It's the End of the World: 8 Potential Armageddons

These kinds of stories are always a fun read, thanks Nmysys!
1. Sudden gamma ray burst: Possible, though as they said, not likely - it'd have to be close enough AND pointed directly at us. As Heartless said, solar flares are a much more immediate and probable threat, especially since the power grid won't be updated in time (which would help mitigate damage). Would it cause extinction, I don't think so, but it would indirectly kill a good portion of the population and set us back technologically.

2. Deadly mind virus: I haven't read Implied Spaces so I have no background info on the author's ideas, but a bad idea taking hold and wiping us out - I think we're not as susceptible as thought (or we're too apathetic). Now a true virus or widespread multi-drug resistant bacteria COULD do a lot of culling and cause millions in economic loss.

3. Magnetic Pole Reversal: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... eticfield/

4. Universe Expansion: I can't seem to find it now, but I recall seeing a recent paper that claimed to settle the debate once and for all - whether the universe would infinitely expand, or at some point begin to contract once again and the result of the study was infinite expansion. So trillions of years in the future (if indeed time is linear, and only forward-moving as we perceive it, which can't be proven either), instead of being compacted into a space the size of an atom with the density equaling 100 billion galaxies, our universe will grow colder and darker long after life everywhere has been extinguished. So we've got that going for us! :thumbsup:

5. Science Experiments Gone Awry: Always a consideration, as scientists sometimes can't see the forest for the trees. Luckily, we've got review committees to cover a lot of stuff. The concerns with the LHC, from what I've read, are overblown. But ya never know! Nanotechnology is one that is going full-steam ahead (you might be amazed at all the products out there that are nano-tech based that you already use and their long-term effects aren't at all well studied) and could stand more critical review (so far, it's voluntary, internal, science-only based reviews of potential issues, no government oversight as of yet).
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 102505.htm
http://www.nanotechproject.org/inventories/consumer/

6. Supervolcano: Someday one of 'em will go off and we'll have a front row seat. It may wipe us out, or some hardy souls may struggle through. Society would never be the same.

7. Self-Aware, Conscious, Artificial Intelligence: Now this one is a possibility. It's not in any of my fields of interest, so there may be serious ethical and moral discussions going on that I haven't seen, but if there are, they aren't very public so I don't see any brakes being applied in this area of research anytime soon. And it concerns me a little (we're still decades out on creating it I think).

8. Pandemic: This will happen at some point, I'm sure in my lifetime. Even if a universal flu vaccine is developed, no vaccine is 100% effective, and there are plenty of other pathogens available that will have a smorgsaboard of humans to infect as we continue to increase our population size. Overcrowding, malnutrition, and unsanitary living conditions are inevitable and those are breeding grounds for pandemics. With the swift global travel occurring in our modern times, containing a highly virulent strain will be impossible. Researchers have been working to improve monitoring of outbreaks and creating infectious disease models that predict how and where each type of disease will spread so as to effectively quarantine the spread, but much remains to do (2 examples here).
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/f ... type=HWCIT
Large-Scale Spatial-Transmission Models of Infectious Disease
Steven Riley
Science 1 June 2007:
Vol. 316. no. 5829, pp. 1298 - 1301
DOI: 10.1126/science.1134695
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... us-disease

What I would've included on this list:

Nuclear exchange. With countries like Pakistan and India who hate each other and have enough warheads aimed at one another to put us into nuclear winter for decades and keep flirting with war, N. Korea which has finally created and tested a nuclear missile (albeit with poor results) and are not stable economically or politically, Israel who seems to be on a hair trigger being surrounded by unfriendly nations, and Iran which is likely aiming for that status, this remains, in my mind, a bigger threat than any of the items mentioned in the article. Will those countries pass through the learning curve as well as the U.S. and USSR did?

Near-Earth Object Impact. More likely than a gamma-ray burst, could be as deadly as a super-volcano depending on its size and where it hits (ooh, what if one landed on Yellowstone?!).

And, of course, global warming (you knew that was coming!). Unless we develop technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and start limiting warming, permafrost will continue to melt releasing more methane which will add to positive feedback loops and cause even more warming. We are already committed to a 1.4 degree rise in temp by 2100 and likely a 1 meter rise in ocean levels, and that's if every country started cutting emissions drastically tomorrow. If we continue business as usual burning fossil fuels, and deforesting large land surface area, we could conceivably reach 800ppm or more of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2100; levels which haven't been seen in millions of years - back when the sun put out a lot less energy (less energy to earth means less energy to trap via greenhouse effect). Polar ice caps and glaciers will continue to melt (another positive feedback loop - increased dark ocean surface to absorb sunlight and decreased white ice to reflect sunlight) and rise causing billions in economic loss due to attempts to save coastal cities, eventual loss of prime real estate, relocation of hundreds of millions of inhabitants, and loss of fresh water sources, diseases will move into areas previously not endemic, oceans will continue to acidify, species will increase in extinction affecting the food chain, and weather patterns are predicted to become more extreme which will make for more economic hardship. Will it wipe us all out? Not likely, but the scale of hardship is conceivably equal to that of a smaller asteroid hit or nuclear winter, so I'd include it on an armageddon list. But that's me!