Doomsday Scoreboard
35 comments
·October 21, 2025altcognito
hamdingers
Societal collapse does not necessarily mean the loss of all writing or knowledge of that society. The wikipedia article you linked to proves this.
fragmede
Out there, somewhere, is a nerd, laser etching Wikipedia onto metal plates, and burying them to be dug up later, just to be able to say, I knew this would happen!
chairmansteve
Needs to carved in stone if they are serious.....
roadside_picnic
I've been in the "doomer" camp for over a decade and been surprised how many things I thought were far off in the future have come to fruition earlier.
But, the one thing I always find interesting, philosophically, about believing the world-as-we-know-it is coming to an end is that all of the things people are concerned about will happen no matter what.
Being afraid of the end of the world is ultimately being afraid that we will lose the things we have, that our work will be lost to time and history, that ultimately we will return to a void and all of "this" will have been for nothing.
However, all of that is true either way. You will lose everything you've ever loved over time in life, all the work you've done will be lost to time, in the end all of your efforts will be for nothing and even that won't matter.
The "end of the world" scares people because it forces them to discard the normal tools they use combat these many existential anxieties, but the world continuing to go on doesn't actually resolve any of those anxieties.
mfro
'The world continuing to go on' is the status quo and has been for millenia at this point. Sure, the argument can be made that the world will end eventually, but if we do not have our reference timescale, what do we have? People aren't afraid that the world will eventually end (because 'eventually' should be thousands of years from now), people are afraid the world will end NOW, which does nullify your experience and efforts on the subjective human timescale. Life as we know it continuing to go on without ambiguity on our confidence to prevent world-ending events does resolve those anxieties.
blastro
beautifully stated thank you
bironran
It's missing the January 19, 2038, the unix epoch end. Only 12 years and a bit from now. Very much in our time.
mcshicks
They seemed to have missed peter turchin
"In 2010, Turchin published research using 40 combined social indicators to predict that there would be worldwide social unrest in the 2020s"
paularmstrong
The way Cliodynamics, Turchin’s field, is explained feels like a very early and remedial version of psychohistory from the Foundation universe.
agarttha
Here's python code to simulate one of the still-active doomsday predictions (The Limits to Growth)
bee_rider
Do they specify exactly what qualifies as a successful apocalyptic prediction?
In particular they count a US civil war as an apocalyptic event… lots of countries and societies have been completely wiped out, though, which must(?) be more apocalyptic.
Maybe the point of the site is just that apocalypses tend to happen unexpectedly?
marcyb5st
A bit in the doomer camp, and what worries me the most are the lifestyle changes needed to not fuck up the climate in the next few hundreds years. I believe I heard that we should slash 7/8th of our emissions (as individuals living a modern lifestyle) to keep the wet bulb temperature in check worldwide by the end of the century. This is, in my opinion, a target that we'll surely miss and it won't be nice.
Europe is already struggling with few millions people trying to enter over several years. I can't imagine what happens when large parts of India/Pakistan/Bangladesh become literally deadly during the hot season. That would displace ~1B people basically at once (if you stay and you don't have Air Conditioning you die). The following turmoil will be like nothing we ever saw before as a species (IMHO).
iammjm
the two active predictions with the time frames of <5 years by MIT, and How & Strauss still look scary and not impossible
stego-tech
It’s also worth noting that Strauss, Howe, and Turchin all repeatedly stress in their books that firm dates aren’t a guarantee, that sometimes the cycle doesn’t line up correctly (like the Civil War cycle), and that none of their words are meant to be taken as literal predications so much as cautious warnings that history often rhymes.
Having finished both The Fourth Turning and End Times recently, Strauss and Howe’s specific guesses as to what might fuel the next crisis are laughably off track even if their broad strokes still paint a compelling (and at times, frightening) picture, while Turchin feels more prescient in his observations.
Ultimately, though, Turchin has the better message: even when a crisis destroys an empire, the world continues onward. That gave me some bleak hope to hang onto.
SCUSKU
Yeah I was fully expecting this site to be making fun of all the wacko conspiracies about armageddon, such that it would make me feel better. But instead, the "Limit to Growth" summary seems entirely plausible.
throwaway173738
It might not even be an apocalypse.
HardCodedBias
The Limits to Growth predictions are laughable.
I think that they Simon–Ehrlich wager showed how laughable they were but I guess we have to revisit every couple of decades.
citizenpaul
What qualifies moving from "pending" state to "active". There seem to be many predictions at the bottom that are only a few years out that are not "active" Some are even end of year.
I could see why the ones with several hundred years deadline are "pending"
retrocog
Gradually and then suddenly.
baal80spam
Need a scoreboard for bubbles!
meteor333
I know this is mostly for fun, but it would be great to see how we are trending on the predications which has more scientific approach to it.
...remember it only takes one to be right!
yreg
We do have this dashboard https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2
Survival bias. I get this is a joke but...
There are many societies which have collapsed. We can't know who predicted it because they are dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse
And of course, this list will no longer exist after societal collapse.