Perhaps a nuke war with an REM song playing in the background.

Most likely, when the sun runs out of its fuel in about 15 billion years from now and swells up into a red giant and engulfs the earth.

Or perhaps an asteroid strike, but despite occasional setbacks (as we’re currently facing) I think we’re on our way to developing the space technology to defend the earth from such a threat.

Doesn’t really matter; we’ll all be dead. Maybe a random meteor, maybe nukes. I don’t know.

@HungryGuy Actually, I think that is scheduled for about 5 billion years from now.

Are you talking “world” or “civilization”? The world will end as @HungryGuy said, but I think our civilization will end much sooner than that. I don’t think it will happen overnight in a conflict situation (although it could). I think it will just keep changing until we would hardly recognize it anymore.

Our ‘civilisation’ survives on a drip feed of oil. Once that runs out they will wheel us out on a trolley.

Civilization will end as we know it because of ecological disaster and over population.

GQ and scary to think about. Scary for our children and grandchildren, who will be around long after we are.

How do you think the world, as we know it, will come to an end?

What does “end” mean?
What is “the world, as we know it”? Everything is constantly changing. “The world, as we know it” has changed in the past one second. At what point do we transition from not “the end” to “the end”?

@zensky That would be a horrific way to end the world. I guess the nuclear war part would be pretty bad as well…

Humans are likely the creators of their own doom but it could be something else.
My money is that we don’t last another 250 years.

@Skaggfacemutt I meant civilisation, the life we know and live everyday… if that were to end, how would it come about?
@Charles “the end” I mean, is the end of not the world, but of how we usually live our lives, the stuff we’re used to. Like supermarkets and cars and TV and college etc.
Something really bad happening, that is enough to change the lives of millions of people.

@HungryGuy Nope, that collision is 3 BILLION years away.

I’m not sure the meaning of the “end of civilization means, exactly. The Roman Empire et al were conquered by other “civilizations”. I’m not sure there’s a real scale of absolute civilizedness. European historians have long held that Roman language empires were more civilized than African, Asian, or Middle Eastern conquerers, but that’s not objective.

So I’m guessing the end of civilization will be the iPhone.

@6rant6 – That’s what I said: 3 billion!!!

Oh crap! I meant to say billion. It’s Fluther’s error for not giving me enough time to to edit my answer.

@PhiNotPi – Yeah. You’re correct. Still, an even sooner looming threat is the imminent collision (about 3 billion years from now) between the Milky Way and Andromeda. While the odds of actual collisions between stars are negligible, the galaxies passing through each other will almost certainly perturb planetary orbits, sending planets into new orbits (at best) and falling into their suns (at worst).

We will probably suck the earth dry of all its oil, and continue messing with our planet and mother nature until the weather and the natural cycles are so fucked up that we are just getting pulverized and flooded and yada yada and struck by lightning and we will have created a hell on earth pretty much. Something like that.

“the end” I mean, is the end of not the world, but of how we usually live our lives, the stuff we’re used to. Like supermarkets and cars and TV and college etc. Something really bad happening, that is enough to change the lives of millions of people.

Still too vague. By those definitions, we are at “the end” compared to 80 years ago as not too many people had cars or supermarkets, TV, etc. Life is constantly changing. Look how much our lives have changed in the past 15 years simply due to the internet. Prior to that, the transistor. Prior to that, TV and jet travel and radio and vaccines and radar.

BTW – I asked that my answer with the typo be removed. It wasn’t censorship. Thanks mods :-)

Since I dreamed this all up, probably when I wake up.

@HungryGuy The Wikipedia article I cited previously refers to a paper that says that event is only 50/50 and then it’s unlikely to affect the earth. And it may be 5 billion years, not 3.

They do point out that the earth’s surface will be boiling (absent mitigation) in less than two billion years due to increasing luminance of the sun.

@6rant6 – Ah, we’re now down to 2 billion years.

Anyone for 1 billion?

Going once… Going twice…

I think that over population is a bigger threat to modern civilization that of the oil burning internal combustion engine or even wars. Just about 40 years ago there were 3.5 billion people on the planet. Now there are 7 billion. In less than another 40 years the human population will likely double yet again to 14 billion. I don’t know how many people our modern civilization can permanently maintain but when we reach critical mass (and then some) then the end our world as we know it will happen. Civilization will likely totally collapse and only very tough survivors will make it. They will have to carry on the best that they can. Hopefully I’ll be long gone by then.

So where do we mark the end of the Roman Empire?

I think we are experiencing the end of life as we know it right now. When I was a child we had a bright shining future of trips to the moon, travel to colonize outer-space, shiny new technological toys every year. Where is all that today? The shiny new tech toys are now a threat to our basic freedoms, moon trips are only going to be open to 1% of the population and colonization of outer-space has been characterized as a last ditch effort to rid the world of unwanted people, but only if they choose slavery over death.

@DaphneT On the other hand, mobile phones have opened up the world to knowledge and communication. More books (via eformat) are available to more people than ever before by an order of magnitude. Democracy, tolerance, and environmental responsibility are on the rise.

The dreams children grow up with are different than the ones their parents did, as always. Today’s child wants to star in her own video, and chances are she will! We absolutely will cure cancer in the next few decades. We’re making great progress in mental health, chronic inflammatory diseases, and heart disease. Eventually the oil will be gone, of course, but there are other sources of energy available. More to the point, before the mid nineteenth century, oil did not contribute to any civilization.

We will colonize the planets, probably before the end of the century.

There is the computer singularity looming. I suppose that will put an end to life as we know it. Though, it’s entirely possible that civilization may benefit from it.

Perhaps when America’s reign as a superpower of the free world comes to an end would we see a drastic change in various societies throughout the world, and how those people will live.

Hmmmm…. Here’s an amusing fantasy:

Nihilistic cult/terrorists decide to screw the world over by secretly digging towards the magma plume under Yellowstone. They set up a big bomb and hit detonate. The ensuing explosion destabilizes the area and results in swiftening Yellowstone’s eruption. Toodles modern world!

We are a very technologically advanced civilization (at least the industrialized countries are) & anything that interferes with this technology will bring us to a screeching halt. It could be sun spots/pulses, it could be a large meteor hitting the Earth, it could be increasing volcanic activity, it could also be a nuclear war. The only people who might survive something as catastrophic as any of these, would be the parts of the world that are still close to nature & farming (who are not dependent on food being brought in on trucks from all over the world), people who are practiced at survival under harsh conditions. Very few in the industrialized countries meet this criteria, so they would die very quickly. Then human-kind would start its long, slow climb back up the ladder. Of course, if the sun goes nova, everyone is done for, because we do not have the technology to get off of planet Earth.

It’s either
overpopulation causes increased competition for resources… water, food, shelter and comforts, war/famine ensues killing billions (or)
melting glaciers raise the oceans by several feet, engulfing 70% of Earth’s major population centers (or)
drug-resistant tuberculosis or other communicable diseases cause the next plague

When governments finally realise the world is made up of finite resources, whilst our population growth is seemingly infinite. How bad will our living conditions get before society says enough is enough? It has to come one day, unless there is some sort of one child policy for the entire world.

@6rant6, what is the computer singularity you reference?

@DaphneT Currently technology is improving at an exponential rate, thus it’s predicted that at around 2045–2050 the technological singularity event will occur, in other words we make machines/computer that are… AI of an equal to or greater than human intellect. A intelligence explosion if you will. What happens after this is hard to say, do we merge with this intelligence? Coexist? Or are we setting up the stage for our own extinction? Anyway, with this super intelligence predicted to be around the bend, we really have no clue where we’ll be technologically post 2050. Interestingly enough, 2030–2050 is also the time that we predict that human “ascend” in biologically immortal beings.

@King Pariah, does the prediction include any ideas on how this ascension can be accomplished?

@DaphneT HeLa: cancer cells from a woman named Henrietta Lacks (deceased) which are biologically immortal now used in research just about everywhere and can be considered as the #1 reason as to why biological immortality is within grasp.

@DaphneT ,although @King_Pariah describes it pretty well, it’s easier to look at the singularity this way: our lives are changed as we invent better computers to do things for us.Over time, we build computers that are more facile in doing specific tasks than we are.

One of the things we currently do is design computers. At some point, the logic goes, we will build a computer which is better at designing computers than we are. Then the computers will get better very quickly until what we are able to do will be trivial compared to what they can do.

At that point, are we freed to self-actualize, or do we just become a footnote on the history of computers?