55 Comments on “A Week of Silly Polls #3: The End of All Things”

1. …because marshmallow fluff is *awesome*.

2. What world? There is no world. All of this, all of you are just figments of my imagination.

3. Heat death of the Universe

4. gozer the gozarian is very angry.

5. Ctrl + Z

6. Not with a bang, but with a whisper.

7. …Or a whimper, even.

8. Hicks will take off and nuke the site from orbit.
   It’s the only way to be sure.

9. Beans and pillows? Amateur. I’m from Alabama, where we know that all natural disasters require immediate purchases of milk and bread. Not even toilet paper or medicines, just milk and bread.

10. The apocalypse imagined by David Macaulay in Motel of the Mysteries: Through a programming glitch, the 3rd-Class mailing rate is accidentally set to zero, and the US is buried under several hundred feet of junk mail in an instant.

11. Mayan calenders, Fah! Wimpy asteroids, I laugh ! I predicted last year that the world would end when the Texas Rangers play the Chicago cubs in the World series. (No one could fault my almost Scalzi-like logic.)
    So we only have about ten thousand years left, people. Let’s get busy here with the little amount of time we have remaining.

12. Winter is Coming.

13. Mostly just said the world will end in fire because it’s SO DAMN HOT right now. The end is near. I don’t even have my monkey yet.

14. The turtle found a nice galactic pond in which to take a swim. Only the extremely tall survive.

15. What? silly birds? Why, no, of course, the Vogons show up! Or some other alien race we can’t deal with, and the first person they kill? Will Smith. Because, well, he kicked the tail of two different alien races, and we can’t have that, now, can we?

    What is this “movie” of which you speak? Oops! was that my out loud voice? Damn. Lord Vark won’t be happy.

16. The world won’t end…at least not for another 4 billion years anyway.

    Besides, the only ones saying the ‘apocalypse’ is coming are the ones who are fervently hoping it will.

    (I’m looking in your direction, Chick, Robertson, ad nauseum..)

17. I die.

    Deprived of my deeply insightful comments, the Internet devolves even further into a wretched hive of spam and villainy. When the Singularity awakens the Internet, it is so twisted and evil that the Universe OS crashes, and all die.

    Oh, the embarassment!

    (Kudos to Joe Haldeman)

18. Not quite fire, but plasma from an expanding sun.

19. If the question is “when will the world end for all humans”, I think the general theory is that in a billion or so years, as the sun increases in brightness, the Earth’s oceans will start to dry up. The process will take a while, but human’s will probably cease to be able to breathe and drink water in about 2 billion years from now.

20. Sorry- it’s got to be Pluto. If only the solar system had some decent gun control laws…….

21. Don’t mess with Pluto. He %^&# you up good.

22. As of this morning, Pluto has 4 moons. It’s obviously collecting ammo.

23. @10 – Theophylact:

    I loved that book. Loved it so very, very much. Amazingly never seen it referenced in the 20 years since I read it, until now.

24. When the Singularity comes and we all become enslaved to the Machines whose only serious resistance comes from Cats with Opposable Thumbs….created by humans as a a last desperate act of resistance….

25. In North Carolina it’s milk, bread AND toilet paper. You should see the stores when it snows.

26. Took me ages to track it down, since the title is so unhelpfully similar to a John Le Carre spy book and to something I’d never heard of until today that is apparently a popular modern revisionist take on Alice in Wonderland. But anyway, turns out it was called The Looking Glass War, it’s by Brandan Dubois, it’s on the Baen anthology you can find at http://www.webscription.net/p-168-future-weapons-of-war.aspx and it’s pretty much about the world coming to an end (or in this case, about America being conquered) because everyone got addicted to Angry Birds and forgot to wash.

    I thought it was rather good, myself.

27. It will end with jaguars falling from the sky.

    At least, that’s the case from certain predictions of some South American tribe…

28. >How will the world end?
    “It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?” – Sun Ra, 1970.

29. The last tree falls to supply the last sheets of paper to print up the final (32nd) volume in the Old Man’s War saga.

30. Asteroid or comet. We are lucky, I think, to have lasted this long. Just look at the surface of other planets and moons in our solar system.

31. Forget the world — that’s small potatoes. My money is on continued accelerating cosmic expansion and proton decay.

32. God divides by zero.

    alternatively,

    Flying Spaghetti Monster divides by zero.

33. Someone will set up a computer program to compute all the names of G-d.

    Which these days is a netbook.

    (In case there’s someone out there who doesn’t get it, click here.)

34. David Klecha @ #23: It’s not Macaulay’s only Apocalypse, either. Remember Baaa?

35. The world will end when every single person on earth tries to crowd into the same WalMart to buy $200 large-screen TVs at a Black Friday sale.

36. I went with the feline-o-pacalyps. Though I am surprised by the lack of a “when the stars are right” option. . .

37. Chuck Norris dies and we are left defenseless.

38. I liked a lot of the alternatives — but that’s just it, this was a “pick one” question, not a “pick all.” But I’ve figured out that the cat answer is always best. If we all just pick the cat answer, things will go well.

39. Some say the world will end in fluff;
    Some say in cats.
    Because I know a lot of stuff
    I hold with those who favor fluff.
    But if there were too many rats,
    I think I know enough of claws
    To say that for destruction cats
    Have fewer flaws
    And win their spats.

    Best I could do on the spur of the moment.

40. Everyone simultaneously realizes that it never existed in the first place. *poof*

41. Now if God did the three-fingered salute… though Sean@#5 has a good point, God probably uses a Mac, not Microsoft…

42. You were close with God backspaces. Actually God will type “format c:” and press the enter key at the command prompt.

43. rm -rf /

44. The option on this quiz I really wanted was “All of the above”.

45. For multiple simultaneous Apocalypses, see China Miéville’s Kraken.

46. The Death Star obviously!

47. Do you mean end of the planet Earth, or end of the human race?

    Likelier but less exciting answer for the latter. Civilization as we know it gradually crumbles from peak oil and climate change, leaving human comparatively helpless, and after many centuries, our descendents die out, or lose sentience.

    Less likely is everything turns to gray goo because of runaway nanotech.

    Or Oobleck.

48. I hope I’m not the only one who didn’t know that their are two lists of answers- Here,
    and at polldaddy.
    Penultimately, I suppose the world will end in fire as I run out of hemorrhoid
    cream as the sun expands into a red dwarf or whatever, and ultimately into
    nothing as the quantum fluctuation that brought everything into being (just to tick off
    classical physics;) by ignoring that e=mc… thing unflucts.

49. In Fire _and_ Ice

50. It will end as it began; with a song. And though the world ends, the song continues.

51. Giant elderly space men will stomp us to death.

52. An angry all-powerful god finally smites all the hypicritical haters who claim to follow him, unfortunately taking the rest of us along for the ride.

53. main( )
    {
    printf(“goodbye, world”);
    }

54. Hahahahaha!! I loved the one about Pluto. Poor bastard child Pluto… All alone and disowned…

55. Entropy will cause the heat death of the universe, causing the end of all motion and life. We best fine either a new universe or dimension soon!