Which Apocalypse Scenario Frightens You Most?

[Arkady Arkright]

No-deal Brexit...

 

[Worthless Whore]

Antibiotic resistant chlamydia.

 

[Jupiter]

There are two fictional scenarios that have left an impact on me. One was the film Contagion, which non-medical me felt was a realistic and frightening depiction of an epidemic breaking out. The other was the book The Road, which takes place in post-apocalyptic America after an extinction event. What terrified me in it was how people resorted to cannibalism and women and children were in extreme danger all the time in this world.

I don't think those are likely scenarios, however. What frightens me now are climate change , artificial intelligence, biotechnological catastrophes, and nuclear war.

 

[danielravennest]

 

[Veritable Quandry]

 

[Free]

Running out of lozenges.

 

[Amelia Freund]

Probably a giant tsunami. Although the likelihood is small, here on the estuary flats along the Australian eastern seaboard we'd have no hope if there was a massive tsunami.

Apart from that I fear the degradation of society's social conscience will end the world more than anything in a slow gradual spiral downward. In a century or two's time, people will care even less about each other than they do now, and it will only get worse from there.

 

[Rose Karuna]

There are two fictional scenarios that have left an impact on me. One was the film Contagion, which non-medical me felt was a realistic and frightening depiction of an epidemic breaking out. The other was the book The Road, which takes place in post-apocalyptic America after an extinction event. What terrified me in it was how people resorted to cannibalism and women and children were in extreme danger all the time in this world.

I don't think those are likely scenarios, however. What frightens me now are climate change , artificial intelligence, biotechnological catastrophes, and nuclear war.

OMG - McCarthy's book "The Road" was one of the darkest books that I've ever read. Plus, cannibals scare the crap out of me.

 

[Isabeau]

The Handmaid's Tale type of scenario would definitely be right up there for me. I heard about Mark Harris in the US recently, and him and his ilk just disgust and scare me. The fact that they even think what they are saying makes any logical sense... that so many agree and not only want to live this way, want to vote for him, but also want TO IMPOSE their fucked-up religious values on everyone else. My mind can't even go there. It seems so plausible. It's also why I had such a hard time watching the series.

 

[Jupiter]

The Handmaid's Tale type of scenario would definitely be right up there for me. I heard about Mark Harris in the US recently, and him and his ilk just disgust and scare me. The fact that they even think what they are saying makes any logical sense... that so many agree and not only want to live this way, want to vote for him, but also want TO IMPOSE their fucked-up religious values on everyone else. My mind can't even go there. It seems so plausible. It's also why I had such a hard time watching the series.

What's scares me the most about dystopian fiction like The Handmaid's Tale and Nineteen Eighty-Four is that a lot of what happens in those novels has happened for real somewhere in the world.

 

[Tirellia]

A world without single estate coffee, new shoes and nail polish would terrify me. I realise that all of these are harvested in the wild on remote Indonesian islands by child slave labourers and they're all at risk from tsunamis, Chinese expansionism and local economic growth. The world is a worrying place.

 

[Seawitch]

OMG - McCarthy's book "The Road" was one of the darkest books that I've ever read. Plus, cannibals scare the crap out of me.

The movie was quite good as well.

 

[Sid]

Which Apocalypse Scenario Frightens You Most?
The one I would survive, while the others around me wouldn't.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

A sudden slump in the availability of cheap fertilizers due to the outage of cheap oil, which would lead to heavily decreased crop rates for a few years, so rising food prices and famines rising on a global scale.

 

[Free]

Tentnado.


Ack!

 

[Val]

Which Apocalypse Scenario Frightens You Most?
The one I would survive, while the others around me wouldn't.

My husband says the same thing whenever something about nuclear bombs comes up - he does not wish to survive that at all.

I would say something similar to Isabeau - world becoming a dystopia. You can fault fate for natural disasters and would probably go away fast in case of huge one that overwhelms us (okay, climate change is our fault but ... we know it) or your own skills if zombies munch on you. We can also rebuild anything if our infrastructure goes down soooooo people becoming more awful and making everyone more miserable is my nightmare. Knowing me, I'd break fast under the stress and die young. At least I'd make it entertaining and instead of doing any grand manifests, I'd somehow make planes drop tonnes of glitter.

 

[Soen Eber]

We run out of beer.

In ancient Egypt, there is a story that humanity had multiplied so much that the noise and din of human existence was greatly annoying the gods, so they slew a great many of them.

They repented a few months later. The gods missed the sacrificial offerings of beer. [source: the history of ancient Egypt podcast].

 

[Soen Eber]

A sudden slump in the availability of cheap fertilizers due to the outage of cheap oil, which would lead to heavily decreased crop rates for a few years, so rising food prices and famines rising on a global scale.

Realist!

But hey, it won't affect most of the countries with nuclear weapons...

 

[Adam Frisby]

False vacuum collapse.

 

[Tigger]

My husband says the same thing whenever something about nuclear bombs comes up - he does not wish to survive that at all.

I would say something similar to Isabeau - world becoming a dystopia. You can fault fate for natural disasters and would probably go away fast in case of huge one that overwhelms us (okay, climate change is our fault but ... we know it) or your own skills if zombies munch on you. We can also rebuild anything if our infrastructure goes down soooooo people becoming more awful and making everyone more miserable is my nightmare. Knowing me, I'd break fast under the stress and die young. At least I'd make it entertaining and instead of doing any grand manifests, I'd somehow make planes drop tonnes of glitter.

We can rebuild infrastructure after a one off event. But I look at climate change, the increasing frequency of what were once black swan events, as massive storms start to batter areas in sequence, fires that once burned sometimes in the right season become year round ,the once-in-a-hundred year floods that start to become every few years. I see the slowly increasing rate of damage starting to outpace us. Rebuilding starts to fail as we can't afford the costs, or we don't have enough skilled builders, or we just can't get the resources fast enough to everywhere that needs them. We start to decay and collapse as the damage grows. I feel like we are on the early steps of this one and by the time it's clear to everyone what's happening it will just be too late to save ourselves and far too late to undo the damage we've done. It's not the massive sudden armageddon, it's the slow dreary descent into desperation and hopelessness.

So that's the scenario that frightens me most, the one where we have already passed the tipping point and just don't know it yet.