The worst imaginable disaster?

[cosmicalstorm]

I have been interested in disasters since I was seven and watched a science-show concerning the Chixculub impactor. Recently I was reading Nick Bostroms writings on existential risks, and it struck me (I think he mentioned it briefly somewhere) that there must be fates much worse than death and extinction.
So I'm asking the sci-fi forum, if we regard extinction as a baseline and shoot downwards, what would be the worst imaginable disaster that could befall the human race?

[Darth Tanner]

Asteroid impact wipes out all life.

Gamma ray burst sterilizes planet.

Yellowstone mega volcano causes mass die off due to dust in atmosphere.

Global warming causes the collapse of the gulf stream and a new ice age.

Death Star gunners miss target and hit us by mistake.

Also see Wiki

that there must be fates much worse than death and extinction.

Other than the local Dark Eldar analogues turning up and torturing us all to death over several eons it’s unlikely, death is an end regardless of whether the rest of the universe is going with you.

[Stofsk]

Get invaded by Space Vampires who enslave the entire planet and harvest us like cattle.

We wouldn't become extinct, but I wouldn't call it much of a life.

[StarSword]

Alien race bulldozes planet for hyperspace route?

[Iroscato]

Aliens who live 40 lightyears away who received a transmission of Never Gonna Give You Up, build their culture around it and then return to Earth and Rickroll us all to extinction? I can't think of a worse fate myself.

[VarrusTheEthical]

Any disaster that mortally wounds the planet's biosphere, but does not wipe out the human race instantly. Instead, humanity slowly dies out over the course of a generation or so as everyone slowly starves to death. Basically, anything that causes The Road to happen.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Everyone goes to hell and gets raped by dogs all the time.

That's a pretty bad one.

[Night_stalker]

I have been interested in disasters since I was seven and watched a science-show concerning the Chixculub impactor. Recently I was reading Nick Bostroms writings on existential risks, and it struck me (I think he mentioned it briefly somewhere) that there must be fates much worse than death and extinction.
So I'm asking the sci-fi forum, if we regard extinction as a baseline and shoot downwards, what would be the worst imaginable disaster that could befall the human race?

Either what happens to the colonists in ME2, or having the Reavers stop by, and pay us a visit.

[Broomstick]

Leaving aside the improbable, if not outright fictional, scenarios outlined here, I'd say having a full-blown Yellowstone eruption, or equivalent (which, come to think of it, could be something like Chicxulub) would be the worst as it would could massive suffering world wide for quite some time. This, in some ways, is worse than immediate death due to prolonged suffering.

[Iroscato]

Leaving aside the improbable, if not outright fictional, scenarios outlined here, I'd say having a full-blown Yellowstone eruption, or equivalent (which, come to think of it, could be something like Chicxulub) would be the worst as it would could massive suffering world wide for quite some time. This, in some ways, is worse than immediate death due to prolonged suffering.

My dad once came up with the witty suggestion of an asteroid impacting Yellowstone, which would probably be a clusterfuck of magnificent proportions. I would like put that little gem forward as a suggestion, as it's improbable, but not entirely impossible.

[Lord Baal]

Earth loosing all ozone and magnetic protection, making us all die a horrible radiation poison death for what I understand.

Other than that I would say we are send over a hentai dimension where our womens are raped forever and we all get decapitated somehow.

[Lord of the Abyss]

An insane AI thinks it's Jehovah and uploads all of humanity into a full sensory Hell simulation subjectively run at millions of times real time. This situation lasts until the universe dies, so we get to experience torture for millions of times longer than the universe actually lasts. Oh, and add error correction routines to the uploaded human minds so they can't ever go insane or somehow get used to it, and rewrite the minds so they can experience much greater levels of suffering than is humanly possible.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Cats really are otherworldy gods, and decided to dream us back into submission...

[Eternal_Freedom]

Invaded and enslaved/experimented on by Daleks.

Or, the Next Hitler successfully takes the world, and proceeds to implement policies to obliterify all the non-Aryans.

Or 1984 comes true. That's pretty horrible.

Or we wind up like the people from Eminiaar VII fighting a war against Mars that requires voluntary execution on a mass scale to stop civilisation collapsing.

[Crazedwraith]

gravity reverses.

[Rossum]

Hmm, a race of aliens appear in our solar system and unleash a swarm of self-replicating robots to harvest all the material in the solar system... except the Earth. The aliens refuse to make contact with humanity in any way and seem to just ignore and avoid us, any attempts to examine them with probes or sensors or attack them with weapons are met with them effortlessly jamming or blocking the action with no attempt at retaliation or explaining their actions.

Eventually, the aliens harvest all the other planets and asteroids in the system, convert them into more ships and leave. Earth is then left the sole planet in the solar system with no way to colonize Mars or any other celestial body on account of them all being devoted by alien robots.

With no hope of spreading to the stars and our civilization already being overpopulated and running low on natural resources, humanity must come to terms with the fact that there is life out there, it wields power we can only dream of, it just doesn't care about us, and there is no hope that we or our decedents can ever find a way to beat them... hell, we don't even know who they are or what they want.

All sorts of new religious movements spring up, resource scarcity results in the collapse of modern civilization, world leaders desperatly try to deal with an alien threat they can't hope to beat or understand while still dealing with all the human threats they can beat or understand. Things go into a hellish state of decline and insanity while our ecosystem starts to collapse.

In the end, humanity is rendered extinct after about five million years when the sun expands enough to boil away the atmosphere. In all that time, humanity never reached the stars and instead died alone and unnoticed in a strip-mined solar system with no clue as to why it all happened.

[Lost Soal]

The Gods of all the major religions past and present (Roman, Greek, Hindu, Egyptian, OT Bible etc.) suddenly become real and start making themselves known.
Let your imaginations run wild with that scenario.

[Eternal_Freedom]

The existence of all those pantheosn is definitely bad. For one, that means we get about a dozen different Doomsday scenarios, and gods (Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Norse) who are perfectly happy to intervene in human affairs.

I would so love to see the encpounter between Zeus and the Pope.

[Batman]

VOY gets belatedly renewed for another 7 seasons.

[Iroscato]

VOY gets belatedly renewed for another 7 seasons.

My god, that's just sick. Sort yourself out man, before you seriously hurt someone!

[Night_stalker]

Forget the ancient deities coming back to try and rule us, how about this turning out to be true?

ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

What if the dog rape wasn't a usual, pedestrian thing, but they just randomly set the rapehounds on you once in a while so you would never be able to expect it.

Would that be better or worse?

Also, instead of paws they have... Hammers.

[Purple]

Some years in the future we detect a radio message from an alien planet. In our idiocy, the republican in charge of America decides to build and launch a RKV at them to get them before they can get us. 100 years later our telescopes confirm the horrible. We missed...

Que waiting for what happens next.

[Sinewmire]

The Chaos gods break out of their torpor and take a new interest in Earth. Mankind is forced to either surrender themselves to posession, or craven worship as science comes crashing down around our ears and ushers in a new dark era of animals indulging in bloodshed, lustm despair and mutation, sometimes all of them at once. Reality begins to weep and tear as the ground itself grows screaming faces, and men become fused to their beds at night.
An eternity of slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods etc. etc.

[Rabid]

Imagine this: a passing astronomical object swings by the solar system, passing kinda close to Earth and giving it a speed boost.

[...]

Or we're ejected from the solar system entirely.


THE END OF YEARS.

This isn't an instant doom. It'll take a while to GTFO of the solar system. I figure several years, maybe more, but we'll start feeling some bad effects pretty fuckin' quick.


Imagine standing outside, watching each week as the sun gets smaller and smaller.... as things get colder and colder. There's nothing you can do. If it was an asteroid impact, maybe Bruce Willis could save our asses. If it was an alien invasion, call Jeff Goldbloom, and by god, he'll give them what for. Gods? Fuck them, Bill Murray's got our backs.

Hell, if we were pulled into the black hole, that'd be pretty god damned lame, but it'd be quick (to us anyway).

But nooo, we have time to say good bye to the sun.


[...]

PLAN D: NUKES NUKES NUKES

So you ain't going outside no more. But maybe if we can make internal shelters and use nukes to power it, some semblance of humanity can go on even without the sun...

How long will these few go on?



ONE MILLION YEARS LATER

"Alien Captain's log, alien stardate rofl dot copter. We've discovered a rogue planet entering our star system that seems to have some kind of ancient civilization on it..."

mang animals

I WANT TO READ A STORY OF THAT !!1!


Book 1 : From the moment we detect the "intruder" that will eject us from the solar system to the moment we pass the orbit of Neptune/Pluton. The story will talk about how humanity deal with it. There will be scenes from the point of view of G-Mens, some from the point of view of the random schmuck in the street, with some flavor-text coming from newspaper articles/TV shows and top-secret reports.

Book 2 / a series of short stories : It has been hundreds, thousands of years, since Darkness has fallen on the Earth. And life goes on. Stories of an Earth without sun.

A short story : Millions of year later in the Milky Way, a flavor story and an epilogue counting the story of how a mysterious race has taken its place in the Galaxy, and how nobody really knows where their homeworld is.


Note : does the Moon follow us in our forced Exile ?