Quite in the same vein I fear the poetry section being eventually replaced by vogon poetry...

Drat...too close to my main fear, which is the coming of the Great White Handkerchief

emc

"Being forced to write comments actually improves code, because it is easier to fix a crock than to explain it. "
—G. Steele

Earth destroyed to make way for hyperspace bypass

Just don't forget your towel!

And thanks for all the fish...

---

Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg

Well, if we're talking about worries like that, what about "Perl Monks bought and assimilated into the MySpace empire"? 'Seekers of Perl Wisdom' becomes 'Seekers of cool embedded .wav files', that sorta thing. Shudder... ;-)

I'm not really sure, but I suspect you didn't notice the implicit reference to a famous fictional work.

A Project Manager told us it's the Mutant Star Goat we need to be worried about !
:-)

oops it's a Star Goat !!

Yes, exactly. Or invasion by a gigantic swarm of twelve foot piranha bees.

I'm thinking of the Apocalypse, where NodeReaper rides into the last and final sunset.

One ending is as crazy as any other, so why not just that way :-)

Cheerio, Sören

What about the Apocalypso, where everyone dances to lively Caribbean rhythms?

Now where's that banana man to tally me bananas . . .

How 'bout: the network is down? ;-)

I went for the biblical answer, maily because I haven't heard any theories involving the others.

Wikipedia has the answers.

Polonius

You are sooooo right. That article was my research for this poll.




Dave

Big Heat : CO2 in the atmosphere will bring us a back a new carboniferous era.
Big Freeze : rise of global temperature will change ocean streams regulation and will make the Gulf Stream disappear, which in turn will freeze Europe and north America or Universe will expand indefinetely and mid energy level will fall forever until every star burns out and everything freezes to death for ever
Big Crunch : Universe will cease to expand and will contract again, to the Big Crunch and a new Big Bang to come.
Big rip I don't know of.

It's Heath Death, not Big Heat, as in the heat death of the Universe. That is, the ultimate consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. A uniformly warm, high-entropy universe where nothing can happen because there's no sink left (sort of like the depletion of a ZPM :-P)

--
In Bob We Trust, All Others Bring Data.

Thanks for the info, but I still stand by my original choice.

I chose Heat Death, but one option left out was the
Lawyerclysm.

----
Data..for the sake of data.

Big rip for me! you never know one day you might be using a parachute either for fun or a holywood movie stylie escape
For the glory of the empire ! Rob

What, your Monday brain, bought by Microsoft? Poor soul! ;)

Last I knew (I've not been keeping close track; "last I knew" is a couple of years old), hotmail still had numerous BSD boxes. M$ was finding these highly non-trivial to completely eliminate. An interviewed sysadmin said everytime they replaced one with a Windows box, another BSD box was installed elsewhere. I think he used an analogy to cockroaches, but I may be wrong.

emc

"Being forced to write comments actually improves code, because it is easier to fix a crock than to explain it. "
—G. Steele

I had heard that, too, but the last word I'd heard (again, a while back) was that Management (!) was insistent upon eliminating BSD, no matter how many (hundreds of) boxen they had to add.

<SHAMELESS PLUG>

Here, our whole division's DNS and routing trees, and quite a few of our heavy load servers, are now happily FreeBSD. Every time the NT-oriented senior folks have a "moment", they task a junior admin with the problem and he solves it with FreeBSD. Our CAD systems admin would love to replace the RHL-E3 boxen that are used for EDA chip-simulation runs with FreeBSD, but he keeps running into places where the apps are Linux-specific, such as expecting a non-standard xterm. For the tools for which they do work, they're both faster and much more load-tolerant than the RH machines.

</SHAMELESS PLUG>

We SHALL overcome! :D

Don Wilde
"There's more than one level to any answer."

Worst scenario? How about caffeine anihilation? Meaning we've run out of coffee beans world wide! Think of the chaos! OH! THE HUMANITY!

It would be the end of all life as we know it.

(And it is a quite simple molecule anyway. Organic chemists are your friends!)

Since I'm not Christian, the Apocolypse is definitely worse for me. In any of the other scenarios, I'm just dead like everyone else.

So, its ok to die as long as you take everyone else with you? :)

dieing is fine ... as long as it's inside an eval block.

Dying = bad

Going to Hell = worse

The only thing worse than those options, is living long enough to see them.

How about: *GAME OVER* back to reality

Yup. Nobody can be sure he's not just a simulation running in a big computer somewhere on a 13th Floor ;)


holli, /regexed monk/

I won't continue the debate / argument further, but I would like to point out that having varied interests doesn't mean that you're automatically worthy of being ignored. It just means you're creative. I bet lots of Perlmonks have unusual interests; for instance, I'm a member of the International Jugglers Association.

Good point about the drift. Of course, that doesn't explain how you get fossilized fish on top of mountains

Drifting continents have a lot of momentum. They don't stop on a dime, and when they collide the sea floor increases in elevation as the contents buckle (i.e. The sea floor is pushed up, forming mountains).

*sigh* And here I was expecting your post to end with continents ramming schools of fish and sending them flying through the air rather than simple creation of mountain ranges.

Or we could be impacted by a rock the size of a small moon. One can never predict these things, otherwise they wouldn't be disasters, would they?

In fact, some of the ice in Antarctica is thickening, despite the accelerating outflow elsewhere. It's a phenomonon that's not satisfactorily explained today. But I'm not aware (and it's part of my business to be so) of *significant* increases anywhere else; not in the north, nor in extreme Alpine regimes.

And while there's considerable evidence for disparate climatic change, S. vs N, it's very clear that the 'cap in Greenland -- home to a huge proportion of the northern hemisphere's frozen water -- is undergoing as much or more melting each year (over the past 8-15 for certain) than anytime in the historic record in our cores. Further, it's starting to look as though open water is more widespread and, for any given location, earlier, throughout the Arctic and, while data is *VERY* spotty, that ice-thickness is decreasing precipitously.

All that said, TedPride's apocalyptic concerns with rocks and nukes may be better justified than any Hollywood scenarios giving us glaciers rushing south at highway speeds...

conveniently ignoring the ice elsewhere in the world, which in many cases is growing rather than shrinking

That's the strangest argument to make. Should we therefore conclude that we don't have to do anything? What we are facing is just a question of ice being distributed around the globe in a different manner, but apart from that everything is hunky-dory? I won't go skiing in the Alps any more, but the North York Moors are starting to look promising?

And these increases more than offset the observed decrease in the Arctic, Antartic and Greenland icepacks? And those of the Alps, the Himalayas and even Mount Kilimanjaro, all of which are known to have permanent ice covers in decline?

I doubt any increase is offsetting all that.

• another intruder with the mooring in the heart of the Perl

I rather doubt...

Whew! I feel much better now. Nothing to worry about.

We're building the house of the future together.

When it comes to melting ice and changes in sea-level, floating ice doesn't matter at all. When it melts it will take up exactly the same space as the water it displaced by floating.

The thing we have to worry about is ice that lives on land, like the Greenland ice sheet.

Oh, and about your moon-sized-rock: we already track everything bigger than a few kilometers. So, sure it might kill us, but we'll have a hundred years or so to think about it.

  "...we already track everything bigger than a few kilometers.

True! Kachin... ^H^H^H
BRAAAATTTTT
.oO ...oops, not quick enough to correct /me.

<error horn vibrations ebb>...


Well, actually, only for those cases of "everything" where "everything" includes only the set whose membership is coterminus with the set "those that we happen to know about."

...and each year, astronomers, amateur and career, discover (some .. several) new and previously unknown "rocks" whose orbits CROSS that of the earth. I believe this year's count of such new discoveries, for rocks with radius > 5 km. is already on the order of 3.

Oh, and about your moon-sized-rock: we already track everything bigger than a few kilometers. So, sure it might kill us, but we'll have a hundred years or so to think about it.

And a few decades to think about being hit by a rock bigger the size of the Moon will make me feel better how?

Sings "Anticipation...anticipa-a-ation..." while searching for his Carly Simon CD's

emc

"Being forced to write comments actually improves code, because it is easier to fix a crock than to explain it. "
—G. Steele

Somehow, this isn't altogether comforting. Even a fairly small rock, 1 or 2 km. in diameter, could ruin your whole day. At that size, huge clouds of dust would be spewed up, probably causing seriously cold weather for a few years. Also, it would adversely affect any city it landed on by annihilating it. Depending on which city it was, this might be considered a bad thing.

http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm

Re "local climate changes," -- the locales moved, for cryin' out loud. That's why we have fossil evidence of dinosaurs and some somewhat more modern biota in Antarctica. please read re "Continental Drift" and "plate tectonics" --

• USGS primer
• Berkley animations
• Continental Drift
• Continental Drift: young children's version

...and I find it very hard to give any credence to OISM: Its so-called "faculty" have their interests engaged so widely -- from "Civil Defense" strategies to YetAnotherVariant of homeschooling -- that it's difficult for me to take them or their assertions seriously ... and, in any case, the paper you cite argues heavily on the basis of short-term ( eg: post-1940 ) trends while largely ignoring the fact (substantiated by ice cores worldwide and bio-data such as that from well-dated tree samples, etc) that the current, significant increase in atmospheric CO2 began with the Industrial Revolution.

But... this is the last from me on this topic. TedPride is NOT a troll, nor, I hope, am I, but we have very widely divergent views of the available data, hypotheses, and conclusions, and this is really far OT, IMO.

Fatal Attraction