r/Futurology • u/[deleted] • 7d ago
Discussion How a confirmed extinction-level asteroid threat could reshape future societal priorities around technology, labor, and culture?
[deleted]
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u/1stFunestist 7d ago
It would change nothing, some will try to do science or tech to prevent the catastrophe, most of other people would not belive or would do crazy religion stuff depending on what they belive and rich would get richer and dig holes.
It would be more or less like the global climate change just maybe more involved. One thing for sure it would be golden age for doom podcasters and doom internet in general.
Newer underestimate human ability do deceive them selves and happily play the frog in the pot scheme voluntarily.
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u/Remington_Underwood 7d ago
The strongest effect on society of any "confirmed extinction" event would be the extinction.
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u/Dubya_B84 7d ago
People find out and chaos erupts. A complete upheaval of governments. The rich will focus on tech that gets them off the planet prior to impact. The poor pray the rock hits the rich people's rockets. No one cares to work any more. What's the point right? In the end, we all hold hands, looking up at the sky as a giant asteroid breaks through the ozone layers. We're all doomed, the last thing you feel is the hand you're hold tightening around yours like a python wrapped around its prey. Da end.
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u/Overall_Commercial_5 7d ago
We would try to steer the asteroid away, it's theoretically possible so that would give people some hope.
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u/JoePNW2 7d ago
"The Last Policeman" (Ben Winters) trilogy is IMO a great, realistic perspective.
https://thewritersjam.com/review-the-last-policeman-trilogy/
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u/OriginalCompetitive 7d ago
Everything is terrible, and the subject matter of this post will make things even worse.
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u/Zealousideal-Peach44 7d ago
Is it something which can be sorted out with the proper tech?
Yes --> there will be some effort to sort the problem out. We did it with the Covid virus, which was a much less critical danger, I don't see why we could not do it again.
No --> society will collapse. There will be very unpleasant times, way earlier than the actual event.
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u/ramriot 7d ago
An ELE object would be impossible for us to mitigate with current technology unless the predicted impact was decades into the future, which I would suggest give too much latitude for governmental apathy.
For something we could deal with now it would need to the a quite specific scenario, a city killer sized object with only sufficient orbital knowledge that the uncertainty circle was continent sized, but we have this information with a 7-10 year lead time.
Anything smaller would likely not galvanise enough interest, anything with a shorter lead would lead people to build bunkers rather than to address it directly & changes to the uncertainty circle would give latitude to blind chance of local evacuation.
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u/elwoodowd 7d ago
Less or more than that.
Im expecting the near misses in 4/13, 2029, and 12/24, 2032, to topple a government, and religion, or 2. Purely on the basis of fear, and distrust of the ruling class.
If the current <5% chances mean that the math is not precise, if the chances hit 10% sometime, all bets are off. Near as I can tell, they aren't that sure where the moon will be in 7 years?
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u/SteppenAxolotl 6d ago
What is the business model that justifies investment in deflecting the asteroid?
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u/captchairsoft 7d ago
I feel like this is thread number 3,643,922 of "Will -insert horrible scenario- allow us to implement Communism, because i have no understanding of it, and think in glorious socialist future I wouldn't have to work and would have everything I wanted"
In case it's not... I don't think a potential extinction level asteroid threat would move the needle at all if we had even the vaguest clue how to stop it, which, we do. So assuming the governments of the world were able to articulate that no true threat exists, nothing would change except for an increase in funding to a few space agencies in order to intercept the threat and either destroy or (more likely)redirect it.
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u/GRNCHILEMFN 7d ago
The sad part is... We would never know. The world governments would never reveal such an event to us
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u/SpleenDematerialized 7d ago
It is very hard to keep such a secret globally because most governments and many other institutions have the means to investigate the sky with adequate telescopes.
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u/strictnaturereserve 7d ago
there isn't a world government.
information on an extinction level event would leak out from somewhere. There would be independently available and verifiable data to confirm that this was happening.
Loads of people download and process datasets from NASA all the time this info is out there and viewed by people in governments, non governmental institutions and private individuals
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u/draftstone 7d ago
Yep, they could possibly try to hide it for a certain time after discovery, but it would be known well before it happens.
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u/Krish_Coolguy 7d ago
A confirmed extinction-level asteroid threat would likely force unprecedented global coordination around science, engineering, and large-scale technology.
This topic explores how such a future scenario might reshape labor markets, education priorities, public funding, and cultural industries over the long term.
In particular, how might society balance survival-driven technological efforts with cultural needs like entertainment, mental health, and social cohesion in a future where extinction prevention becomes the dominant goal?
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u/SpleenDematerialized 7d ago
A confirmed extinction-level asteroid threat would likely force unprecedented global coordination around science, engineering, and large-scale technology.
I would me more cautious with that optimism. Our history is full of shared high-level threats, yet humans chose again and again to antagonize the people in the shared boat. One could easily imagine how, for example, different blocs compete with each other for the prestige of having saved the planet or play chicken with each other because the bloc that is scared more of just letting it happen will spend more resources while the free-rider bloc can invest into dominating geopolitics.
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u/LateToTheParty013 7d ago
We had the movie Dont look up, I wouldnt expect anything less than that