How many of you believe in the end of the world?

Well, the world will end one day, but it is far in the future (millions of years) and no one can predict it.

The end as we know it. Right? This spinning orb will be around in some form, sans us…

Yes, but not in the biblical sense. More like the sun dying out eventually and basically taking the earth with it.

I’m 100% sure it will happen sometime and 99% sure not in my time.

Aside from any religious beliefs, I believe the science that if we don’t stop emitting carbon gasses or at least slow it, the world as we know it will be drastically changes and e world for our species will end.

I think it’s widely acknowledged that the sun will eventually expand & take us out, possibly on a hot date…extremely hot.

Yeah, like when the sun goes down it will take us with it but I’ll probably be like long dead by then so I’m not going to worry about it.

End of the world? Nooooooo not for a very very long time until the Sun expands.

Save the Planet

Yeah, but I feel fine.

The world ends for someone every single second. Yes, I believe in the end of the world.

I expect the end of the human species long before the planet ‘ends’.

@ssssanna Welcome to Fluther, and thanks for the great question. I base my beliefs not on blind faith but on observed evidence. There is lots of evidence to lead us to believe that the world as we know it will end. There is the Law of Entropy. The Universe itself appears to be headed for heat death in the distant future, many billions of years from now.

Before that fate, we face the evolution of our Sun from a yellow dwarf to a red giant as it runs out of hydrogen and gravitational collapse transitions it into nuclear fusion of heavier elements. As that occurs, the sun will likely expand until its photosphere encompases the earth, and we will be melted down to become part of the Sun’s mass. Thankfully, there is a chance that we won’t get consumed completely by its Red Giant phase. In that case, all water on Earth will be vaporized and all life extant at that point destroyed.

When our Sun runs out of all nuclear fuel, it will collapse back to a brown dwarf. If Earth still exists outside the Sun at that point, all the water of Earth that the dying Sun previously vaporized will come out of the atmosphere as snow and ice, and the Earth will become one giant ice-ball.

Only if intelligent life on Earth shows itself intelligent enough to not self destruct before the Sun does so 5.4 billion years in the future, do we stand any chance of avoiding that the melt-down or ice-ball fate. It could be done by moving the Earth’s orbit further out in the Solar System during the Sun’s red giant phase, then back in close, say about where Mercury is today, when the brown dwarf phase hits. But that still doesn’t get us around the universal law of entropy. So yeah, I believe the Earth as we know it will end.

Oh, and happy Fourth of July. Look at the bright side of the above. The bills that we agonize over, the insults our loved ones heap on us, and the political blunders that enrage us are really trivial matters. No matter which way they go, entropy will end it all anyway. In the end, the ice-ball theory rules!

If you mean like rapture-y, Mayan prophecy-ish end of the world… no.

The end of planet Earth is an inevitability, so it doesn’t matter whether I believe in it or not.

The end of human life on our planet… no, I think human life will endure on this planet for as long as it is physically possible (i.e., until our sun begins to change, as @ETpro described). I think civilizations will have time to rise and fall, and I think the human population will rise and fall as well, but I believe there will always be at least some humans here. They may not always be comfortable or happy, but they will persist.

It’s the end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine.

This response to an earlier question on the topic may be a year-and-a-half old, but what’s a year and a half in the context of an end-of-the-world question?

I hope a curious scientist or wondering vagabond finds my fossilized bones.

A given species tends to last around two million years. I think that this is because in order to radically evolve, a species has to split off into another species. Humans can surpass the two million mark because we have evolved, and will no doubt continue to evolve, socially. A sea turtle lives pretty much the same as its million year ancestors, but humans have made radical changes over the course of a few thousand years. All the statements about some coming Armageddon overlook the fact that as a species we are becoming less belligerent. Deaths from homicides, and war in particular, has been steadily declining. Rate of religious belief, a major cause of conflict, has also been declining. I am optimistic that we will be around for quite some time yet.

@glacial I strongly suspect that our next step in evolution will include porting intelligence, memories and sense of self into a cyborg better equipped for the rigors of space travel. As the saying goes, “The meek shall inherit the kingdom of Earth, the wise will move on.”

Everyone’s going to die eventually.

@LostInParadise “I think that this is because in order to radically evolve, a species has to split off into another species”
I’ve tried, but I can’t figure out what you mean by this.

“Humans can surpass the two million mark because we have evolved,”
Every species has evolved.

“and will no doubt continue to evolve, socially”
This is not actually evolution.

@ETpro I would not be surprised if mankind left the planet at some point, if only to try to find other worlds to colonize. But you know… I would also not be surprised if it didn’t. Regardless, I suspect there will always be people here. Who knows?

Yep, even the sun will die, or we will exterminate ourselves, or a roving black hole will absorb our universe, or….pick your poison. Personally I hope for the renegade black hole to swallow us up. Time to start over methinks. lol

@glacial , What I meant was that I believe that evolution tends to occur over a relatively short period of time and that the part of a species that acquires new traits is unable to mate with the parent species, and so becomes a new species and, by outcompeting the old species, the old species dies out and is replaced by the new one.

I am not going to argue with you over whether social evolution counts as evolution. What is important is that it causes a change in behavior in the same way that physical evolution causes a behavioral change. Those who gain a reproductive advantage by evolving socially will displace those who have not.

I believe. Hallelujah, I believe, and believe me, it’s not theoretical.

Your belief in the “tree form” of evolution has been pretty well debunked, @LostInParadise. It’s not so much that “new species” out-compete the older forms from which they evolved, and the older ones die out, but the new forms generally adapt to different niches in the ecosystem. (It’s not that what you suppose never happens, but it’s just not the common mode of evolution.)

If what you propose were true, then why are there still so many primates in the world apart from humans? Why, for that matter, are there still bacteria, if everything evolved from one-celled organisms in the first place? Read about the various forms of Galapagos finches; if they all evolved from a single species, then how could they all exist in the same locale now if your idea was correct?

Read some Stephen Jay Gould for his entirely readable and enjoyable descriptions of evolution as “a bush” and not a tree.

@LostInParadise I was just looking for clarification. Your previous answer makes it sound like you are saying that humans are a different species than we were “a few thousand years ago”. I don’t know if this is what you were trying to say, perhaps you were exaggerating for effect, but it is incorrect.

There is no requirement for competition between a new species and its predecessor – they frequently coexist in time, if not always in space. I think that in order for further speciation to occur among humans, we would have to see some sort of global disaster that prevents intercontinental travel. Perhaps that is likely over the remainder of our time here. It’s impossible to say. But I think our behaviour, particularly our ability to use technology to overcome adversity (or even discomfort), makes evolution less likely, not more.

Well, it all has to end some day. I believe it will, but it’s probably not going to be like what movies suggest. The Sun will one day expire, although my guess is that mankind will be long gone by then. The ’‘end of the world’’ will probably be very gradual, unless mankind has some kind of nuclear world war in the distant future. Or famine, disease…who says the ’‘end of the world’’ might not occurring right now?

I’m an agnostic and don’t have enough knowledge to predict the end of the world. Now, ask me if it’s going to be hot today and I can wholeheartedly say, “yup”

It has been foretold

I don’t think it’s a matter of ‘believing’. It’s going to happen, someday. No prophecy involved, of course.

@LostInParadise & @glacial I’d be willing to bet that if further speciation occurs in humans, it is because we are tweaking the genome to drive it.

@glacial I totally agree that a portion of humanity will remain here as long as practicable. There are things like nearby gamma ray bursts and rogue black holes wandering the universe that can turn what appeared to be a good neighborhood very bad in a blink of an eye. We’d be wise to hedge our bets and colonize lots of places while keeping a home base here as long as here remains habitable.

I do! One day the sun will die and we’ll have to move to another planet. It’s not the ‘end of the world’, it’s just the ‘end of the sun’.

It all depends on what you mean by “world”. The sun continues to slowly grow and slowly becomes hotter which at some point in the future will make the earth uninhabitable for life (this will happen long before the sun turns into a red dwarf). So at some point humans will have to give up earth and find a new planet, unless we manage to increase the distance of the earth from the sun. But even this is only a temporary solution, as the red dwarf has a finite life too.

@mattbrowne Yeah, and at that point, we can’t just colonize Mars or nothing, we’d have to find another planet in another solar system. Besides Mars, I don’t see what other planet people could potentially live on in this system. :/
And finding another planet in a good place according to its sun requires technology that we don’t currently have. And I’m not entirely sure we ever will lol.

ummm…..........I guess I’m in the minority here in that I’m a Christian so I believe in the end of the world in terms of a biblical sense…...but we do not know the day nor the hour

Could it happen in my lifetime? Maybe, but I sure hope not. I believe our human race is running the earth into the ground and it is a sign…..

Yes yes I know many an atheist would largely disagree and start spouting stuff about science and whatnot. Please don’t. I’m religious, not stupid. I’ve taken the classes, read the article, etc etc. Just answering the OP’s question :) It is what I believe.

Yes, Mars and later Titan will only work for a while.

Finding appropriate earth-like planets is doable.

@mattbrowne To my understanding, many have been located, ones that are apparently like Earth, more or less. But we have to be able to get there, first. :/

@mattbrowne Admittedly it is a SWAG, but I think the degree of difficulty in moving Earth’s orbit away from and later back toward an evolving Sun is about equal to the degree of difficulty in traveling multiple light years to the nearest earthlike planets in the habitable zone of a star younger than ours, and successfully colonizing it, are about equal. I’d bet we do both.

@Symbeline – Humans went from stone axes to 3D printing in just a few hundred thousand years. Progress is accelerating. Why shouldn’t we be able to send starships to exoplanets in a few hundred years?

@mattbrowne Not saying it’s impossible. I find it very unlikely, however.

@Symbeline – In the year 2200 or 2300 I find it very likely, if humanity keeps evolving technologically. A major global disaster could lead to a setback.

@ETpro – Agreed.

I don’t know if the end is near or not but I’m sure it is not going away

@nerevars Welcome to Fluther. I’d say you are absolutely right there. There are unknowns like massive asteroid strikes, hits by huge comets, collisions with rouge planets or even rouge black holes. Any of these events could happen in the relatively near future. But if we survive all those hazards we face the Red Giant phase of the Sun, and eventually the heat death of the entire Universe.

If I am at all lucky, I will not be here to watch it…. (I am new to this site, and I am getting the impression that the people here take these questions much too seriously. Or themselves too seriously. I do not think I belong on this site; I really do have a life.)

@Yes_Indeed I’ve never said this to a brand new member before, but the door works both ways.

Personally, I think life is very serious, and discussing it should factor that in.

This was just suggested to me by Fluther as a new “Question for you”... perhaps it’s a sign.