What do you think the biggest danger to the end of mankind or earth is? (page 4)

JWdaughter

I don't know about destruction of the earth-I think that a virus/viruses will take out a large proportion of the world. The Spanish Flu did a number on us back in the early part of the century. Other (past)diseases have taken out as much as 2.5% (maybe more) of the known population. It harmed more than 25% of the US population, reducing life expectancy by 10 years. Look what 'new' diseases did to the American Indians in the last few hundred years.

Interestingly, this may alleviate some of the other harm-overpopulation, which uses up resources faster than they can be replenished, in some cases. If in 1919 or whenever the Spanish Flu could do as much damage as it did, without rapid air travel, interstate highways, etc., I think a new strain of disease could do infinitely more damage-not unlike the human toll we imagine for a great nuclear incident. There will be people left, but far fewer and with a more limited capacity to destroy their own world. I hope I am wrong!

Country Girl

The supervolcano in Yellowstone had a segment in this program.

CG

Mary

I think disease and/or pollution is the biggest threat. I see the Great Lakes around here being polluted with all the shit that the factories pour into them on a daily basis and it's enough to make you cry. People here in Southern Ontario suffer more from asthma and allergies and a host of other health problems including cancer, than anywhere else in Canada. We've got the pollution coming over from Michigan, all the garbage spewing down from the nickel mines up in Sudbury and all the crap coming up from the Southern USA and it all congregates over the Great Lakes, creates smog in the summer time and god knows what else the rest of the year.

Then you've got emissions from all our vehicles thrown in there, nuclear waste, landfills, deforestation.........the earth can only take so much. If the earth goes, then we go.

New Worldly Translation

I'm glad nobody said man made black holes cos that's junk science. Black holes could hypothetically be created in the Large Hadron Collider due for launch in 07 but they'd be so short lived due to hawking radiation they would pose no threat at all.

An interesting hypothesis put forward by Richard Muller and others is Nemesis. The majority of stars in the galaxy are twin stars so statistically the sun should have a twin in orbit, probably a red or brown dwarf beyond the oort cloud. It's orbit would bring it close to the inner solar system at regular intervals and it's gravitational pull would drag comets, asteroids etc with it which would bombard the planets and help explain the intervals of severe impacts followed by calm and the regular occurrences of extinction on earth.
Some satellites due to launch in the next couple of years should prove or disprove the theory.

Narkissos

Syntax.

Alpheta

It will be a virus that will wipe out 40% or more of the population, similar to what the Black Death did in the 1340's. It will be spread fast in over-populated countries in Asia and the third world and spread to the US, Canada, Europe, Australis, etc. via air transport. All the health organizations in the world won't be able to come up with a vaccine against it - once they realize what' s happening, until 40% of their populations are dead. "Western" societies may have marginally lower death rates due to better hygiene practices.

Imagine a world with 40% of 6.1 billion dead: 2.44 billion dead. We wouldn't even be able to keep up with processing the dead. If you think I'm full of it, I suggest an excellent and fast read, "The Great Mortality" by John Kelly. A very scary book, because everything that happened in it is TRUE, as recounted in the diaries of eyewitnesses and public records kept at the time and mathematical extrapolations therefrom.

proplog2

Narkissos:

I think there is something you are onto.

What do you think the biggest danger to the end of mankind or earth is?