New answers tagged apocalypse
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Defensive Dyson sphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that completely
encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power
output. The concept is a thought experiment that attempts to explain
how a spacefaring civilization would meet its energy requirements once
those ...
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The technology is known as "star lifting", and works through the "simple" expedient of removing enough mass from the star to slow down the rate of fusion reactions. If the people who do this are clever enough, they can store the excess hydrogen from their star lifting operations in artificial gas giant planets (probably the size of Uranus) and feed the ...
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Volcanic ash can do this naturally. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter
So you aren't decreasing the luminosity of the sun but you would decrease the light penetrating the atmosphere.
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Major Pyramids and Ziggurats
Not just the Giza Pyramids, mentioned by Patricia Shanahan, but also the biggest of the Mesoamerican pyramids, like the Great Pyramid of Cholula, the biggest known pyramid in the world, The La Danta end El Tigre pyramids in El Mirador, and the Pyramid of the Sun in Tetihuacan, all of which are already around 2,000 years old. ...
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The Hoover Dam would remain mostly intact, though it'll only be running for a year or two after maintenance stops and zebra mussles clog the coolant intakes
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I nominate the Giza Pyramids. They have already survived about 4,500 years without maintenance, and indeed with human destruction in the form of removing outer casing stones.
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The average life expectancy of someone with HIV today is about 70 years. This is only slightly less than normal and still much longer than "healthy" people throughout most of human history. This is to say that civilization would be fine in the greater scheme of things.
If this is a true capitalist society, then economy of scale will kick in fairly quickly....
answered Jan 30 at 18:42
Nosajimiki - Reinstate Monica
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If there are a thousand krakens in Europe and they managed to kill 99% of the population (742 million) in a week then each kraken was killing 1.2 people per second (plus any cows they may have eaten along the way). That seems unlikely given the distances involved alone. They would each have a very large territory so it doesn't seem reasonable that even a ...
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Guns are the worst Zombie weapon anyway
First, guns are noisy which attracts more of the shambling dead to you location. Second, guns require specialized ammunition that needs gunpowder and machined (or molded) metal (I guess you could fill a shot-shell with random gunk). Lastly, guns have a bunch of moving parts that you will need to maintain to ensure it'...
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Assuming it is smarter than humans, it will have no trouble making billions on the stock and futures markets, and eventually taking them over.
It can then use its money to fund extremist politicians of every stripe, extreme terror groups, extreme religious groups and everyone else calculated to bring more love and harmony to the world.
If it feels creative ...
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There are endless options in 2020. Many systems have been hooked up to the internet with poor security, and many more that weren't understood to be hooked up to the internet now are connected. For instance, anything that was purely some bizarre RF protocol is now accessible via the many thousands of software-defined radios that are plugged into internet ...
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Hack nuclear power plants
As several others have noted, hacking weapons of mass destruction isn't possible because they are controlled by analog systems impervious to malware. That doesn't mean your AI can't start a nuclear disaster - but it will have to come from a power plant, not a warhead.
Power plant hacking is becoming increasingly common, and the ...
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Make people paranoid, they will start killing each other.
A extremely smart AI can take advantage of human conflicts and craft a war, using fake news, messages, creating false alerts in military bases, and so on. It only needs a few real attacks to keep the war ball rolling. False polls, and opinions of phony (or crafted) so-called-professionals can justify ...
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I'm assuming with this question that nothing else is different about our civilization or technology, and the Evil AI has just popped into existence with an internet connection, because if we made an AI deliberately and it turned "evil", it may have connection to a lot more than the internet from the start.
Although the internet connects machines all over ...
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I will invoke one of WB's gods, Randall Munroe on this one. Here is what he has to say about a robotic apocalypse:
What people don't appreciate, when they picture Terminator-style automatons striding triumphantly across a mountain of human skulls, is how hard it is to keep your footing on something as unstable as a mountain of human skulls. Most humans ...
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So hacking into our WMD's and using them is an obvious one. Or since those are probably not on the internet hacking into the info of the people controlling them and finding a way of convincing/forcing/blackmailing them into using the WMDs.
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