Wednesday, July 20, 2011

[chtbhlkc] Timeframes for human extinction

Poll: The human race will go extinct within the next...
* 2 years
* 4 years
* 16 years
* 260 years
* 66,000 years
* 4.3 billion years
* 18 quintillion years
* 10^38 years
* 10^77 years
* 10^150 years

Each epoch is the square of the previous epoch, which has no physical justification, but mentally makes sense: each of the extinction timeframes roughly suggests a different mechanism for extinction, ranging from "unexpected sudden death" to "we failed to avert nuclear armageddon" to "we failed to avert a destructive technological singularity" to "we failed to escape the red giant sun" to "we failed to escape the heat death of the universe" to "we failed to escape proton decay".

No comments :