Doomsday Scoreboard
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Apocalypse
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Societal Collapse
The 'Doomsday scoreboard' website tracks various apocalyptic predictions, sparking discussion on the nature of doomsday, the validity of predictions, and societal collapse.
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Oct 21, 2025 at 4:14 PM EDT
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I think that they Simon–Ehrlich wager showed how laughable they were but I guess we have to revisit every couple of decades.
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.
...remember it only takes one to be right!
If any of your acquaintances are ever in doubt of anything ever happening, this will be a handy guide for them to consult.
[0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nothing-ever-happens
1. Events, including big ones like 9/11, don't unfold like in the movies as even direct consequences are often far removed.
2. Pax Americana + Hypernormalization + Cheap Food + Digital Escapism = a drug which convinces its users of neverending stability and order.
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.
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?
Ten times the GDP, three times the population and our military stuff mostly works, Ukraine has done a phenomenal job with what they had but Russia turned out to be even more of a Basket case than expected.
The problem is how much damage they can do before we put them back in their box and whether getting the shit kicked out of them would triggger a nuclear exchange which would get really out of hand.
I could see why the ones with several hundred years deadline are "pending"
People are persistently presented with perils (plagues, parasites, pollution, power-hungry politicians, propaganda, plutonium-powered projectiles, etc...) and humanity keeps finding a way through (though certainly at great personal and population-wide cost sometimes).
Some pretty serious chokepoints in the full history (including research suggesting that something reduced our ancestors numbers by ~99% a little under a million years ago) and yet this particular strain remains.
What would a Denesovian say about this?
"Not much", outside of what they'd contributed to any surviving lines.
To your point, whether we're winning or losing very much depends on how we define our team.
Thank you for sharing your hopes for the better outcome no matter what, I'm with you on this.
"In 2010, Turchin published research using 40 combined social indicators to predict that there would be worldwide social unrest in the 2020s"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin
I've checked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bu... and I can't see what I could be muddling it up with, either. Spooky!
So it's not as if "everything works" then suddenly "everything doesn't"
And it's only for operations that care about the sign / compute deltas / use signed numbers, otherwise it's 2106-02-07 06:28:16 UTC.
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.
> I found my way forward through an 18th-century Samurai manual, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s “Hagakure,” which commanded: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” Instead of fearing my end, I owned it. Every morning, after doing maintenance on my Humvee, I’d imagine getting blown up by an I.E.D., shot by a sniper, burned to death, run over by a tank, torn apart by dogs, captured and beheaded, and succumbing to dysentery. Then, before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive. “If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead,” wrote Tsunetomo, “he gains freedom in the Way.”
[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20...
I think people like Ray Kurzweil are essentially religious. Instead of a messiah and heaven, they think of salvation in terms of a singularity, immortality, or a way of ascension. It feels very religious to me, and as such, detached from reality and physical possibilities.
Even if upload does not produce a singularity or the like it still is a huge step towards getting more time to address other issues and it makes interstellar solutions viable. But when we can read out the human mind remains an unknown.
The world is inevitably going to end, our work isn't going to be forever preserved into the future and there will be no "end of history" until there are living humans.
The thing is that the world can end in many ways. My world can end in many ways. I'd rather pass on with a clear consciousness, with my faculties preserved more or less, and with a legacy of having at least tried to make the lives of other that tiny bit better, so I'm aware if I'm not vigilant I can spend my final days suffering from an avoidable disease or accident or regretting I wasted my life chasing a better tomorrow that never came while neglecting what I already have today.
This is virtually the same for all society. It's going to fade into oblivion, but it matters a great deal that the process is as gentle as possible for everyone involved.
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).
As a rat race where the competition is between humans then rich people have a comparative advantage regarding how to survive the ravages.
So the future is less about avoiding climate catastrophe completely - that won't happen when the rich and powerful don't care.
The future is about surviving the issues until enough people die that emissions takes care of itself.
Either a lot of people die thus reducing emissions, or specific groups die thus reducing the capability to generate emissions on behalf of others. Or maybe enough tragedies happen that moral conscience does hold sway. Likely a combination of the above.
For supporting the continuation of my genes, maybe I should invest in property in Siberia/Alaska/Canada/Greenland/etc etc.
It’s bound to happen eventually
Because, IMO, Russia would be destroyed the first time they threatened NATO.
Maybe. Or maybe the big powers might realize that sending hundreds of thousands or even millions of people to die in an all out war (depending on how big it gets and who else gets involved) is a harder sell than settling on appeasement and so smaller states would lose their sovereignty.
I live in Latvia. If there's no risk of MAD, then what's to prevent some opportunistic Russians from invading my country and seeing whether NATO would actually do something about Article 5? Some are pondering whether that's not a direction that Russia could move in even now - stage something relatively small and see how NATO responds. They're already regularly violating our airspace and doing cyber warfare against us and trying to drum up opposition to our government (as flawed as it may be) by the ethnic Russian people.
Could go either way.
We (I'm an American) have four ballistic missile subs that no longer carry ballistic missiles because of arms reduction treaties. The subs still exist, though, with each of the Trident launch tubes instead holding 7 Tomahawks. They are built to hide and they're very good at it--we can't even reliably track them ourselves. That means they could sneak in to launch points some distance from Russia. The Ukraine war has shown that heavy air defenses sometimes work against ground hugging missiles (but remember the Moskova--despite fearsome anti-air capability it for some reason couldn't engage two sea hugging missiles), but ares without heavy defenses fare poorly against even crude low altitude stuff. Expect most of those Tomahawks to get through, and there goes Russia's logistics capability. Most stuff of importance is within Tomahawk range of the coast.
From memory, the rough argument was that society depends upon input flows of energy, resources (metals etc) and food. Society needs to allocate resources and energy to extract these inputs. Energy sources such as fossil fuel reserves are finite stocks, some are cheap to extract (high energy return on energy invested). Over time we consume and deplete the high EROEI reserves and have to move on to consuming the lower EROEI reserves. This means that the fraction of energy society needs to allocate for energy extraction increases over time, so there's less energy for other uses. Similarly, we deplete the cheap to extract stocks of metal required to build and maintain industry, leaving stocks that require higher inputs of metal and energy to extract. Similarly for agricultural yields, as we mine and deplete accumulated stocks of nutrients out of the soil.
The business as usual scenario leading to "overshoot and collapse" behaviour is that we have increasing population, increasing industrial capital and increasing demands for energy, food and resource inputs, while the fraction of energy and resources that need to be allocated to energy, resource and food production grows over time. The fraction of remaining surplus energy and resources that can be allocated to things like education, healthcare, research, art decreases over time. At some point the growing fraction of energy and resources that needs to be allocated to energy and resource extraction becomes so large vs the existing population and industrial base that there simply isn't enough surplus to maintain healthcare, education, research, etc at the same level.
The "Overshoot and collapse" dynamic describes stocks of population, industry etc growing to peaks well beyond sustainable levels before the above dynamics catch up and cause them to rapidly decline.
The researchers did a bunch of modelling of alternative scenarios, exploring how to avoid these "Overshoot and collapse" dynamics.
There is no lead-up to the apocalypse. The Messiah will return "like a thief in the night" and "nobody, except my Father, knows the hour of my return" (I probably butchered those two quotes). Either way, the Bible is pretty clear (as was Jesus): there will be zero indication the apocalypse is coming. None. It'll just... start.
But I get what you're saying either way. I just think it's an interesting factlet.
It's pointless to cite the Bible to defend a theological position, because someone else can cite a different part that can be interpreted to say the exact opposite.
If someone plans to, they should first read Revelation 22:18–19.
And Revelations isn’t the only prophetic work. Try Ezekiel.
> It's pointless to cite the Bible to defend a theological position
Understandable, but citing the Bible is fairly important in theology, though it should be done within context.
Sure, Judaism was word of mouth a long time, and that’s great. I personally can’t remember much, so I think referencing text is fine.
See, that's when you use literal reading. "I'm not adding anything to the text, I'm just interpreting it."
>And Revelations isn’t the only prophetic work. Try Ezekiel.
Ezekiel is clearly about events in our past, though.
>Understandable, but citing the Bible is fairly important in theology, though it should be done within context.
Meh. There's no internally consistent Christian theology that cites the Bible and doesn't involve generous amounts of cherry picking.
It's not. Christian dogma doesn't even obey the law of identity.
>Is there something new or relevant you’re making a case for?
New? Not, not really. It's not at all new that the official position of the church ("Jesus is entirely mortal and entirely divine") is inherently self-contradictory. I mean, what the hell. If I didn't know any better I'd think an atheist came up with it to troll early Christians. Try saying something similar about literally anything else. "The contents of this glass are simultaneously entirely water and entirely mercury." It says nothing good of either the followers or the clergy that that nonsense has been accepted for so long.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Schism
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Leo_XIV
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Francis
Stop trying to figure out which scary new technology is the Number of the Beast. Stop trying to figure out which scary new politician is the Antichrist. Stop trying to figure out what any of that shit means, it doesn't mean anything anymore and the only apocalypse that's going to happen is the one we ourselves create, in part because we persist in our delusion that we don't really have to worry about this world because God's going to burn it all down anyway.
It is threadsafe. The documentation is very clear about this.
If anything, we have a much better shot at surviving the next mass extinction than we had at surviving prior ones, now that we have so many advantages.
I probably won't survive it because I'm a smooth brained weakling, but some humans surely will
Most species have gone extinct.
Personally, I do not believe climate change can kill us off. The worst case predictions are pretty dire (and beware the worst case makes the IPCC look tame--there is not enough data on methane hydrates for it to be in the IPCC model, but the worst case estimates are worse than the IPCC estimates and they will probably stack.) But I consider extinction likely because we can move around. An animal that loses 90% of it's habitat loses 90% of it's population but the survivors are pretty much the same as before. But are those humans who will be killed off just going to sit there?
Step 1: become accomplished in some field Step 2: ??? Step 3: write about the anti Christ and predict when it will occur
Switch your steps 2 & 3.
Step 4 is profit.
1999: Spanish designer Paco Rabanne announces that the Mir space station would crash on and destroy Paris in between the 28 July 1999 lunar eclipse and the 11 August 1999 total solar eclipse, the two somehow interacting to create magnetic interference, leading to the station crashing at 11:22 on the 11, as predicted by a 17th century fresco in some abbey that shows an eclipse, a clock at that hour, and a sentence "you will know the hour of your death but not the day"... Also Mir would have hypothetically contained a Russian atomic bomb, which is what would destroy Paris, and possibly leading to some all-out nuclear war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIsjK7gpSoc
I mean that's bad but it's much better than what I picture in my head as an apocalypse
No one want to live in the middle.
> As described in Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, societies become more complex as they try to solve problems. [...] Such complexity requires a substantial "energy" subsidy (meaning the consumption of resources, or other forms of wealth).
> When a society confronts a "problem," such as a shortage of energy, or difficulty in gaining access to it, it tends to create new layers of bureaucracy, infrastructure, or social class to address the challenge. Tainter, who first identifies seventeen examples of rapid collapse of societies, applies his model to three case studies: The Western Roman Empire, the Maya civilization, and the Chaco culture.
> For example, as Roman agricultural output slowly declined and population increased, per-capita energy availability dropped. The Romans "solved" this problem by conquering their neighbours to appropriate their energy surpluses (as metals, grain, slaves, other materials of value). However, as the Empire grew, the cost of maintaining communications, garrisons, civil government, etc. grew with it. Eventually, this cost grew so great that any new challenges such as invasions and crop failures could not be solved by the acquisition of more territory. [...]
> It is often assumed that the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a catastrophe for everyone involved. Tainter points out that it can be seen as a very rational preference of individuals at the time, many of whom were actually better off. Tainter notes that in the west, local populations in many cases greeted the barbarians as liberators.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
Or we could be living in universe inside like a raindrop of larger universe that may hit the ground and burst any moment.
I'm not saying anyone predicted those or something. It's just that the notion of doomsday is quite vague.
I'm trying to broaden some notions here. Prediction might not be exactly absolute prediction, and doomsday might not be exactly absolute doomsday.
Perhaps some great threats were averted precisely because someone predicted them (for example, the great leaded gasoline poisoning).
https://github.com/TimSchell98/PyWorld3-03
I gotta say I didn't know about this Johnny Silverhand post, but I hope that if these things don't come to fruition he still finds time to stick it to the corpos in the most rockerboy way possible.
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