This is a fascinating and entertaining video that runs about 30 minutes.
Thanks to Mark Derail.
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You can follow the links and get to the TED website where 10 or so of the speakers can actually be downloaded. My favorite is Pinker, the famous linguist. I looked for Petranek but could not find him. Hate to watch anything thats really good and not have it to see again?
only 10??
The existentialist in me says that there is a number 11. The world ends with my death.
No need to watch… it ends with the next service pack from Microsoft.
The world doesn’t end… It’s our punishment…how could it end?
loved this presentation hopper….finally a video I could truely enjoy…..lol
I went to their site….it’s a great place….thanks for finding this.
Great link, a real treasure of a video
11th way world ends…
A Republican wins the next presidential race, God throws his hands up in despair, we hear a sudden “aw screw it” coming from the heavens, and God decides to cancel the whole experiment as a darn failure.
#8 – Too bad the left wouldn’t believe in it, even after it happened.
12,
Gods laughing at us, for keeping EVERYONE alive and NOT fixing them as we do CATS & DOGS…
We eat ourselves out of a planet that cant sustain us anymore.
whats the Funniest part is that the USA is the largest exporter of FOOD.
When other countries TRY to get out from this, as in Brazil and S. america…By opening up LAND for farming..WE complain. Why NOT make MORE forests in the USA.. 20+ years ago they TRIED to get farmers to grow 1 in 100 acres with Wood stocks. For wind breaks and Forestry…DIDNT HAPPEN.
Does anyone else besides me think it is pretty colossally stupid to try to make mini black holes on Earth with a particle accelerator?
I found this video interesting but I think some of it suggests less, not more, money for research. Research into black holes should be at the top of the list. If anything, this research should be done in deep space far from Earth, not on the surface of the planet we all live on.
I recently watched a very badly axcted movie called…*the Black Hole*….about just what this video mentioned…a wayward experiment gone awry. I believe it ate most of Chicago or St. Louis before the hero saved the day. 🙂
I remember reading an article about the particle accelerator at CERN, and how some experiment that they plan to do has a possibility, although small, of becoming a chain reaction ant turning the whole planet (to it’s core0 into a mass of gray goo.
Expanding our knowledge of the universe is good… but if there is nobody around to know about it, is there a point to the experiment?
#9 – James Hill – After many futile attempts, you finally come up with a good zinger. Congratulations.
9–Yes, good jibe. Such a thing would be on a par with right wingers still thinking BushCo is doing a good job.
excellent video, and I because of this Ive found a new excellent site.. http://www.ted.com, thanks John, keep up the good work… your a God among men.
One thing I don’t agree… the solution to a magnetic field reversal of the earth … Put ozone in the upper atmosphere… What a load of crap.
Ozone is produce when a O2 get hit by Light from the sun: (From wikipedia)
O2 + (radiation
[Duplicate post. – ed.]
Science Fiction: #8’s comment about god giving up because humans aren’t living up to god’s expectations shows just how egotistical man really is. So if you combine world end scenarios 10 and 9, you get aliens attacking earth using the media to convince humans that god doesn’t care about them anymore which causes massive depression. Aliens then come down and wipe humans off the earth.
This could possibly be a nice movie for the Sci-Fi channel. May be Scott Bakula could star in the movie.
As I listen to this and hear about depression as a way the world will end, I have to say that this is incredibly human-centric. The world will NOT end without us. In fact, without us, the healing can begin. The world will end when the sun goes nova and engulfs our utterly insignificant little blue green planet.
This guy’s ideas are really far out there. The main stream real issues that can cause global civilizational collapse and possible human extinction are well documented in Collapse by Jared Diamond. Funny that he didn’t even mention global thermonuclear war. That’s a much more realistic threat to humanity than most of these.
SPOILER ALERT
10 – Depression. – Um … yeah. Sure. Maybe we won’t be so depressed when there are few enough people to live comfortably.
9 – Aliens – Is this guy freakin’ kidding or what??!!?
8 – Ecosystem collapse – This one is real.
7- Particle Accelerator Mishap – Tiny black holes are more compact but not more massive than what went in to them. This is not a real fear.
6 – Biotech Disaster – GM foods. Silly. All corn is GM. Natural corn has tiny kernels and is inedible.
5 – Earth’s Magnetic Field Reversal – OK. But he didn’t offer anything for this other than increasing ozone.
4 – Solar Flares – Terraform Mars??!!? We can’t keep our own planet terraformed. How the hell does he think we’re going to terraform another planet?
3 – Global Epidemic – OK, that could happen.
2 – Rogue Black Hole – What a freakin’ wacko!! We know where the black holes are in our local neighborhood. We can measure them gravitationally.
1 – Asteroid – Um. Yeah. OK.
People, let’s concern ourselves with the things we know will happen. We are trashing our planet. Like the deer that were introduced on some small arctic island that quickly reproduced to over 1500 individuals and then ran out of resources and ended up with a population of 29, we are eating out our resource base. We are also changing the climate. We are also deforesting the whole planet. We are also depleting our aquifers and our top soil, leading to wide spread desertification.
We need to take care of what we know beyond any doubt will kill huge numbers of us before we can worry about a sub-gram black hole in a particle accelerator swallowing up the rest of the earth. BTW, this can’t happen.
#19
Humor… can’t be bought.
19,
#5…Hmm, what is mentioned is that the Magnetic field around the earth REDUCES while the gravity affect is happening(est 100 years)… And that we could THICKEN the Ozone to combat being FRIED…AND that the reversal is already happening.
#1..2029-2036… In 2029 that SAME asteroid that we ALMOST hit before, will pass even CLOSER…Its in a Near earth orbit, between the sun and the earth.. about 6 years later…IF’ the magnetic gravitation of the earth affected THIS asteroid, it WILL’ hit the Earth.
Population control…
The population from 2000-2050…WILL raise by 1/2..
release the Germs/virus and LEts see WHO is left after…
#11 – you can solve the black hole problem by sending a message back in time to warn yourself not to create them. http://tinyurl.com/2548ug
Something that can really happen: My dog’s farts hitting a critical tipping point and destroying the entire atmosphere. It’s gonna be a bad way to go when it happens.
Solutions:
>
10. The will to survive.
— Create wars so that men could have a reason to live.
9. Aliens invade Earth.
— Poison our ecosystem and create robots out of people so that there is nothing here they’ll want.
8. The Ecosystem Collapses.
— Recreate dinasours and have them protect the oceans and forests.
7. Particle accelator mishap.
— Keep Buddhists on the payroll at CERN and have them meditate on Peace while at the moment of impact.
6. Biotech Disaster.
— Feed the human population junk for food (especially high fructose corn syrup) to increase tolerance to self-mutating corn.
5. Reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field.
— Set up a positive (+) nuclear reactor at the North Pole and a negative (-) one at the South Pole. Run them at maximum capacity.
4. Solar Flares.
— Invent Sunblock SPF 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
3. A new global epidemic.
— Blame an ethnic group and see #10 above.
2. We meet a rogue black hole.
— We give it a rogue white pole.
1. A really big asteroid hits Earth.
— Find a way to slow down or speed up the rotation of Earth so that we can make sure it lands in the Middle East.
#16 One thing I don’t agree… the solution to a magnetic field reversal of the earth … Put ozone in the upper atmosphere… What a load of crap.
Ozone is produce when a O2 get hit by Light from the sun: (From wikipedia)
O2 + (radiation
Your statement sounds like people that claim we shouldn’t be concerned about dwindling oil supplies because “oil’s still being made naturally.” If it is (there’s some debate on the “abiotic production” argument), it’s at such minuscule quantity that it could never keep up with our current consumption rates.
His point seemed that human intervention has been detrimental to the Ozone layer – such that natural production isn’t sufficient to replenish it – so they think it could stand to be “beefed up” a little. Granted, it IS produced naturally, but if it was at equilibrium all of this time (before chlorofluorocarbons and such), then depleted due to human influence, it falls that if the natural system is insufficient to make up the difference, other means should be at least considered. Not really a hard concept to grasp.