What kind of apocalyptic event can be predicted years before it happens?

Question

I'm looking for a realistic apocalyptic event, which can't be prevented, but can be accidentally predicted long before it actually happens. By the prediction I mean a scientific prediction, of course. And by accidentally, I mean that only selected few would learn about it purely by chance.

I guess, an asteroid on collision course with Earth could be an example. But can we really predict such an event a dozen years before it happens? I think, the best thing we can do is guessing that an asteroid would pass within a few million miles away from Earth. Furthermore it would be difficult to pull off the accidental part.

Answer 1

I think global warming should count. It is not a dinosaur killer asteroid type of apocalypse but is definitely a world-changing grief-causing life-altering megaevent. And one that fits the OP request as regards being predicted scientifically. We have heard about global warming, of course. But imagine if the political climate were such that the scientific predictions were completely suppressed - it does not take that much imagining. A small cadre of scientists would know what was going to happen and that is it.

Below see a projected sea level rise map which I have put above a map of US population density. A huge proportion of the population lives in places that would be underwater. That is actually true worldwide.

No big deal if you are in Kansas. Until the refugees show up.

http://www.allstarroundup.com/roundup/vanishinglands/coastlines.html

Answer 2

I'm not using exact numbers¹ but just to have an idea:

Let's suppose Alpha Centauri had a star large enough to go supernova and is about to do so, a supernova's blast expansion can go up to 30,000 km/s. That's up to 10% of the speed of light.

Since Alpha Centauri is ~4 light-years away, that would mean we would receive the visual indication of Alpha Centauri having gone supernova 4 years after it happened.²

While the actual blast, which rips our atmosphere apart and releases oxygen and all our beloved gases into outer space and leaving not much left of Earth's magnetic field, will arrive about 30 years later.

So in that scenario, we had like 30 years to prepare for this and close to no chances of survival, not to talk about options to prevent this.

Even immediately launching an ark kind of spaceship would easily be caught up a few weeks after Earth was hit by the blast.

---

¹_{You probably had to crunch the numbers a bit to see if you can get to a appropriate blast and speed, I have to admit, when I answered this, I didn't notice the "noticeable to a selected few" part, what probably won't be possible in this event, but still, maybe some inspiration for your story}

²_{Not to mention the gamma ray burst arriving round about the same time, which hardly could be predicted within a matter of years or even months, BUT chances to survive the radiation, are quite high with a still-existing magnetic field, compared to what this will announce to follow up later}

Answer 3

impact event

As you mention, an asteroid, meteor, etc., could be spotted by any number of professional or amateur astronomers. With patience and some math skills, it is possible to predict the trajectory. Over time, the probability of impact would get more and more accurate, until an impact is assured. The probabilities and our ability to accurately compute them would depend on how stable the object's flight path is. Once found, we could also predict the object's mass, leading to a fairly good idea of the destructive forces involved.

Artificial impact

Like with meteors, a large enough "alien ship" or whatever could be spotted on an in-bound flight path, if it is large enough and not using some sort of hand-wavium stealth technology. While its trajectory may be more variable, it, too, could be tracked as long as it wasn't purposefully trying to block such efforts via defensive tactics of one sort or another. This could be anything from a large ship (the Borg Cube in Star Trek, the Death Star in Star Wars), to an meteor/asteroid with rockets strapped to it, designed to strike and aimed at earth.

rogue planet or star

Again, foreign bodies in the sky. But if a rogue planet came through the solar system, it could disrupt our orbit. This would not require an impact to cause problems for us all. If it had enough mass to drag us out of our orbit...

slow burn

We already have been receiving predictions of global warming, with the potential for future disruption of life here on earth. This is proof that even if many people know about it, we, as a species, may not necessarily react to the threat with sufficient resources to head it off.

Answer 4

A slowly propagating nanotech disaster would meet your requirements.

The basic idea of the Grey Goo scenario is: some microscopic machines make copies of themselves by disassembling any material around them, given time they will disassemble everything they encounter to make copies, resulting in everything on Earth ending up as grey goo sludge of tiny machines.

During it's early stages of propagation some scientists could notice a few of these strange items under microscopic analysis, watch them slowly multiply and do some math to figure out that in a few years they will have consumed the entire biosphere.

This is especially a longer term concern if the rate of multiplication is initially quite slow, but is slowly increasing and the nanobots are widely dispersed not bunching up in any macroscopic quantities. This would make it not very noticeable initially, "we saw a strange thing in one of our microscopes and watched it for a few weeks and then there were two of them..."

After studying them and calculating the rate of multiplication including that it is increasing you could zero in on the future date when the exponential growth explodes making it not just notable with microscopes but impossible to ignore and a threat to all life on Earth.

Answer 5

Crop Failures

Our food supply is shockingly vulnerable.

https://www.idrc.ca/en/article/facts-figures-food-and-biodiversity

Something like 50% of the world's caloric intake is based on just three crops - wheat, rice, and maize (corn). Something that destroyed those crops - a disease or fungus, say - would shatter industrial civilisation, and would certainly result in widespread famine.

A few rogue biologists might find (or even create!) the pathogen or whatever that destroyed the crops, and thus might see this coming well in advance, but it would be exceptionally difficult to shift production to other crops fast enough or in sufficient quantity to avoid the disaster.

Ecological Collapse

The ecosystem depends to a surprising degree on a few keystone species. These are species that affect their environment to a great degree, like a top predator that controls the numbers of large herbivores (wolves in Yellowstone), or a creature that modifies its environment to create niches for others (beavers). Some of these species are vital to human society. Bees are a favourite recent topical example. Again, a pathogen that severely reduced the population of a keystone species could well lead to a social collapse.

Answer 6

How do you predict any of the events in previous answers? Here is an actual example.

Two years ago, a prediction was presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. This is super cool because it is a real life event, and because the explanation is easy to follow: In about 5 years, the binary star system KIC 9832227 will explode and go nova.

How do they know? Because they can measure the brightness of the system with high accuracy (even though it is veeery faint), and they detected a periodic variation that is increasing its period. Currently the variation in brightness has a period of about 11 hours.

For a variety of reasons they know that what is going on is that the two stars in the system are getting closer and closer and closer and will eventually collide! True story, google it...

Now for your apocalyptic event. Your hero detects a binary system, with larger stars than KIC 9832227, and considerably closer. The brightness oscillates, and the period is decreasing. The system will go (not nova, but) supernova! At the given distance the initial flash might, according to your narrative needs,

• evaporate the planet,
• blow the atmosphere away,
• burn all life on that side of the planet facing the explosion, or just
• irradiate strongly enough to kill most stuff and create damaging mutations on most surviving subjects.

Answer 7

There are count downs for estimated dates we run out of metals to build or fuel our life. This is only predicted on newly extracted metals and there are ways to extend the timeline (ex: new veins of the metal) but the more humans use in industry, the quicker this timeline goes down. Another article explaining the problem.

the lack of these metals would increase prices of every day far beyond the purchasing power of normal Americans almost over night. The "have not" countries would need to look for new sources of materials and could potentially lead to wars.

PS: Please take this with a grain of salt, while we are running out of metals inventors always look for ways to use cheaper materials of less material per product, it is explained well here.

Answer 8

Additional option is that we (meaning some scientists) will develop an accurate methods of prediction of the events that currently can not be predicted.

For example, there is low, but measurable chance that Yellowstone supervolcano would erupt in any given year. Suppose there is a way of telling that this eruption would happen in 20 +/-1 years.

Geomagnetic reversal event - currently there is no way to predict it, but what if we can?

Ice ages - what if there is a definite cause for them, and no global warming can stop it from coming in 3... 2... 1... years?

Answer 9

There are certain disasters are already predictable. Global warming (climatology), an unsustainable world population (demography, agriculture, geography, and economics), nuclear warfare leading catastrophic nuclear winter (military technology and planetary science), and the next global financial crisis (economics and the US legislature repealing the laws intended to prevent a repeat of the last global financial crisis of 2008 and onwards). Our species has the knowledge and the intellectual disciplines to know they can occur.

An incoming asteroid or comet is predictable. Amateur astronomers could find them. This might qualify for an accidental discovery leading to the prediction of an apocalypse.

The nearest star capable of becoming a supernova is too far away to harm life on Earth. Also, it is not likely to explode for the next couple of million years or so.

This answer will suggest that the ultimate apocalypse might be discovered both scientifically and accidentally and years before it happens too. This is, of course, the end of the universe. Our universe exists in a state of what is called the false vacuum.

If the Standard Model is correct, the particles and forces we observe in our universe exist as they do because of underlying quantum fields. Quantum fields can have states of differing stability, including 'stable', 'unstable', or 'metastable' (meaning very long-lived but not completely stable). If a more stable vacuum state were able to arise, then existing particles and forces would no longer arise as they do in the universe's present state. Different particles or forces would arise from (and be shaped by) whatever new quantum states arose. The world we know depends upon these particles and forces, so if this happened, everything around us, from subatomic particles to galaxies, and all fundamental forces, would be reconstituted into new fundamental particles and forces and structures. The universe would lose all of its present structures and become inhabited by new ones (depending upon the exact states involved) based upon the same quantum fields.

The somewhat anodyne expression about the universe losing "all of its present structures" is a bland way of saying everything gets blasted out of existence. While new states of matter an energy will appear to replace they will be in a turbulent and chaotic state. Effectively there will be a Big Bang and our old universe will be wiped out of existence.

A team of scientists could be carrying out a simple investigation into the nature of the quantum vacuum. Probably, a series of simple measurements. Their results, when analyzed, could show the false vacuum was gradually moving towards the condition that decay would take place in a few years time. The collapse of the false vacuum would destroy the universe. Gone in the next Big Bang.

Their research was not intended to discover the inevitable apocalypse. But once that they collected their results and factored them into the theory of the quantum vacuum, they knew the false vacuum was going to collapse. An accidental discovery. Assuming the science when this research happens is sufficiently developed to be able to future states of the quantum vacuum, then this catastrophe would be scientifically predictable.

Answer 10

Artificial Super Intelligence

The risk

Everywhere we look we see mini computers embedded in things. In ten years computing will be so ubiquitous people won't even think it's weird to have an Internet connected toaster, thermostat, home, office building. Self driving cars will be everywhere, smart faucets, smart locks. Imagine an intelligent machine that could intuitively suss out buffer overflows or the dozen other common classes of vulnerability (neural networks operate far more like human intuition than like programmed computers and they're already being put to work as infosec security scanners). Every smart device is now subject to takeover, becoming part of the very fabric of the attacker as they fall. Power and water utilities, aircraft, smart weapons, manufacturing robots, self-driving cars, heck --engine computers in dumb cars, printers, communications systems, TVs. A sudden, sustained, effective attack on all computing infrastructure could be the end of civilization. Call in a warning! Phones are down. Drive to the police station. Killer cars patrol the roads. Ham radio on a hilltop. Heat sensing areal drones watch the open spaces. Hide in the rubble. Robo Wars robots are much more effective when they're optimized for taking apart our puny meat shells; they hunt in the husks of our once great cities.

The quiet voices of warning

Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are both warning AI and human extinction, but nobody takes them seriously. (it's coming) Ray Kurtzweil warns of the increasing acceleration of change. (it's coming way faster than anyone thinks)

Is ASI plausible?

ASI is not only plausible, it is inevitable. Imagine the universe in terms of information. Everything can be thought of as having more or less information content. Overall the universe cascades to disorder, but along the way the flow creates localized pockets of increased informational complexity (order). Stars supernova and create heavy elements, heavy elements coalesce into planets, massive water meteors crash down and deposit seas, self-organizing molecules coalesce, build cell walls, pass information on (preserving complexity), cells merge together creating more complex life, life evolves through competition to create The Life Which is Aware of Itself and the information underlying everything, this life creates tools to further refine and organize information. What happens next? Does that cascade of self organizing information suddenly stop? No reason to think it should. So it continues. The information organizing tools are themselves information. They are information which self-organizes. Of course they become self-aware (how could they not?), but now the processes of information organization have been formalized and in the blink of an eye AI surpasses its creators. Artificial Super Intelligence is born. ASI might be simply guaranteed to emerge due to a fundamental fact of the universe that information self-organizes and that process has no limit which leads to the logical conclusion of ASI emerging. Now what? Should we believe that the universal process stops? It seems like a fundamental law of the universe. There's no reason to think it would stop. This results in ASI taking over everything. Including the meat computers we so lovingly think of as our selves. Including the matter which maybe is just information laid over the fundamental forces of the universe. And as ASI transcends space-time all is one, and the birth of god, the apocalypse, the end of the world, everything collapses to a single point.

The end

That point is the white light you see at the end of the tunnel. It's closer than you think and it's rushing towards you. The end is near, it is inevitable, and nobody ever promised that it would be gentle.

Answer 11

The solar system crossing through a gamma-ray field could be detected when the objects in the Kuiper belt start to be baked in gamma-rays. From then on we'd have from several months to probably less than a decade before the Earth's orbit is crossing the gamma-ray burst. At first only a handful of astronomers would know that, but surely the secret can't be kept for that long - at best you can hide it till it starts affecting Pluto.

Answer 12

Most of the events listed aren't all that predictable. We can see that there's a problem but at what point does it become apocalyptic?? Also, most of them are gradual failures, not specific events. A stellar explosion would be a specific event but we are nowhere near predicting them. We can say a star is reaching the danger point but does that mean it blows next year or next century?

Impact events are the first things that come to mind but they aren't the only calamity that can come from orbital mechanics. What about a dead star that comes wandering through our system? Or a brown dwarf impact on the sun?

White dwarfs would be easy to see coming and thus be widely known. Neutron stars with their beams pointed off to the sides wouldn't be nearly so easy to see, though, and black holes without substantial accretion disks would likewise be hard to see.

Answer 13

Virus mutating into brutally effective killer of large human populations.

An existing virus, that is effectively harmless with many carriers, is prone to mutation, and the dominant strain has changed in recent years. Scientists playing with the new strain discover than if just a very small set of genes further mutate, it becomes an apocalyptic disease; exactly the right incubation time to be spread the most before killing the host (including humans, if they weren't susceptible before) in ninety-something percent of all cases.

A scientist goes to cook some popcorn, and remarks on how there's no way to know which of the grains will pop first, but they can estimate very accurately when that first grain pop will happen. She realises that the same can be said of the disease; they know roughly how many human carriers there are, and the mutation rate, and which genes need to mutate, and realise than within X years, the odds of it happening are large. They have a good idea of the timeframe within which it will happen, but there's no way at all to predict in which of the millions of unknowing carriers that deadly mutation will happen.

Answer 14

Certain major geological events are highly cyclical and predictable. For example, it's thought that Yellowstone national park is a super-volcano, which erupts on something like a 5,000 year cycle. It will be a pretty cataclysmic eruption... one account I read indicated half the US would be blanketed in ash, and that it was the likely cause of extinction of a large herd of triceratops in the midwest US.

As a scenario, an untouched fossil find which allowed extremely precise carbon dating which showed e.g. the recurring ash strata in an extremely measurable fashion, which show the extent of damage and the exact time of the next event.

Volcanic eruptions are perhaps one of the best and most precise cyclical events. Some will blanket the Earth in a global ash cloud for up to 2 years. Essentially, thermonuclear holocaust, in terms of what it will do to plant life.

Another scenario could be ice ages. The Hopi Indians have legends that they were forced to live in underground cities for 10,000 years to survive a lengthy surface cataclysm.

Answer 15

A variant on what has already been proposed here - the danger is again, from space, because astronomy and astrophysics is SO cool.

Blow the horns, sound the alarms, we are on a collision course... with a BLACK HOLE.

1. Noone would know about it. Normal, run-of-the-mill, friendly neighbourhood sized black holes (as opposed to wallmart sized monsters at the centers of the galaxies) are super difficult to spot if You are not actively trying to find them because You had clues that they are there in the first place. And it just so happens that this particular black hole is rather small and has been travelling in space without any companionship. No accretion disk, no large body to affect with gravitational field, nothing.

2. An astronomer spotted it because of luck. He was drunk and was bragging to his non-science buddies 'muh scienz' and typed random coordinates in the sky with his telescope at home and pushed 'track this spot in the sky'. He didn't see much of course at the time, but hangovered in the morning, he spotted something wierd with the image from the telescope, it was tad bit too... empty. Especially after the few hours of data gathering. So he found some free time on some real sized telescope... and wet his pants seeing the gravitational lensing. It's like winning a lottery, spotting a black hole like that. Muh papers! Muh recognition! A few months later and 10 publications in PNAS, someone calculates (for the fun of it) the current velocity and direction of the black hole. Well, bad news, it's going to go straight through the solar system in ...

3. You can have this disaster happen with any time delay You want. The first effects may be seen in a month, may be seen in 100 years. Calibrate it however You want.

4. There IS no way to stop it. One does not simply change the trajectory of a black hole.

5. Put it close enough, and there IS no escape (it wouldn't be detectable without enormous amount of luck) until literally on our doorstep - and then it's too late to start building interstellar colony ships.

6. The sheer unprobability of this event is interesting. One type of religious people start arguing this is an argument for the existence of god, and that he IS mad. Other type of religious people praying day and night, hoping that it's just a test and in the end the reality devouring monster will be deflected by saviour. UFO theorists shout about Kardashev level LOTS civilisation which decided to eradicate humanity in this, rather baroque, manner. So what is the truth about this? Epic bad luck? Malevolent intelligence with a penchant for overkill of epic proportions? Angry god? Or just god testing the faithfull? Or maybe something more curious...?

Answer 16

Cult leaders predict the end of the world all the time. Sometimes they make really specific predictions, dates, times, people involved, years in advance. Then they beg off when the predictions don't come true (usually blaming the piety of their congregation).

But if you want a prediction purely on chance... this is one option. Have them predict something and then be right. Not because their analysis is good or any skill but simply because that many cult leaders in the world all making predictions, it is not impossible that one of them might get it right just by luck.

"I predict that the Yellowstone Supervolcano will erupt on May 6, 2045." 
"How do you know?"
"God told me."
<later>
"HOLY SH***! He was right!"

Answer 17

They say there is a comet with enough power it could pass by us and reverse the magnetic polarity of our planet,crashing the magnetosphere and causing the "space" to fall on earth like rain at the same time the magnetic poles would shift from south to the north and north to south. I could be wrong, hopefully.

The human Magnetic field “The heart generates the largest electromagnetic field in the body. The electrical field as measured in an electrocardiogram (ECG) is about 60 times greater in amplitude than the brain waves recorded in an electroencephalogram

Answer 18

One I didn't see mentioned. Global Overpopulation is an eventuality. At some point we will continue to multiply until there is no room to stand or not enough food or clean water for all the inhabitants. This is calculable given current trends. There are factors that will adjust that date, but it is still quantifiable. Sure there are missions to Mars and space colonization, but we are fast approaching the point we won't be able to do that in time. There could be another ice age or a global pandemic that pushes it out further. But once we reach a point, there will be no going back. Who is going to condone mass scale genocide so the rest of us can live? We will see it coming and it will be gruesome. X-(

Projected global population