There are endless predictions of doom of humanity in popular media. Many people are concerned about a environmental collapse. Most dire predictions tend to focus on a single threat, I think. Stephen Petranek (former editor of Discover) compiles in his talk at the TED forum several threats to humanity, together with some recipes for avoiding impending catastrophe.
Take it serious or not, looking into the threats is worth some few minutes. If nothing else they might be good for some chuckles. Here comes Petranek's list as he ordered the items by urgency (together with some references to wikipedia articles):
1. Meteoroid hits the earth.
2. Rogue black hole.
3. Global epidemic.
4. Giant solar flares.
5. Reversal of the earth's magnetic field
6. Biotech Disaster. He mentions gene-manipulation of food.
7. Particle Accelerator Mishap.
8. The Ecosystem Collapses.
9. Aliens invade earth.
10. We loose the will to survive.
The last point was popularized in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Decline of the West, and Planet of the Apes.
Is this the end of humanity?
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hello,
I have a question,
I want use the commands unix in matlab so i used unix('command')
but when i define a variable with this fuction like
unix('I=`awk ''{print $1}'' file1`')
after i can't use $I, it does'nt understand the value of this variable. what i must do?
thanks,
your blog help me so much
Zahra
Hi Raha,
just found your comment. Thanks a lot, especially for your positive remark that my blog is helping you. BTW, it's the first comment on my blog, so it's an event for me.
you do everything in bash and then read out the final result as I write in 2.
2. You read out the results after each command and then feed them back. The template would be like this:
filename='*.eps';
[a,b]=unix(['ls ' filename]);
Then you work with b. And feed b or some post-processed form back to unix.
I am writing you this very short as the actual implementation depends on what you want to achieve precisely.
bye,
Benjamin.
I been hearing a lot of different things about this,but you got to go back to when Nostradamus and his made his End of the World Predictions to fully understand this.
Then basically move forward with updated Predictions
Nice share regarding end of the world predictions
Whether they are accurate or not, I think the best way to face doomsday is by doing much kindness and always appreciate each other hence our life becomes so meaningful and colorful :)
When I was really young, I used to be very scared of any Doomsday predictions. Eventually I learned that there is not much we can do if such a thing is going to happen. We ought to be more concerned about our own mortality, which is more real. Just be nice to people we care about, and take each day as a blessing.
@Cinnamon: I used to be also very afraid of these predictions when I was small. I used to be afraid until not too long ago of environmental breakdown. After reading "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (see my short review) I am mostly cured from that. I am not sure if there's a real threat there's nothing you can do about it. You can build a bunker, say, against a meteoroid threat, and grow vegetables down there. However, most of these threats are very unlikely to happen, so it makes sense to just go on with your own life without the bunker.
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