Dark Forest hypothesis the Dark Forest hypothesis says that we haven't been in contact with other alien species because they've been hiding from each other remaining silent to survive if aliens are intelligent enough to have the technology to contact us they likely also have the technology to destroy us be it through genetically engineered viruses or through star laser weapons even if these alien species are benevolent they could look at us just like we look at ants and try to harvest every resource from Earth without caring or they could look at us as a future Potential Threat
preferring to destroy us before we become a problem technological singularity if AI reaches a point where it can self-reproduce and create smarter versions of itself at an uncontrollable and unpredictable rate its growth cannot be reversed creating a rapid increase or explosion of intelligence that far surpasses the human one rendering humans Obsolete and showing us what natural selection can do it could lead to a battle for resources with the machines wanting them for reproducing themselves and the humans wanting them for surviving creating a war that has an obvious outcome even if the AI doesn't mean to
harm us its actions could still be dangerous for example if it's trying to solve a problem it might change the environment in ways that make it hard for humans to survive as they mathematically deem that solution to be worth more than our survival genetic engineering genetic engineering is a double-edged sword enabling incredible medical progress but also giving humans who are not known for always having the best intentions the knowledge to hack organisms it's only a matter of time before the tools and knowledge to create an undetectable incredibly contagious and deadly virus are accessible to everyone
even if not on purpose errors could be made either in the genetic modification of an animal or in its containment making it possible for an animal with no natural predators and a fast reproduction rate to exist causing irreversible damage to the ecosystem this is arguably one of the most probable causes of Extinction in my opinion strangelets strangelets are a type of particle that is very different from the ones that make up everything we know like atoms and are created in the super dense core of a neutron star it's hypothesized that when these strange particles touch
normal matter they could start a chain reaction turning everything they touch into more strangelets the problem is that neutron stars could potentially spew out these strangelets after a collision making it possible for them to casually reach Earth even though it's highly unlikely gamma ray burst gamma ray bursts are extremely powerful and bright flashes of very high energy light being the second most energetic event in the universe after the big bang they can be caused by things like exploding stars or merging neutron stars and if one of these hits Earth the ozone layer would be destroyed
leaving us vulnerable to UV rays and ending life on Earth it's pretty unlikely though as one of the focused beams has to be pointed towards us and the gamma ray burst should happen within our galaxy technological stagnation if Humanity hits a point where the exponential technological progression we've had until now hits a roadblock either caused by a lack of resources needed for Advanced Technologies or a physical impossibility to go further we can be stopped from colonizing other galaxies making our Extinction caused by any other reason much more likely not only that but we can have
future problems with resources as without improvements in agriculture and Water Management we might not be able to feed everyone leading to starvation and conflicts over resources without new medical technology a new disease could spread uncontrollably and kill a large portion of the human population and without new anti-climate change Technologies the world could become inhabitable vacuum Decay it's the hypothesis that the Universe we live in might not be perfectly stable imagine that our universe is like a ball resting in a small dent on a hill everything is fine as long as the ball stays in the
dent but if it somehow gets pushed out of the dent it could roll down the hill into a deeper more stable Dent if that happens a bubble of true vacuum which is much more stable than ours gets created and starts expanding at the speed of light changing the rules of physics as it goes anything inside the bubble would be destroyed because the particles that make up matter and energy would no longer behave the same way and the scary thing is that such a bubble could already be expanding and we wouldn't no since the bubble travels
at the speed of light and we can't see it coming gray goo if a future engineer is able to create Nanobots so small that you can't see them without a microscope but designed to build more of themselves using every material around them because of exponential growth we would be swarmed by them even if one of them got out and we wouldn't notice until it's too late they would pretty much be impossible to stop using every material the Earth has to reproduce creating a gray goo super volcanoes super volcano eruptions although pretty rare could happen within
the next few centuries luckily we can predict them in time since scientists can detect the pressure building up when one erupts not only will the local area be damaged by the massive explosions lava flows that obliterate anything in their path and an ash fall that can collapse buildings suffocate living creatures and contaminate Water Supplies but there will also be Global damages mainly caused by the ash cloud that would block out the sun causing a big drop in temperatures called volcanic winter cosmic strings cosmic strings are strange super thin and Incredibly long objects that scientists think
might exist in the universe they are like cracks in space left over from when the universe was very young if a cosmic string pass through our solar system it could cut through space Like a Knife because of its incredible energy and it would create strong gravitational forces which could disrupt the orbits of planets and moons so we either get sliced in two or we get sent to the void antibiotic crisis right now antibiotics make it easy to get rid of infections and do routine medical procedures But as time passes bacteria are getting more and more
resist istant to all of them if we use more antibiotics bacteria have a higher chance of becoming stronger against them which is one of the reasons why it's advised to not use antibiotics without being checked by a doctor another reason that this happens is because the agriculture industry heavily uses them to grow food some projections say that if we don't discover new treatments we could see common infections become once again life-threatening with around 10 million deaths annually the bad news is that research is not incentivized because it's expensive and not that profitable as new antibiotics
are usually used useful against a small number of bacteria lowering sales numbers and one-time treatments like vaccines need to be taken only once also causing low sales numbers nuclear war there are currently around 13,000 nuclear warheads and if every single one of them exploded a percentage between 50 and 80% of the human population would either die immediately or in the long term the surviving ones would find themselves in a very hostile environment with the nuclear winter caused by a lowering of temperatures due to smoke being sent into the atmosphere and block out sunlight this would
cause catastrophic damage to Agriculture and create food shortages they'd also have to fight radiation that would cause severe health problems including cancer and genetic mutations the radiation could contaminate food and water supplies further reducing the population over time climate change Earth could become inhabitable if we hit certain tipping points we are currently at 1.1 de C of global warming but if we hit 1.5 the Greenland ice sheet would start melting which could raise sea levels by up to 7 m over centuries and the newly revealed ocean would start absorbing energy from the Sun further warming
the region also the ground without the reflective ice and water around it would heat up faster speeding up the melt by around 60% at that same temperature the permafrost would start a Snowball Effect causing organic matter once trapped in ice to be free and start decomposing releasing CO2 and methane which is much more dangerous than CO2 by the way heating it up even more releasing more organic matter and so on permafrost melting can also cause ancient viruses and bacteria that human hum have never encountered before to be released potentially leading to new diseases between 1.1
and 2° C we can experience the Atlantic meridianal overturning circulation weakening which would cause a giant flow of water that acts as a pathway for heat to travel from the southern hemisphere to the northern one all the way to Greenland a partial collapse would cause Europe to enter a mini ice age between 2 and 3° C we have the disruption of monsoon systems which can impact the lives of around 1 billion people and complicate Global Food flies at the same temperature we can see the Amazon forest dieback which is the point where the forest dries
out loses its ability to recover and become Savannah which would cause the release of large amounts of CO2 further accelerating global warming and reduced rainfall in the region causing problems in agriculture with potential food shortages massive asteroid to cause human extinction an asteroid would need to be around 10 km in diameter like the one that caused the extinction of dinosaurs it's pretty difficult for this to happen since scientists are monitoring every big asteroid in our vicinity and thanks to experiments like the dart Mission designed to test and demonstrate a method of asteroid deflection by intentionally
crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid at high speed we can hypothesize that we might be able to avoid a complete catastrophe transhumanism in modern times biological evolution for humans has slowed down because we've created ways to adapt to our environment using technology rather than relying on natural changes in our bodies technological advancement however continues at a rapid Pace matter of fact at a much f faster Pace than biological evolution this has led to the concept of transhumanism where technology is used to enhance human abilities Beyond natural limits we could edit our genes to adapt ourselves
to other planets thus making different human subspecies one of the most extreme ideas in transhumanism is digital Consciousness which involves uploading human Minds into computers or creating a hive mind where many people's thoughts and experiences are interconnected functioning as a super intelligent single entity at this point we'd need incredibly different organisms to roam around the world and gather resources putting Humanity as we Define it to an end but keeping humans alive in another new form heat death the universe might be heading towards heat death in trillions of years from now which is a theoretical future
where the universe has expanded so much that it becomes very cold and empty eventually there will be no more energy differences meaning no heat light or activity anywhere everything will be spread out evenly at a very low temperature leading to a dark lifeless Universe where nothing new can happen so even if we survive all of the other threats we will still die at the end even though there's speculation that a new Big Bang might happen in the future creating Another Universe if you want to discuss this video or suggest an idea for the next one
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