Posted on 08/24/2025 6:48:32 AM PDT by BenLurkin
In a game of Russian roulette with a standard Colt revolver, the chances of instant death are one-in-six.
Terrifyingly, that’s the same as the odds of humanity being wiped out within 75 years – everyone dead in a cataclysmic and total breakdown of civilisation, according to Oxford University futurologist Toby Ord, an expert on the threat of artificial intelligence.
Does it sound impossibly bleak? His colleague Nick Bostrom is more pessimistic still. He rates the possibility of human extinction by the next century as one in four.
Pulitzer prize-winning writer Jared Diamond is even less hopeful, predicting our species’ chances of survival beyond 2050 – just 25 years away – are no better than evens, or 50/50.
Not so long ago, only oddballs in sandwich boards and evangelical cult leaders seriously believed ‘the end of the world is nigh’. The phrase itself was a comic cliche, so gloomy it was funny.
But the voices now warning of our impending extinction come from highly respected scientists, not kooky doom-sayers. They point to multiple existential threats faced by the human race: not only nuclear weapons, but rampant climate change, artificially engineered viruses and even malevolent AI capable of manufacturing its own super-weapons.
(Excerpt) Read more at climatedepot.com ...
I miss the good old days when this stuff was being proclaimed by weirdos on the street with “The End is Near” signs,
Yeah, I need to set my watch again.
I didn’t realize the scientist’s respected award was the Pulitzer for leftist journalism.
Ehrlich predicted global overpopulation catastrophe by the 1980s. He has never been disavowed by the left, even though every...single...one of his predictions failed.
His failed catastrophe turned into a dress rehearsal for the MMGW hoax. Same script, if different agonistes.
I hang up “Help Wanted” posters to keep out the riff riff.
The same “respected scientists” who have been predicting climate or population extinction every 10 years since the turn of the century?
Has he confirmed this with the rapture ready kooks yet?
Yup—the environmental “experts” already killed me dozens of times.
https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions/
Does the alarmist crowd ever tire of being wrong?
They said the same thing when I was in HS back in the 70’s.
Soylent Green never happened.
We’re all going to die!! AGAIN!!!
we don't need to wait on planet X,nor globull warming nor the magnetic shift or ai...we are destroying ourselves all by ourselves.
Always good to hear from Oxford University bullshytologist Toby Ord.
Algore already predicted the end of the world , we burned up , POOF
is there ANYTHING that Oxford “scientists” can’t be wrong about?
btw, “Oxford scientist” is an oxymoron ... Cambridge was the university that was the real scientific powerhouse back in the day, though in recent history, Cambridge is best known for producing Soviet spys ...
Oxford of course has given us “effective altruism”, the dressed up “philosophy” of “the means justifies the ends” that gave us the billion dollar thieves Sam Bankman-Fried, his family and his cohorts ...
Western democracies are not far behind. Sweden has 10% Muslim population and highest crime rate in Europe.
I guess that's appropriate.
In several different ways.
This kind of stuff fails on the pages of a dictionary.
Extinction requires 100% eradication. This is a right and proper definition. Not like “collapse” which we so often see thrown about (with no solid numerical definition).
So what does it take for extinction? Here are some ways:
Sun goes nova. Sorry, there is no surviving that one.
Massive asteroid strike. Odds really high of 100% deaths, though taking a rather long time, maybe 100 yrs to get the last human starved.
Climate change of a few degrees? Absurd. You could lose what, 20% of the population? That ain’t extinction.
Oil scarcity? Pretty good odds of extinction, but it will take 100 years or so. Transportation ends and that means food shipment does. So you will have humankind restricted to villages. They can’t grow. They can’t recover because big population gains require oil. So a stagnant population in various locales just waiting for the random disease to arrive, for which there will be no drugs since . . . transportation died.
Nuclear war? Nah, self limiting. When you are out of warheads, you are out of warheads. Dust in the atmosphere? Yes. Low food production from that dust? Yes. But “low” doesn’t meant zero. You can’t get to 100% death count if some people are eating. That same issue with drugs above? No, you still have oil to move drugs, because consumption of the scarce amounts reduces with the population. In general, it’s recoverable, over centuries.
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