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Doomsday scoreboard

236 points| diymaker | 4 months ago |doomsday.march1studios.com

159 comments

order

kulahan|4 months ago

One mildly interesting fact that MANY Christians get wrong:

There is no lead-up to the apocalypse. The Messiah will return "like a thief in the night" and "nobody, except my Father, knows the hour of my return" (I probably butchered those two quotes). Either way, the Bible is pretty clear (as was Jesus): there will be zero indication the apocalypse is coming. None. It'll just... start.

fluoridation|4 months ago

The book of Revelation also cites various signs that are metaphorical enough to be applied to just about anything.

It's pointless to cite the Bible to defend a theological position, because someone else can cite a different part that can be interpreted to say the exact opposite.

jancsika|4 months ago

One mildly interesting fact MANY programmers get wrong about the is_computer_on function:

It is threadsafe. The documentation is very clear about this.

asdfasvea|4 months ago

The term "religious fact" always puts a smile on my face.

iamthejuan|4 months ago

Signs were given, not dates.

bloppe|4 months ago

The homeless man currently yelling outside my window is an equally authoritative source of information about the apocalypse as the Bible, and he thinks it's coming soon.

CobrastanJorji|4 months ago

I think they've gotta maybe define what counts as an "Apocalypse." The active "Fourth Turning" hypothesis expects a crisis on the scale of the Civil War. That degree of crisis has happened lots of times. Certainly the Civil War itself was accurately predicted for decades leading up to it.

bloppe|4 months ago

Agree. You can always claim prescience by being vague enough. "Something really bad will happen" will eventually come true. I suppose the point of this site is to call out the ones who dare to be more specific.

Yizahi|4 months ago

There are countless civil wars going on nowadays, with variable intensity. That's kinda low bar as far as Apocalypse go.

shoo|4 months ago

For anyone curious about academic studies of historical societal collapses, check out Joseph Tainter [1]

> As described in Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, societies become more complex as they try to solve problems. [...] Such complexity requires a substantial "energy" subsidy (meaning the consumption of resources, or other forms of wealth).

> When a society confronts a "problem," such as a shortage of energy, or difficulty in gaining access to it, it tends to create new layers of bureaucracy, infrastructure, or social class to address the challenge. Tainter, who first identifies seventeen examples of rapid collapse of societies, applies his model to three case studies: The Western Roman Empire, the Maya civilization, and the Chaco culture.

> For example, as Roman agricultural output slowly declined and population increased, per-capita energy availability dropped. The Romans "solved" this problem by conquering their neighbours to appropriate their energy surpluses (as metals, grain, slaves, other materials of value). However, as the Empire grew, the cost of maintaining communications, garrisons, civil government, etc. grew with it. Eventually, this cost grew so great that any new challenges such as invasions and crop failures could not be solved by the acquisition of more territory. [...]

> It is often assumed that the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a catastrophe for everyone involved. Tainter points out that it can be seen as a very rational preference of individuals at the time, many of whom were actually better off. Tainter notes that in the west, local populations in many cases greeted the barbarians as liberators.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter

bironran|4 months ago

It's missing the January 19, 2038, the unix epoch end. Only 12 years and a bit from now. Very much in our time.

layman51|4 months ago

Right, but there's no doomsday prophecies around the Year 2038 problem as far as I can tell. I think it falls in the same kind of category of known problems that are certain to happen at some point. Some other things I was thinking of were the theorized ARkStorm, and also an earthquake that could happen in the Cascadia subduction zone.

undershirt|4 months ago

9/11 happened 1 trillion milliseconds after the unix epoch.

shoo|4 months ago

The Limits to Growth book is an interesting read. To quote Box, "All models are wrong, but some are useful". I wouldn't take the dates-ranges estimated from the modelling that seriously, but the modelling assumptions are worth reading about and reflecting on. The overall modelling and dynamics seem pretty plausible to me.

From memory, the rough argument was that society depends upon input flows of energy, resources (metals etc) and food. Society needs to allocate resources and energy to extract these inputs. Energy sources such as fossil fuel reserves are finite stocks, some are cheap to extract (high energy return on energy invested). Over time we consume and deplete the high EROEI reserves and have to move on to consuming the lower EROEI reserves. This means that the fraction of energy society needs to allocate for energy extraction increases over time, so there's less energy for other uses. Similarly, we deplete the cheap to extract stocks of metal required to build and maintain industry, leaving stocks that require higher inputs of metal and energy to extract. Similarly for agricultural yields, as we mine and deplete accumulated stocks of nutrients out of the soil.

The business as usual scenario leading to "overshoot and collapse" behaviour is that we have increasing population, increasing industrial capital and increasing demands for energy, food and resource inputs, while the fraction of energy and resources that need to be allocated to energy, resource and food production grows over time. The fraction of remaining surplus energy and resources that can be allocated to things like education, healthcare, research, art decreases over time. At some point the growing fraction of energy and resources that needs to be allocated to energy and resource extraction becomes so large vs the existing population and industrial base that there simply isn't enough surplus to maintain healthcare, education, research, etc at the same level.

The "Overshoot and collapse" dynamic describes stocks of population, industry etc growing to peaks well beyond sustainable levels before the above dynamics catch up and cause them to rapidly decline.

The researchers did a bunch of modelling of alternative scenarios, exploring how to avoid these "Overshoot and collapse" dynamics.

M95D|4 months ago

It's interesting that the "Apocalypse Type" is listed as "Civilization collapse", but they take the date of population peak as the criteria for failing the prediction. I personally don't equal "peak" to "collapse".

mcshicks|4 months ago

They seemed to have missed peter turchin

"In 2010, Turchin published research using 40 combined social indicators to predict that there would be worldwide social unrest in the 2020s"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin

paularmstrong|4 months ago

The way Cliodynamics, Turchin’s field, is explained feels like a very early and remedial version of psychohistory from the Foundation universe.

mcmcmc|4 months ago

When is there not social unrest?

bee_rider|4 months ago

Do they specify exactly what qualifies as a successful apocalyptic prediction?

In particular they count a US civil war as an apocalyptic event… lots of countries and societies have been completely wiped out, though, which must(?) be more apocalyptic.

Maybe the point of the site is just that apocalypses tend to happen unexpectedly?

zwnow|4 months ago

Yea im not sure how a civil war in the United States would affect me as an European... It certainly would, but I'd survive. Isn't the whole point of apocalyptic events to not survive them?

LorenPechtel|4 months ago

And what exactly is apocalyptic? Suppose someone finds a dinosaur killer and there is a successful deflection mission. I would have no problem calling that apocalyptic.

alganet|4 months ago

Was the Bronze Age Collapse a doomsday event? Mount Toba eruption? I think they were.

I'm not saying anyone predicted those or something. It's just that the notion of doomsday is quite vague.

I'm trying to broaden some notions here. Prediction might not be exactly absolute prediction, and doomsday might not be exactly absolute doomsday.

Perhaps some great threats were averted precisely because someone predicted them (for example, the great leaded gasoline poisoning).

georgeecollins|4 months ago

People know that they are not living at the start of anything. All through history people imagine they be living near the end of everything.

No one want to live in the middle.

lloeki|4 months ago

Missing from the list:

1999: Spanish designer Paco Rabanne announces that the Mir space station would crash on and destroy Paris in between the 28 July 1999 lunar eclipse and the 11 August 1999 total solar eclipse, the two somehow interacting to create magnetic interference, leading to the station crashing at 11:22 on the 11, as predicted by a 17th century fresco in some abbey that shows an eclipse, a clock at that hour, and a sentence "you will know the hour of your death but not the day"... Also Mir would have hypothetically contained a Russian atomic bomb, which is what would destroy Paris, and possibly leading to some all-out nuclear war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIsjK7gpSoc

baal80spam|4 months ago

Need a scoreboard for bubbles!

dostick|4 months ago

The whole universe may end at any moment without warning. There could be another universe on a collision course and speed so fast you will never know it.

Or we could be living in universe inside like a raindrop of larger universe that may hit the ground and burst any moment.

re5i5tor|4 months ago

Where have I heard that name … oh this little apocalypse https://failure.museum/marchfirst/

fletchowns|4 months ago

First thing I thought of as well! Despite being short lived, MarchFIRST was influential on Apple's branding and comeback.

roadside_picnic|4 months ago

I've been in the "doomer" camp for over a decade and been surprised how many things I thought were far off in the future have come to fruition earlier.

But, the one thing I always find interesting, philosophically, about believing the world-as-we-know-it is coming to an end is that all of the things people are concerned about will happen no matter what.

Being afraid of the end of the world is ultimately being afraid that we will lose the things we have, that our work will be lost to time and history, that ultimately we will return to a void and all of "this" will have been for nothing.

However, all of that is true either way. You will lose everything you've ever loved over time in life, all the work you've done will be lost to time, in the end all of your efforts will be for nothing and even that won't matter.

The "end of the world" scares people because it forces them to discard the normal tools they use combat these many existential anxieties, but the world continuing to go on doesn't actually resolve any of those anxieties.

gchamonlive|4 months ago

For me the problem is managing the transition minimizing unnecessary suffering.

The world is inevitably going to end, our work isn't going to be forever preserved into the future and there will be no "end of history" until there are living humans.

The thing is that the world can end in many ways. My world can end in many ways. I'd rather pass on with a clear consciousness, with my faculties preserved more or less, and with a legacy of having at least tried to make the lives of other that tiny bit better, so I'm aware if I'm not vigilant I can spend my final days suffering from an avoidable disease or accident or regretting I wasted my life chasing a better tomorrow that never came while neglecting what I already have today.

This is virtually the same for all society. It's going to fade into oblivion, but it matters a great deal that the process is as gentle as possible for everyone involved.

shoo|4 months ago

I am reminded of Roy Scranton's essay Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene [1]

> I found my way forward through an 18th-century Samurai manual, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s “Hagakure,” which commanded: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” Instead of fearing my end, I owned it. Every morning, after doing maintenance on my Humvee, I’d imagine getting blown up by an I.E.D., shot by a sniper, burned to death, run over by a tank, torn apart by dogs, captured and beheaded, and succumbing to dysentery. Then, before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive. “If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead,” wrote Tsunetomo, “he gains freedom in the Way.”

[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20...

loandbehold|4 months ago

People like Ray Kurzweil, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Paul Christiano see a pathway out of this inevitability through technological singularity. In their vision humans are a seed to something greater, something noticeable on cosmic scales. In their vision, like early humans who emerged on the other end of genetic bottlenecks, today's humans will have a disproportionate effect on the future. According to the current models of cosmology heat death of universe in still inevitability but that's on a completely different timescale than human life.

mfro|4 months ago

'The world continuing to go on' is the status quo and has been for millenia at this point. Sure, the argument can be made that the world will end eventually, but if we do not have our reference timescale, what do we have? People aren't afraid that the world will eventually end (because 'eventually' should be thousands of years from now), people are afraid the world will end NOW, which does nullify your experience and efforts on the subjective human timescale. Life as we know it continuing to go on without ambiguity on our confidence to prevent world-ending events does resolve those anxieties.

skeaker|4 months ago

If you have ever believed in the butterfly effect and if you believe that the world will keep marching on, then your actions undeniably do leave a permanent change to the world, forever after you are forgotten.

blastro|4 months ago

beautifully stated thank you

iammjm|4 months ago

the two active predictions with the time frames of <5 years by MIT, and How & Strauss still look scary and not impossible

stego-tech|4 months ago

It’s also worth noting that Strauss, Howe, and Turchin all repeatedly stress in their books that firm dates aren’t a guarantee, that sometimes the cycle doesn’t line up correctly (like the Civil War cycle), and that none of their words are meant to be taken as literal predications so much as cautious warnings that history often rhymes.

Having finished both The Fourth Turning and End Times recently, Strauss and Howe’s specific guesses as to what might fuel the next crisis are laughably off track even if their broad strokes still paint a compelling (and at times, frightening) picture, while Turchin feels more prescient in his observations.

Ultimately, though, Turchin has the better message: even when a crisis destroys an empire, the world continues onward. That gave me some bleak hope to hang onto.

HardCodedBias|4 months ago

The Limits to Growth predictions are laughable.

I think that they Simon–Ehrlich wager showed how laughable they were but I guess we have to revisit every couple of decades.

SCUSKU|4 months ago

Yeah I was fully expecting this site to be making fun of all the wacko conspiracies about armageddon, such that it would make me feel better. But instead, the "Limit to Growth" summary seems entirely plausible.

citizenpaul|4 months ago

What qualifies moving from "pending" state to "active". There seem to be many predictions at the bottom that are only a few years out that are not "active" Some are even end of year.

I could see why the ones with several hundred years deadline are "pending"

kej|4 months ago

Pending means we haven't reached the start of the predicted time range for that event yet. If I predict a collapse in November of 2025, it would be pending for the rest of October, then active on November 1st until either the collapse happens and it becomes successful or December 1st arrives and it becomes failed.

xivzgrev|4 months ago

I'm surprised at the number of famous folk who have predictions, like Christopher Columbus. Gives new context to Thiels recent musings on the Antichrist.

Step 1: become accomplished in some field Step 2: ??? Step 3: write about the anti Christ and predict when it will occur

richrichardsson|4 months ago

I think the South Park underpants gnomes meme might be more apt here.

Switch your steps 2 & 3.

Step 4 is profit.

cool_man_bob|4 months ago

You would be surprised how superstitious Americans are in general.

Sweepi|4 months ago

Are the predictions from the 2nd and later IPCC reports in there? Last I checked they were on track.

bloppe|4 months ago

But is that the apocalypse? I hate the fact that we're destabilizing the environment, but humans (and wildlife) are pretty good at adaptation. Our ancestors have obviously survived massive extinction events in the past.

spencerflem|4 months ago

Until we have nuclear disarmament, there’s a sword having over us.

It’s bound to happen eventually

KronisLV|4 months ago

Then we’re back to conventional warfare and the casualties of that. Just look at Russia and Ukraine.

retrocog|4 months ago

Gradually and then suddenly.

Bjorkbat|4 months ago

Reminds me of the old gem of the Web 1.0 internet that was Exit Mundi

altcognito|4 months ago

Survival bias. I get this is a joke but...

There are many societies which have collapsed. We can't know who predicted it because they are dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse

And of course, this list will no longer exist after societal collapse.

hamdingers|4 months ago

Societal collapse does not necessarily mean the loss of all writing or knowledge of that society. The wikipedia article you linked to proves this.

fragmede|4 months ago

Out there, somewhere, is a nerd, laser etching Wikipedia onto metal plates, and burying them to be dug up later, just to be able to say, I knew this would happen!

churchill|4 months ago

Basically, the ultimate, "Nothing ever happens" scoreboard [0].

If any of your acquaintances are ever in doubt of anything ever happening, this will be a handy guide for them to consult.

[0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nothing-ever-happens

acuozzo|4 months ago

Plenty happens, but:

1. Events, including big ones like 9/11, don't unfold like in the movies as even direct consequences are often far removed.

2. Pax Americana + Hypernormalization + Cheap Food + Digital Escapism = a drug which convinces its users of neverending stability and order.

boje|4 months ago

All of these can be summed up as: "Bangs are more interesting than whimpers."

smith-kyle|4 months ago

"Days until next prediction might begin". Cute.

marcyb5st|4 months ago

A bit in the doomer camp, and what worries me the most are the lifestyle changes needed to not fuck up the climate in the next few hundreds years. I believe I heard that we should slash 7/8th of our emissions (as individuals living a modern lifestyle) to keep the wet bulb temperature in check worldwide by the end of the century. This is, in my opinion, a target that we'll surely miss and it won't be nice.

Europe is already struggling with few millions people trying to enter over several years. I can't imagine what happens when large parts of India/Pakistan/Bangladesh become literally deadly during the hot season. That would displace ~1B people basically at once (if you stay and you don't have Air Conditioning you die). The following turmoil will be like nothing we ever saw before as a species (IMHO).

_carbyau_|4 months ago

As a society if we care about our fellow humans - generally seen as a virtue to have - then we need to reduce our emissions etc etc.

As a rat race where the competition is between humans then rich people have a comparative advantage regarding how to survive the ravages.

So the future is less about avoiding climate catastrophe completely - that won't happen when the rich and powerful don't care.

The future is about surviving the issues until enough people die that emissions takes care of itself.

Either a lot of people die thus reducing emissions, or specific groups die thus reducing the capability to generate emissions on behalf of others. Or maybe enough tragedies happen that moral conscience does hold sway. Likely a combination of the above.

For supporting the continuation of my genes, maybe I should invest in property in Siberia/Alaska/Canada/Greenland/etc etc.

ipaddr|4 months ago

Serbia is a nice place.

languagehacker|4 months ago

Very disingenuous to put second-coming style prognostications from religious nutsos in the same list as people trying to use science, pattern analysis, or surveys of scholarly literature to identify when society will gradually break down from writing too many checks the environment or the economy can't cash.

I gotta say I didn't know about this Johnny Silverhand post, but I hope that if these things don't come to fruition he still finds time to stick it to the corpos in the most rockerboy way possible.

AstroBen|4 months ago

One of the currently active events is predicting something on the scale of the Great Depression

I mean that's bad but it's much better than what I picture in my head as an apocalypse

wartywhoa23|4 months ago

It can show 0 successful predictions all it wants, but we'd been through global lockdowns and forced vaccination, there's an ongoing war in Europe with casualties in hundreds of thousands on both sides, Gaza is being demolished by Israel, Internet as we knew it is about to turn into whitelisted fiberoptic/5G TV, surveillance is rampant, and the rise of the global technofascist police state as the public is being entertained by the clown shitshow of top level politicians is not obvious only to those who've been trying to save their sanity by remaining in denial.

jungturk|4 months ago

Don't disagree with any of that, and I don't want to minimize the seriousness of the issues you've cited, but that kind of reinforces the implication of the scorecard?

People are persistently presented with perils (plagues, parasites, pollution, power-hungry politicians, propaganda, plutonium-powered projectiles, etc...) and humanity keeps finding a way through (though certainly at great personal and population-wide cost sometimes).

Some pretty serious chokepoints in the full history (including research suggesting that something reduced our ancestors numbers by ~99% a little under a million years ago) and yet this particular strain remains.

catigula|4 months ago

Doesn't make much sense given that we wouldn't exist to observe a timeline/reality where doomsday has been realized/effectuated.

amock|4 months ago

The prediction aren't for total extinction events or even events where the internet wouldn't be around. Also, it' just a silly site provided for our entertainment.

acuozzo|4 months ago

"The end of the world as we know it" != "Eradication of humanity"