a bit too much..

Though my favourite apocalypse of course would be the one where all the different things mentioned above happen similtaneously in different places, leading to absurd amounts of confusion in addition to all the madness and carnage..

15:06 / 13.02.03

Good suggestions everyone - how stupid do I feel for forgetting "falling knives"? Clearly we need two lists: one for the realistic stuff and one for the eyebrow raisers. I'll sort it all out in a bit.

For now, though, thinking of the 'realistic' list, does anyone want to challenge the notion that Alien Invasion has the greatest nastiness potential of the lot? I'm thinking mad technology + cruelty = "aaargghhh!" in glass tubes, for ever.

Note to self: add Allen Invasion to Eyebrow Raising list

Tryphena Absent

15:12 / 13.02.03

Please, we all know that alien invasion is simply a paranoid dream of the imperialist North American mind, having no effective enemies the hive conscious of the U.S. worker creates an unbeatable force. This dream replicates itself from the original paranoia caused by the Cold War, let's not contribute to the imperialism people, let's pay attention to the terrifying notion of the sheep, goats, butterflies and twelve thousand tap- dancing hamsters.

13:21 / 14.02.03

Here's the charts in proper order (ie with nastiest at no.1), complete with new entries.

Physically Possible:

1 - Discovering that that bloke was right about us being a simulation (a): being mucked about with in nasty ways by the creators
2 - Wrath of God, Armageddon, four horsemen etc
3 - Alien invasion

Note: 1 -3 are at the top because they all offer the potential for unending torture

4 - All-out conventional war with occasional use of WOMD
Note: Cruelty also likely (invading armies not known for their self control) but not unending
5 - Pandemic
6 - All-out global nuclear war
7 - Super Volcano eruption
8 - Massive computer shutdown / electronic cock-up, causing missiles to go pop etc
9 - Massive solar flare knocking all the electrics for six
10 - Asteroid / meteor impact
11 - Gradual ecological disaster / ice age / global warming
12 - Robots taking over
Note: cruelty possible but I suspect yer robot would prefer a quick, efficient method for the disposal of waste
13 - Tsunamis caused by big bits of islands falling into the sea
14 - Discovering that that bloke was right about us being a simulation (b): being switched off
15 - Fertility drop (droop?)
16 - Global ennui / boredom / apathy

Eyebrow Raisers:

1 - Moths
Note: THEY FLY AT YOUR FACE
2 - Lovecraftian monster rage
3 - Monsters. Monsters from the id
4 - Falling knives
5 - Anime apocalypse
6 - Allen invasion
7 - Zombies!
8 - Any one of the 50s/60s Sci-Fi disasters that Rizla's read
9 - Sheep
10 - Goats
Note: yes, sheep are worse. Don't be fooled by the placid exterior - sheep are sheep in sheeps clothing.
11 - 12000 tap-dancing hamsters
12 - Butterflies

Disagreements and additions welcome.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

13:53 / 14.02.03

And all of you are forgetting Bunnies.

And George Bush selling the planet to aliens for magic beans that make oil plants.

13:54 / 14.02.03

Blue skinned Amazonian Martian women enslaving the male population to use as sex-toys and/or studs to further their dying race.

14:03 / 14.02.03

Is that what you want Sax? It sounds good to me, if you've gotta go go with a smile on your face, eh?

14:19 / 14.02.03

No! That would be a terrible way to go! That's why I suggested it.

Now, purple-skinned Venusian pygmy women who have just broken up with a Pluvian rugby team and come to Earth feeling vulnerable and just wanting to, you know, talk but instead you push loads of gin on them and get them drunk and into bed and in the morning feel crap about yourself. Now that's an invasion.

14:35 / 14.02.03

That list (fine though it is), still misses out zombies!

And what about an ancient race of underground DRAGONS awakening under London and, um, setting everything on fire, like in that chillingly plausible motion picutre 'Reign of Fire'?

And what about an ancient alien artifact being dug up under London (I see a pattern emerging) and spreading mind warping mass hysteria and the collapse of human civilisation, like in Quatermass and The Pit? Would that count as alien invsion?

Or what of the somewhat contrived - though not to be taken lightly - 'Day of the Triffids' scenario?

What about 'The Death of Grass' - a virus wipes out all vegetation and plant life - that would be pretty damn bad.

14:37 / 14.02.03

oh, and incidentally - shouldn't this thread have been hilariously entitled "Armageddon sick of it!"?

14:48 / 14.02.03

Ush! I can't believe I left Zombies! off! Have sent plea to moderators, see above for amendments and additions soonish...

14:55 / 14.02.03

Raininig knives? Pfft. Humanity will be over the day it starts to rain *cows*. It's the "Extinction by Thud" theory, as it is known in the academic circles (tiny, tiny circles. Spinning reeeeeally fast).

Picture this: You're on the street, overhearing people talking etc:

"So I called Harry and we THUD!"
"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEETHUD!"

"No, you can't have more THUD!"
"I love you, THUD""
"Look at my newBLOSSHH!"

And so on, and so forth.

01:37 / 16.02.03

And why are aliens so much more physically plausible than falling knives (shudder)? At least I know knives exist. I even have several in the house. And therein lies the terror: if knives are in the house, then why NOT raining from the skies? Lovecraftian monsters seem more likely than aliens as well (seeing as they're just waiting in a dimension next door as opposed to seventy trillion light years away) but that's a whole nother can of worms. Sorry. Carry on.

01:46 / 16.02.03

What about No Alchool? Wouldn't that be a disater? At least I can get pissed while the Zombies eat my brains.

Or what if there really was a God and all those crappy ass Left Behind books were right?

12:28 / 16.02.03

When Nyarlatheotep bestrides the earth, when the hidden bands of cultists complete their million year preperations ...

We haven't been planning that long. But we do have weekly prayer meetings and a bake sale coming up if you want to pop along.

Also many of us were at the march yesterday. If civilisation is going to be destroyed, it should be for His glory, not some jumped up cowboy.

There is no peace through the gateway. And very soon there won't be anywhere else either.

In terms of things that could wipe out human life, I favour INTOLERANCE and IGNORANCE.We really don't need anything else.

12:52 / 16.02.03

Saveloy: 11 - 12000 tap dancing hamsters

Would that be these evil Satanic tap dancing hamsters?

12:57 / 16.02.03

If they get on your tits, then you can always have some fun exterminating them.

Hell, having been a peacenik all weekend, I'm off to kill toons too and Emincreepyhomophobeem too, elsewhere on the site. Beware of the Harry Potter ones though. Bit gruesome, even for me.

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