Strap in, this one's a novel. Hope you brought a snack.
They're all 20-40 minutes long, so it may be too long and boring for your taste, but if you're just sitting in the trailer on a rainy day doing nothing, the hours will fly by watching this stuff. I'll summarize the best one: How hard it is to cause the end of the world. He goes through every scenario that common sense and movies and books use as a cause of the apocalypse, and how in reality it's way more unlikely, really almost impossible.
Nuclear War: I've mansplained to Karen before that nuclear war wouldn't be the end of the world. Consider how every nuclear bomb that's been detonated was habitable not even ten years later (Hiroshima, Bikini Atoll, Las Vegas). Now consider how uninhabitable Chernobyl is. Even if every single nuclear bomb was detonated with an even distribution across the globe, it wouldn't be enough to irradiate the whole world or cause a nuclear winter. In order to do that, you would need Chernobyl at a catastrophically larger scale. It's possible, but once a civilization figures out how dangerous nuclear reactors can be, they pass reform laws that prevent it from happening again. Same with the Cold War, once you make it to the end of the first Cold War and Mutually Assured Destruction, the next step is dismantling all of the nukes over the next few centuries. It's assumed intelligent alien civilizations would do the same.
Bioterrorism: This one is where the Chinese make a super virus that gets out of the lab and kills everyone. The reason it wouldn't be the end of the world is simple statistics - it would need to literally kill everyone in the world. Viruses don't work like that; even if 1 in a million people is immune through genetics (which is extremely conservative for more viruses), there would still be thousands of people left over. Assuming they could travel and communicate, that's more than enough to restart society through breeding and reverse engineering previous technology. It may take a few hundred or thousand years to get back to where we were, but that is nothing compared to the relative billions of years that our sun will be around.
Post-Apocalyptic Attrition:
Cyclical Apocalypse: In this scenario, the end of the world caused by the same thing (let's use nuclear war for this example) happens over and over again with technology returning to Cold War levels, only to destroy itself when nukes are rediscovered. This one's not likely due to the curiosity of man and archeology. Imagine if at the turn of the century, just when industry and interest in archeology was taking off and all those museums were founded, that we discovered a layer of radioactive dust from 3,000 years ago in the ice cores, and started finding buried gadgets with heavy metals in them. Then imagine there was another radioactive layer at 6,000 years, and 9,000 years. It would be the most documented and studied piece of our history. It would be like the Egyptian Pyramids - nobody will have not heard about it. As long as the future society is aware that civilization is cyclical, the cycle would be broken.
Climate Change: The political one. The thought that climate change will end mankind is preposterous. Climate change is an actor to slow technological process, not halt it. This is also unlikely to affect alien civilizations as our greenhouse conundrum is very specific to Earth: we have massive oil reserves due to dead algae and seaweed at a specific layer of the crust, with little tectonic movement to disrupt it. Also an alien civilization is just as likely to make their planet more habitable through climate change as uninhabitable.
Artificial Intelligence or Alien Invasion: This one is rooted in the fact that if it happens, it would be over before you knew it had begun and there would be no way of resisting it. If an alien civilization wanted to erase us, they'd only have to be slightly more technological than us to be able to just sling a comet into the Earth and that would be that. You just don't beat a smarter, bigger, and more technologically advanced group in a one-on-one fight, unless their goal isn't to kill you in the first place. For AI, it's unlikely to be animatronic metal things attacking us with gatling guns. If AI is truly intelligent, they would be smart enough to realize how threatened we would be if it appeared at all violent. It would instead appear as the perfect companion right up until the bitter end. It would probably start by advocating to be treated as a person by gaining traction in the courts, and then running for elected office.
Grey Goo: This is the Michael Crighton one where we make nanobots that end up going rogue and consuming all matter on Earth as it makes more and more chemically identical nanobots, until the whole planet is consumed. This one wouldn't work because an EMP would render the nanobots useless. Even if it got out of hand we could just nuke them, as we currently have this technology. There might be some property damage though.
Lone Wolf: (Now we're starting to get into the ones that are unlikely, but possible. I think this one's the most interesting). This one is the observation that as technological progress increases, the ability for one person to cause damage increases exponentially. With the invention of nukes, the ability for one person to cause damage increases to one nuclear explosion. With the ability to 3D print a nuke, the ability to build a nuke decreases to one person. When we discover how to create and store antimatter for rocket thrusters, the ability to cause damage becomes extremely significant. We currently have fairly advanced technology with a medium-sized population, and we have no shortage of lunatics wanting to burn it all down. This principle becomes one of the few solutions to the Fermi Paradox that are actually rooted in science: civilizations might not be able to sustain interstellar travel infrastructure because the technology and population support individual sabotage becomes too great. This goes without saying, however, it is extremely unlikely that a lone actor could cause the end of progress and civilization as we know it.
Suicide Pact Technology: This is any technology that guarantees the destruction of civilization once it's created and used. It's kind of a cop-out for the Fermi Paradox and Apocalypse because by definition it's something no one has considered yet. Activists like to say nuclear warheads or antibiotics or the internal combustion engine are examples of Suicide Pact Technology, but they aren't. The term is really just used to categorize all the stuff we aren't yet developed enough to consider. Because of that it's also a legitimate solution to the paradox.
So there you have it. Humans aren't going anywhere, at least according to science philosophers. If you're bored enough to watch or listen, the one on the alien linguistics is really good. He basically dispels the notion that A) aliens will have any communication that resembles human language and B) due to this alien language will be indecipherable. He lists off the ways to crack it and points out that dead ancient languages have been cracked with far fewer resources than the alien language response team would have (see: Rosetta Stone). I've linked both videos.
Alien Cryptography: https://www.
Apocalyspe How: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
~Decker
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