#end of humanity

[inc-immigrationnewscanada]

Doomsday Clock Ticks Closer to Global Catastrophe: 89 Seconds Until Midnight

In a chilling announcement that sends shockwaves through the global community, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its symbolic ‘Doomsday Clock’ closer than ever before to midnight – now standing at a mere 89 seconds away. This annual assessment signals an unprecedented level of danger to human civilization from a mix of existential threats including climate change, nuclear warfare,…

[drdamiang]

[awesomecooperlove]

🤖👿🤖

[la7ma-mafrooma]

Keep talking about Palestine!

[tomi4i]

[no-passaran]

Genocide experts warn that India is about to genocide the Shompen people

Who are the Shompen?

The Shompen are an indigenous culture that lives in the Great Nicobar Island, which is nowadays owned by India. The Shompen and their ancestors are believed to have been living in this island for around 10,000 years. Like other tribes in the nearby islands, the Shompen are isolated from the rest of the world, as they chose to be left alone, with the exception of a few members who occasionally take part in exchanges with foreigners and go on quarantine before returning to their tribe. There are between 100 and 400 Shompen people, who are hunter-gatherers and nomadic agricultors and rely on their island's rainforest for survival.

Why is there risk of genocide?

India has announced a huge construction mega-project that will completely change the Great Nicobar Island to turn it into "the Hong Kong of India".

Nowadays, the island has 8,500 inhabitants, and over 95% of its surface is made up of national parks, protected forests and tribal reserve areas. Much of the island is covered by the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve, described by UNESCO as covering “unique and threatened tropical evergreen forest ecosystems. It is home to very rich ecosystems, including 650 species of angiosperms, ferns, gymnosperms, and bryophytes, among others. In terms of fauna, there are over 1800 species, some of which are endemic to this area. It has one of the best-preserved tropical rain forests in the world.”

The Indian project aims to destroy this natural environment to create an international shipping terminal with the capacity to handle 14.2 million TEUs (unit of cargo capacity), an international airport that will handle a peak hour traffic of 4,000 passengers and that will be used as a joint civilian-military airport under the control of the Indian Navy, a gas and solar power plant, a military base, an industrial park, and townships aimed at bringing in tourism, including commercial, industrial and residential zones as well as other tourism-related activities.

This project means the destruction of the island's pristine rainforests, as it involves cutting down over 852,000 trees and endangers the local fauna such as leatherback turtles, saltwater crocodiles, Nicobar crab-eating macaque and migratory birds. The erosion resulting from deforestation will be huge in this highly-seismic area. Experts also warn about the effects that this project will have on local flora and fauna as a result of pollution from the terminal project, coastal surface runoff, ballasts from ships, physical collisions with ships, coastal construction, oil spills, etc.

The indigenous people are not only affected because their environment and food source will be destroyed. On top of this, the demographic change will be a catastrophe for them. After the creation of this project, the Great Nicobar Island -which now has 8,500 inhabitants- will receive a population of 650,000 settlers. Remember that the Shompen and Nicobarese people who live on this island are isolated, which means they do not have an immune system that can resist outsider illnesses. Academics believe they could die of disease if they come in contact with outsiders (think of the arrival of Europeans to the Americas after Christopher Columbus and the way that common European illnesses were lethal for indigenous Americans with no immunization against them).

And on top of all of this, the project might destroy the environment and the indigenous people just to turn out to be useless and sooner or later be abandoned. The naturalist Uday Mondal explains that “after all the destruction, the financial viability of the project remains questionable as all the construction material will have to be shipped to this remote island and it will have to compete with already well-established ports.” However, this project is important to India because they want to use the island as a military and commercial post to stop China's expansion in the region, since the Nicobar islands are located on one of the world's busiest sea routes.

Last year, 70 former government officials and ambassadors wrote to the Indian president saying the project would “virtually destroy the unique ecology of this island and the habitat of vulnerable tribal groups��. India's response has been to say that the indigenous tribes will be relocated "if needed", but that doesn't solve the problem. As a spokesperson for human rights group Survival International said: “The Shompen are nomadic and have clearly defined territories. Four of their semi-permanent settlements are set to be directly devastated by the project, along with their southern hunting and foraging territories. The Shompen will undoubtedly try to move away from the area destroyed, but there will be little space for them to go. To avoid a genocide, this deadly mega-project must be scrapped.”

On 7 February 2024, 39 scholars from 13 countries published an open letter to the Indian president warning that “If the project goes ahead, even in a limited form, we believe it will be a death sentence for the Shompen, tantamount to the international crime of genocide.”

How to help

The NGO Survival International has launched this campaign:

From this site, you just need to add your name and email and you will send an email to India's Tribal Affairs Minister and to the companies currently vying to build the first stage of the project.

Share it with your friends and acquittances and on social media.

Sources:

India’s plan for untouched Nicobar isles will be ‘death sentence’ for isolated tribe, 7 Feb 2024. The Guardian.

‘It will destroy them’: Indian mega-development could cause ‘genocide’ and ‘ecocide’, says charity, 8 Feb 2024. Geographical.

Genocide experts call on India's government to scrap the Great Nicobar mega-project, Feb 2024. Survival International.

The container terminal that could sink the Great Nicobar Island, 20 July 2022. Mongabay.

[Maps] Environmental path cleared for Great Nicobar mega project, 10 Oct 2022. Mongabay.

[sylvidoptera]

Flickering here and there, you could sometimes see them on the security monitors. Obscured by the fog pouring in from the coast where the slowly-freezing ocean met the boiling water flushed from our reactor's cooling system, the figures seemed hardly more than a glitch in the screen.

Officially, they didn't exist. The people in power were too busy in their brightly lit, warmed, and tech-filled houses in the dome to believe anything that bothered the last of the people doing all the work to keep them there. And a job at the reactor was the best you could get in these days, so we kept our mouths shut.

We called them Wraiths, for the nebulous shapes they made unless they were concentrating; however, the ones of us who had to tend to the outer parts of the heavily-shielded facility keeping the last of humanity alive knew all too well they were anything but ghosts.

"Let me in. Please let me in? It's so cold…" "If only I can feed, I can break free of this dying realm. I promise to take you with me." "Surely just a small mass is able to be spared. I can give you anything you want!"

You couldn't let them touch you. Not because they could kill you, which they could if they made contact for long enough. All energy was food for them. No, the true danger was the visions.

Locked in a Wraith's embrace, every survivor had reported gorgeous, mind-wrenching, unobtainable hallucinations that were more like memories long forgotten. Sights of stars, galaxies, and nebulae all swirling in their cosmic dance. The sounds of minuscule pieces of matter coming together in new and more wondrous forms. Sensations of riding the waves of gravity, light, and radiation from place to place. Tastes and smells of unknown materials that would likely kill a human's frail form, but which had nourished unknowable creatures since the creation of the universe.

All of the survivors that had been rescued, treated, and released from care had immediately gone back out to throw themselves into the embrace of the Wraiths once more. No one and nothing could convince them to keep living. Every single person insisted that it was better to use their energies to try to let the Wraiths go back to being gods than it was to stay here and wait until both sides were dead from the heat death of our star.

I looked again at the monitor and saw a particularly large disturbance in the fog. Not my first Wraith, but definitely the biggest one I had seen before. Frowning, I leaned forward and looked closer. Yes, it was definitely coming straight for the camera and not the door. When it came close enough, I could see the fog being molded by invisible energy into a face peering intently, as if it knew it was being watched.

The instant the face finished assembling itself, I recoiled instinctively. My dead wife was looking at me in monochrome colors, except for a few sparks of color in her eyes as the Wraith put more energy into its seeming.

"Open the door, Malcolm. Please? I know you miss me. Miss us."

Gritting my teeth, I dug my nails into my palms and couldn't seem to decide if I wanted to look away or stare at that beloved visage as long as I could. It had been nearly a year that Shala had been gone. She, and the baby she hadn't known she'd been carrying when the Wraith had caught her out on her shift.

Tensing myself against any other words that could come, I remembered how we'd found out she was pregnant in the hospital after she was attacked. I'd hoped against hope that the life inside of her would keep her from following the other survivors. That the idea of our child, and what it would do to me to lose them both, would keep her in this world.

Hope failed me.

"There is hope, Malcolm. But it's slowly fading. The reactor can't go on forever. You know that." There was no coaxing tone, no promises of gifts or escape; the slightly blurred voice of his wife was matter-of-fact. "Eventually there will only be resources for the rich, and then there will be nothing and even they will die. Right now, the only thing you're prolonging is their pleasure; fueled by dying isotopes and the sweat of their workers."

I knew it. I'd known it for several years now. Shala and I had talked about it, and had decided not to have a child since it would be cruel to doom them to a short life of labor. No matter how much we had wanted to be parents, we loved the idea of our child too much to make them physical.

Again, her voice - stronger now. "There IS hope, Malcolm. The baby and I are here. Everyone who has gone before is here. But unless these creatures can break free and get back into the stars, what's left of our essence will die with them." I could swear I heard actual sadness, love, and urgency in the voice I was having a hard time not thinking of as my wife's true self.

I turned back to the monitors and saw an entire body in the fog, my wife's hands cradled protectively over the baby in the still-flat belly she'd had when she'd escaped the hospital to find the Wraiths. The colors of her eyes had brightened to living tones. My voice was a mixture of so many emotions that it came out nearly incomprehensible to my own ears. "So what are you proposing? That I just let you walk right in and basically eat the last hope of humanity? How do you expect me to doom everyone here to a slow death when I have no idea what will happen?"

The Shala creature continued to look at the camera directly, not even glancing at the door next to it, and gave a small, melancholy smile. "Before they had been so reduced, these beings wouldn't have understood the suffering of such small things. Now, after enough of us were absorbed and studied, they are loathe to bring more pain upon us." There was a pause, then a sigh. "But neither do they want to die. If they feed on the radiation, they can absorb our energies as they are released and take them far from here. No slow, back-breaking, meaningless lives and deaths until there are no more lives. Just a brief, all-encompassing blast of heat and then never having to serve others to survive again."

"You're still talking about the last of humanity being wiped from the universe. Shala would have been completely against that." My palms were bleeding, but I didn't feel the blood seeping from around my nails because I was too busy trying to ignore the tears running down my cheeks. It was getting harder and harder not to just do what she… it… wanted. I'd been trying to find a reason to stay alive after I'd lost her and the baby. So far only duty had kept me going; right now duty was starting to look like insanity.

"Do you remember those nights we would talk about what it meant to be human? So much discussion about what actually makes us human. Bodies can change and the mind remains - sometimes even clinging to lost limbs long after they're gone. We knew there had to be something beyond just the physical." Her voice - he could no longer think of the apparition as it - was tinged with amusement. "You told me one time you'd love me if I were just a brain in a jar, because everything that made you love me was inside. We just didn't know if what was inside could exist without the outside." There was a brief pause and he felt their eyes lock through the camera's lens. "Now we know that it does. Wouldn't you rather free everyone here, in a moment of pain too quick to be felt before the flesh dissolves? To let them be reborn as something happy and hopeful, and preserve humanity in another form? Or do you want to work yourself to death, alone, knowing that everything you've worked for is going to die simply because you couldn't imagine being yourself any other way?"

…

My next to last physical thought was that the alarms were very extremely loud. I figured that was supposed to happen, though, when you deliberately shut down all the safeties on a very large reactor, send it into meltdown, then proceed to open all the doors to the outside to watch a wall of fog flood through them.

The final thought that went through my physical body was "Huh… warm. That's nice."

…

"You're even more beautiful without your body than you were with it," was the best first thought to have in a new form, at least in my opinion, as I melded with the mental presence of my wife and daughter and watched the living stars getting closer.

Text: As security for the nuclear energy plant, I mostly turn away dying gods. Desperate for one more taste of such power, they will say and do anything to get me to let them in.

[historyandmemes]

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — More than half a million people in Gaza — a quarter of the population — are starving, according to a report Thursday by the U.N. and other agencies that highlights the humanitarian crisis caused by Israel’s bombardment and siege on the territory in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. The extent of the population’s hunger eclipsed even the near-famines in Afghanistan and Yemen of recent years, according to figures in the report. The report warned that the risk of famine is “increasing each day,” blaming the hunger on insufficient aid entering Gaza. “It doesn’t get any worse,’’ said Arif Husain, chief economist for the U.N.’s World Food Program. “I have never seen something at the scale that is happening in Gaza. And at this speed.” ... At the start of the war, Israel stopped all deliveries of food, water, medicine and fuel into the territory. After U.S. pressure, it allowed a trickle of aid in through Egypt. But U.N. agencies say only 10% of Gaza’s food needs has been entering for weeks. (Dec. 21, 2023 | Source)

DON'T LOOK AWAY.

[drdamiang]

TARGET

you talk the stealth

of first strike

they won't

know we

are coming

and so we both fire

though no one is coming

this beautiful

death technology

such a

shame,

if put to waste

what use being born

with a price

on my head

target on

my back

and Einstein'equation

demanding final vindication

[awesomecooperlove]

🤖🧠🤖

[leftoblique]

I realize that all of these are just book/movie/game plots and most of them are complete nonsense, but the actual ways the world might end are equally fascinating.

Presented by severity, then in rough descending order of likelihood; items in italics possibly caused by humans; strikethrough items are highly unlikely given current scientific understanding.

Human Civilization-Ending (100s to 100,000s of years)

Resource exhaustion

Global nuclear or biological war

Mass extinction leading to biosphere collapse

Epidemic

Meteor impact (large)

Climate becomes inhospitable

Robot apocalypse

Alien colonization

(Complex) Life on Earth-Ending (100M to 1B years)

Increasing solar insolation depletes atmospheric O₂, CO₂

Hydrodynamic depletion of H₂O 

Runaway greenhouse effect

Earth’s orbit destabilized

Meteor or comet impact (v. large)

Supernova/GRB sterilizes the planet’s surface

Earth-Ending (Billions of years)

Sun goes red giant, swallows Earth

Earth’s orbit destabilized, followed by collision with planet/sun

Earth swallowed by slow-moving black hole

Earth swallowed by stable strangelet

Universe-Ending (Trillions of years)

Heat death

Proton decay

Reality-Ending (Timeframe unclear)

Metastability event/Vacuum decay nucleation

Big Rip

Big Crunch

Frank, how will the world end?

According to various models, the world could end in any of a number of ways:

Nuclear war

Ice age

Super supervolcano

Massive extinction of biosphere-critical species

Galaxy supernova ejecting all protons

Solar system smashed into black hole

Cambrian explosion II

Decay of the vacuum induced by protons on the edge of the event horizon

Burning ghost solar system

Extreme parton fusion in the 10 TeV region

Fatally damaging freeze on the free neutrons in the dibaryon in the resonance transition

All mammals moved to the men's room

Slippery slope that leads to a slippery slope to a slippery slope

Impact of a strangelet

Apocalyptic engine failure

Semantic satiation

Creation of hyperdense E8 vacuum bubble

First autocatalytic bacterial thermodynamic planet

They take offense to being called 'the three stars.'

Superconducting life forms would then try to infect us with their atoms

Water world

Drift in starship crew culture

Octanium dominates as a cooling agent for superconductors

Orgone energy blows past limit of Yudkowsky novel

We were going to write about the end of the world, and then we forgot that we were going to write about the end of the world.

[elucubrare]

saw a poll about whether you prefer corruption or redemption arcs and i realized that for me it's not really either, it's a distillation arc: when a character becomes the most intense version of what they could be, everything inessential falling away or being discarded so that only the core remains.

[mysticdragon3md3]

I Hope it Ends with a Monster by Curious Archive