Time between those big disasters is measured in millions of years. If I were a betting man, I’d bet on a 75% chance of destruction over a 0.5% chance of somewhat worse destruction, any day.

So ah, probably less vanity than practicality.

First off all, the theory was first predicted in the 1950s, and back then it was “right around the corner!”. And then it’s cropped up as a fashionable prediction every decade or so, always “right around the corner”. Some people say it’s happened already, other ones say it’ll happen in 2030. Who the fuck knows? The predictions tend to be as accurate as those people that predict Malthusian catastrophes.

Second, the whole point about Peak Oil is that it’s a fucking bell-curve! The supply of oil wont suddenly disappear into thin air and no one will be able to drive their cars. The production is going to start slowing down slowly, decreasing outputs over a long period of time. This will make oil prices go up, and we will have plenty of time and market pressure to develop alternate technologies. No biggie, in other words.

Seriously, can people lay off the whole Peak Oil thing? Lets just face it, the slow decline of oil production isn’t going to end the world. We’ve lived through far worse.

Global warming is a much more serious concern, although I really doubt any single thing is going to bring down America– when that happens, it’ll probably be a highly ambiguous confluence of disasters and slow decline.

for those of you interested.

@19: I agree that “technology will save us” is blatant hubris. In fact I think that it could be right up there at the “Jesus will come back and save us from global warming” level of hubris.

As a population we are not placing enough of an emphasis on education and hard work. Technological breakthroughs do not happen in short order. It takes many great minds many great years to create a few great technologies. Sadly, many minds don’t get to become great through lack of access to education or to the money to pay for it. Even if they’re lucky enough to get the education, there’s precious few opportunities to get paid real money to do research and development (i.e. creating new technologies) to pay back the money after they’ve gotten the education. Until such time as this changes, we may be headed to a future more in line with “Idiocracy” than anything else.

Failing that, I’d prefer extermination by intelligent supercomputers.

That’s Apophis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99942_Apophis) not Pop Tarts.

Although the current financial meltdown might be attributable to pure greed, I think an underlying motif was that there was not a general understanding of what all these complex securities would do to the economy under certain scenarios.

Apply a similar scenario to technologies such as self-replicating nanomachines or perhaps something in the genetic engineering domain and we could be talking about a whole range of bizarre possibilities, “gray goo” being just the most extreme.

“Loose Nukes” was the top pick, with 10.5 readers choosing it.

“10.5 Readers?” Did somebody get nuked halfway through voting?

That’s not The End, that’s sanity. So many things were *so easy* with oil and plentiful resources. We didn’t have to plan, think, innovate to accomplish a lot … just guzzle.

We Americans bamboozled ourselves about how easy it all is. We … got fat. When we burned up all our easy oil, we started buying other people’s easy oil. So now that’s biting our ass. To get all movie-blurbish: Stopping it isn’t The End — it’s The End of The Beginning.

My money’s still on a supervolcano, with a big honkin’ space rock we never saw a close second. Now THERE’S some grade A fuck-you-up stuff straight from ma nature’s nightmares closet.

My personal view is that unfair trade between the West and the rest of the world has become so extreme that poverty will force great changes in our world – either riot or migration. We already see these changes happening today, but wherever land is not being farmed sensitively this will cause problems – especially in sub-Saharan Africa.