20 Fun Ways Humanity Might Actually Go Extinct

‘Heat death of the universe’
20 Fun Ways Humanity Might Actually Go Extinct

There are two types of people in this world: Those planning for an ordinary, individual death, and those who want to take everyone else out with them. They don’t necessarily want to bring about the apocalypse themselves, mind you. But if they have to go, everyone else better be going, too. You could say they’ve got a bad case of existential FOMO.

Luckily for them, there are so many ways the world could end. There’s all the normal ways that we’re all worried about every second of every day, of course: global pandemic, nuclear war, regular war, etc. But there are a ton of ways the world could end quite literally any second that you’ve probably never even considered. That’s fun, right?

To give us all a wildly entertaining panic attack, user SmokoMan asked r/AskReddit, “What is the craziest legitimate reason the human race could be completely wiped out?” and nothing but death and destruction followed.

AvengedTenfold 5y ago Robots
tristanhermans 5y ago Multi resistant bacteria
5y ago Black hole gives us the succ
InTooDeepButiCanSwim 5y ago A bad line of code launches nukes.
Enclair121 5y ago A powerful enough solar flare could do the trick...
the_killer_cannabis 5y ago Someone accidentally sets our atmosphere on fire
5y ago The old faithful_geyser could shoot out a giant cloud of ash that would blot out the sun
TenNinetythree 5y ago Heat death of the universe. Crazy to think we make it that long
PineapplemonsterVII 5y ago Climate change. It's already happening and it probably won't destroy all of humanity but it could easily cause the collapse of society as we know it.
i_fuckin_luv_it_mate . 5y ago A large Comet or Asteroid collides with earth. Do you know how fast those things could be theoretically moving towards us? Small asteroids hit the earth all the time
I_Ace_English 5y ago Neutron star gets on a collision course with Earth. The documentary I watched on this posited that humanity could survive it with a generation ship if enough people banded together quickly enough, but its equally possible that we'll just self-destruct by the time it reaches us and tears the planet apart.
TheLoadedToad 5y ago Letting Al progress. If you let Al learn a lot of vital information, it could eventually start writing code to hack into every system known to man. It could start creating self producing codes for robots essentially and with the knowledge of the internet, it would come to the conclusion that it's only way to survive is to end humanity. So yeah
5y ago Wave form collapse, essentially the possibility that some fundimental aspect of our reality relies on being in a superposition, observing it too hard could cause the waveform to collapse with results that we literally can't even begin to imagine. For comparison the next closest thing would be a false vacuum event which would change the very laws of physics, but a waveform collapse is just so bizzare that we can't even guess that much.
LFanother 5y ago A micronova from our own sun. When the dust shell hits the Earth, the sun-side will be under immense heat. The opposite side will have rapidly expanding gas (atmosphere) to go from an area of high pressure to an area of low pressure (sun-side of the Earth). Rapidly expanding gas, under Boyles Law, will make the opposite side of the Earth very very cold - enough to freeze large animals instantly. This is combined with a polar flip that enables crustal displacement because the mantel, under electric energy, will turn into a plastic liquid which will rotate the
5y ago Genomic meltdown. Every new baby has a few dozen novel mutations. Most are harmless, some are lethal, but in between those extremes there are some that are damaging but not bad enough to stop the baby growing up and having kids of their own. Under normal conditions each woman has many children and most of them die before making it to maturity, so those small damaging mutations are likely to be weeded out of the gene pool since weaker kids are less likely to survive. Enter modern medicine and industrial society where the child mortality rates are
Astramancer_ 5y ago Gamma Ray Burst. We're just sitting here doing our own thing and ВАМ! Earth gets sterilized in a lightspeed event. Zero warning. The worst part is the people on the far side probably won't die instantly. Pretty quick since it would probably strip a big chunk of our atmosphere, but they'd still know the end was here.
Kitsune_of_the_Mist . 5y ago Sharks are currently endangered. If they died out, fish populations would rise, which would reduce populations of algae and seaweed and other stuff that fish eat, which would in turn bring down the fish population lower than it was originally, which would cut into the populations of land animals that eat fish like bears, which would increase the populations of deer and other prey animals, which would reduce plant populations, which would reduce all animal populations, which would decrease human population. tl;dr Don't fuck with the food chain.
PufferFish_Tophat 5y ago Overmining the Moon. On Earth we're just moving mass from one place to another. But for the Moon, the mined material is going offworld, eventually changing the mass of the Moon. This could change the Moon's gravitational pull on the ocean (the tides), and as it lost mass it would orbit closer and closer to the Earth, until it was pulled into the Earth. The Moon also acts as a counterbalance to keep the Earth from wobbling around it's axis.
primerush 5y ago The Strange Death of the Earth Either a mishap at a supercollider or a hypervelocity ejection from a neutron star introduces a bit of strange matter to the planet. This bit of strange matter, or strangelet, starts converting the nucleus of every atom it touches into strange matter which creates a cascade effect through every bit of matter on earth turning our planet into a hot, lifeless ball of strange matter.
5y ago Dust gets into a computer part. Nuclear weapon systems are designed to 1) sense when enemy nukes are inbound, 2) sense when a nuclear weapon detonates, and 3) retaliate by launching nukes. Humans are involved too, but decisions are based upon the information from sensors and computer systems. If a nuclear weapon sensor gives a false alarm and detects inbound nukes when there are none, that could lead to actual nukes being launched. Then those nukes will be sensed and cause more nukes to be launched. Armageddon.

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