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You want to know how you’ll die? You’ll probably pass at a very old age on a yacht with one hand holding your loving wife’s hand and the other holding a Colt 45. The weather will be pristine and the stars will be out. You’ll drift off painlessly and willingly. You’ll have lived a life worthy of being proud of.
Or you could get hit by a nuclear bomb tomorrow. Life’s a bitch like that.
A group of 50 of the smartest people on the planet were asked to reveal the biggest threats to mankind. Ya know, a light, trivial topic. Their responses make me want to drain my retirement in favor of buying a mini pony in fear of me not making it to 65.
Times Higher Education asked 50 Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, physics, physiology, medicine and economics what keeps them up at night. Here are the greatest threats to civilization, in their view.
- Facebook (2 percent — 1 laureate)One Nobel Prize winner slash conspiracy theorist claims that Mark Zuckerberg has so much information on his 1.2 billion users, he could ruin the world with it if he so chooses.
- Drugs (2 percent — 1 laureate)One laureate fears that the increasing strength and addictiveness of drugs could end the world as we know it. Not likely.
- Ignorance and Fake News (6 percent — 3 laureates)One laureate said, “it is a disaster when people start believing things that are false and, even worse, when governments induce them to believe facts that are evidently wrong and ignore all evidence-based, scientifically proven data.”
- Inequality (4 percent — 2 laureates)The gap between the rich and the poor is growing. If robots phase out poor peoples’ jobs, a class war could soon follow.
- Terrorism (6 percent — 3 laureates)If nukes or biological weapons get into the wrong hands (cough cough ISIS), the destruction could scorch the Earth.
- Donald Trump and Ignorant Leaders (6 percent — 3 laureates)Donny ends the world?! Nahhh.
- Selfishness, Dishonesty, and Lack of Humanity (8 percent — 4 laureates)Go hug a stranger bros.
- Disease or Drug Resistance (8 percent — 4 laureates)There is a chance familiar diseases will get smarter and resist medicine. The Bubonic Plague killed 30% to 60% of Europeans in just a three years in the late Middle Ages.
- Nuclear War (23 percent — 12 laureates)Cc: North Korea
- Population Rise and/or Environmental Degradation (34 percent — 18 laureates)“Humans are very busy with the greatest climate change experiment since the ice ages,” John Mather, a senior scientist in cosmology at NASA, told Times Higher Education.
Depressed yet? Here’s a puppy somersaulting out of a box…
[h/t Times Higher Education]