The Next Major Catastrophe. Taking Bets!

What do you think the next major Catastrophe will be?

By "Catastrophe" I mean something that is capable of killing off 10's to 100's of millions of people within a relatively short time frame. For example; Wars, Diseases/Virus', Natural disasters.

My personal guesses would be between:

~ World War Three
~ Nuclear Radiation (such as Fukushima)
~ Super Volcano Eruption




Here's a list of possibilities I can think of otherwise:

~ Disease
~ Virus
~ Famine caused by a loss of a particular, or many particular species
~ World War
~ Asteroid Impact
~ Nuclear Radiation
~ Super Volcanic Eruption
~ Sarah Palin Becomes President

reply to post by Ghost147


You forgot "Alien Invasion"

reply to post by FraternitasSaturni


Lol, ah yes of course!

reply to post by Ghost147




Predictions are pointless and have no bearing on anything. There are any number of things that people can spend there time on that are actually productive.

Which begs the question of why I am wasting my time with this post. The world may never know.

watchitburn
reply to post by Ghost147

 

Predictions are pointless and have no bearing on anything. There are any number of things that people can spend there time on that are actually productive.

Which begs the question of why I am wasting my time with this post. The world may never know.

Lots of things are pointless and have no bearing on anything. I've seen that argument made for recycling, condoms, bird watching and a host of other things. While I don't feel that predictions are in anyway credible (that includes weather forecasts), they can- like other forms of speculation- be fun.

reply to post by Ghost147


You forgot a Government planned U.S. Terrorist Attack/Shooting. The government is keen on disarming the people right now, so plan for more of those.

Earthquake hitting DC is my guess, they just finished repairing the tower there, the masons need more work.

reply to post by Ghost147

~ Sarah Palin Becomes President

What gives me nightmares is that Hillary Clinton might.The epitaph for that epoch would be, "She came, She saw, and everyone died, Muaw ha ha!"

My feeling is the next, most likely major catastrophic event would be disease-based. Frankly, with modern travel, not only internationally but also within countries, the scene is already set for a major pandemic of a flu virus. It doesn't even need to be one that humans have made and "accidentally" released as in The Stand and similar stories. Major pandemics of varying severity occur on average every few decades, but we haven't had a bad one since around the late 1960s, if I recall correctly. (The 2009 pandemic was not very severe.)

This means we have some billions of younger people who have perhaps never been exposed to one of the more lethal flu strains.

The 1918 Spanish flu (H1N1) pandemic probably claimed more lives than WWI. Estimates vary, but about one third of the world's population was infected and of them, somewhere around 10 to 20% died. Even allowing for better medical technology these days, our health systems probably could not cope with even ten percent of the population falling seriously ill at one time, let alone more than a quarter.

With the world's population now around 7 billion, and with such rapid international transport available, such a virus could be spread from its initial source to most countries within a couple of days. Once in other regions it would also spread more rapidly through local populations because so many people (especially in bigger cities) use mass transport systems.

Sooner or later, another very high-lethality pandemic will happen. The only question is how bad it will be and what demographics will be affected most. And as for vaccinating against it, that would help some (perhaps) but there would still be many hundreds of millions who would be left vulnerable.

The next major catastrophe will be the internet being shut down, or,
more seriously, a weather phenomenom. im guessing Ireland and britain will have an extremely severe winter, with blizzards of snow and temperatures well in the minus.
We're overdue a white winter. My Russian girlfriend would love it!
One of the few things she misses about Russia is snow, or as she calls it, "proper snow".
Not the couple of inches we get here in Ireland once a year.

firby's. have you ever seen a firby?
they are scary and theyre potenial to unleash massive destruction is vastly underated.

reply to post by Ghost147


Hey this is great, seriously, could you author a thread like this every time? When I was getting stressed out this year after Snowden, I decided that I would throw a party for myself every time there was another end-of-the-world scenario instead of stressing over it - so when tensions were rising over Syria, I cracked a beer, watched Anderson Cooper, then went on a road trip - hopefully with a B.A.C. level of under .08 but who's counting I'm kidding.

What counts as a major catastrophe? Here are some I think count from the past 10 years:

*9/11
*The Patriot Act
*Iraq War
*Challenger Explosion
*Hurricane Katrina
*Indonesian Tsunami
*Haiti Earthquake
*Bath Salt Zombie Outbreak

This year:
*Fukashima (ongoing)
*Snowden N.S.A. Leaks
*Syrian conflict, close to war, the John Kerry solution
*The government shutdown

-----

Okay so I may have missed some but is that about the size of what we are looking for?

-----

Okay - I am going to say one of the following - Obama Assassination or "tactical" meteor strike. My reasoning is that there are a lot of prophecies that have been around for hundreds of years that basically point to Obama being assassinated while comet ISON is in the sky. I am not promoting his assassination at ALL, to be clear, but we are entering an unusually calm period of a month or so (does this ever happen anymore?) where there isn't any obvious next thing coming.

About the tactical meteor strike, I believe that was originally part of the NeoCon agenda regarding uniting people through common enemies. There was something prior to terrorists, but after terrorists I think it was going to go asteroids and then possibly aliens.

Rikku
firby's. have you ever seen a firby?
they are scary and theyre potenial to unleash massive destruction is vastly underated.

Did you mention firby's in another thread regarding that being the only thing of interest happening between 1995 and today? Because if it was someone else, then I'm going to change my answer to some kind of A.I. takeover

SecretKnowledge
The next major catastrophe will be the internet being shut down, or,
more seriously, a weather phenomenom. im guessing Ireland and britain will have an extremely severe winter, with blizzards of snow and temperatures well in the minus.
We're overdue a white winter. My Russian girlfriend would love it!
One of the few things she misses about Russia is snow, or as she calls it, "proper snow".
Not the couple of inches we get here in Ireland once a year.

Worse yet...ATS getting shut down and we would be forced to Facebook.

reply to post by rickymouse


Wow... wow... that internet shutdown or A.T.S. shutdown would be bad... let's see. About the A.I. threat, I'm going to go with a meteor strike hitting the N.S.A. data center, making the A.I. go crazy, and a bunch of drones go AWOL and Obama bites it.

Also, demons. Whoa... wait a minute... I just made a big connection. If aliens are extra-dimensional, that means that is actually related to the demon possession threat.

Now I'm getting somewhere... so the N.S.A. switches to quantum computing which they don't realize allows demons to possess their computer system, and then the demons take over the drones and start hacking away at our infrastructure because they would then have access.

Wow. That is possible. Skunk work thread time.

My guess would be a super blizzard .Something that would last for a couple of weeks with crazy cold and power outages .

edit to add that I see super knowledge beet me to the cold weather thing ..

the2ofusr1
My guess would be a super blizzard .Something that would last for a couple of weeks with crazy cold and power outages .

edit to add that I see super knowledge beet me to the cold weather thing ..

edit on 17-11-2013 by the2ofusr1 because: (no reason given)

Well our temperatures in central Alberta, Canada can reach -56C in winter, and -25 to -30 for a few months. So it's not all that bad if it's a few weeks. Hell, I'd rather have a longer summer anyway

reply to post by Ghost147


That's a tough one to decide with all of the possible Doom Porn scenarios. I think the next major catastrophe will either be a weather or viral event. Also a possible war over Rare Earths. Last I heard, China bought up the remaining mines in the US for Rare Earths and closed them.

We shall see what happens....

lostbook
reply to post by Ghost147

 

That's a tough one to decide with all of the possible Doom Porn scenarios. I think the next major catastrophe will either be a weather or viral event. Also a possible war over Rare Earths. Last I heard, China bought up the remaining mines in the US for Rare Earths and closed them.

We shall see what happens....

Thats interesting about China...
They tried to buy up all of our forests here in Ireland this year. There was a public outcry because our life-sucking government was actually going to do it! After a few demonstrations they relented. Can you imagine? China would have owned about 5% of Ireland! Ridiculous to even consider it, but thats our government for you. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr........

reply to post by Ghost147


I reckon it will be from a virus

not that is any reason to insert a smiley face but I was feeling happy when I wrote the above sentence.