Have you ever thought of how the world will end? How will it all be gone? This can be a sensitive topic because of what will happen to everyone and how we will all end. It can also be amusing. Many people have thought of this before and many reasons have come up. They have thought of how will they lose people and the world. Which problems from modern society will cause the most extreme problem of all: the end of the world? In this blog post, I will debunk and exhibit what problem will cause the end of the world.
Society has so many issues there are too many to count. Problems we have in modern day society are apparent and we already comprehend what some are that we want to fix. An example of an issue is climate change. Climate change involves the acts of humans and natures reactions to the change in weather. Climate change has to do with the ecosystem and our earth’s health and action. During climate change temperatures are going up and down in areas due to the fact of air pollution. “Scientists have high confidence that global temperatures will continue to rise for decades to come, largely due to greenhouse gases produced by human activities. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which includes more than 1,300 scientists from the United States and other countries, forecasts a temperature rise of 2.5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century.” 2.5 to 10 degrees might not seem much, but it can cause a lot of damage. For areas whose temperatures are normally really high, it will get hotter. In areas where it is colder everything will start melting. This would and will cause a huge problem in the food chain because if an animal goes extinct the other who eats it can to and so on. One day the earth will get so warm or so cold that human life/civilization will no longer be capable of living.
Other possibilities to end the world are nuclear wars. Nuclear warfare is caused by human beings. Nuclear warfare can be started by a conflict and people sending bombs. This is something that can be easily avoided but the authorities and people do not feel like it can be a problem so as a community I believe that nuclear bombs should not be available to anyone. “With the end of the Cold War, fears of the world ending in both fire and ice faded, but reports of the demise of that demise may have been premature. Not only does President Trump seem to have a somewhat cavalier attitude toward the deployment of nuclear weapons, and their wider accessibility, and not only are nuclear treaties crumbling around the world, but those two adjacent South Asian countries I mentioned have nuclear arsenals, and they’ve gone to war with each other before.” This indicates that nuclear warfare can end it all and wipe out all of humanity.
Artificial intelligence has been advancing these days, but I do not believe that AI will end the world. However, AI is becoming smarter and its destructive potential is possible. “Facebook abandoned an experiment after two artificially intelligent programs appeared to be chatting to each other in a strange language only they understood.” This is an example of AI starting to get smarter and out of our control. I would get worried because as people we have stopped any unnatural behavior before and we could do it again.
I personally think that the world will end because of something natural or earth- related like climate change. However, I additionally believe that nuclear warfare can also end it. This does not suggest I do not believe that AI can end humanity in my point of view. I am using science more than unknown causes. A collapse caused by AI would be intriguing though. How do you think the world will end??
Darien Ramirez
Latin School of Chicago.
Sources- https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/
Wired-https://www.wired.com/story/even-a-small-nuclear-war-could-trigger-a-global-apocalypse