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Doomsday scoreboard

doomsday.march1studios.com

21–30 of 167 posts

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#21
post #19

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?

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?

Without US involvement in your Eastern flank, it might get tougher.

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#22
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"

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#23
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.

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#26
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.

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#27

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

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

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#28

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 ente…

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.

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#29

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.

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!

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#30
post #12
post #9

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

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

The world as we know it dies every second creating the new new one. What's the cutoff?
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