Digital Wanderer

Watched the documentary film "Last Days On Earth" on the ABC channel. It talks about the 7 most likely ends of human civilization. The film is beautiful, albeit populist.

I'll list them in order of probability (roughly based on the film), with my comments.
1)Astrophysical disaster: explosion of our or a neighboring sun, a wandering black hole.
Unlikely, but beautiful.

2)Asteroid.
Slightly more likely, but there is a high chance of influencing its orbit and saving ourselves. This was covered in the film.

3)Artificial intelligence.
The probability is hard to estimate, but personally I consider it high. The thing is, the number of transistors is approaching the number of neurons in the human brain, and therefore Prigogine's "transition of quantity into quality" might kick in, with minimal effort from humans themselves. 20-50 years left, no more.

4)Supervolcano eruption.
There is a special type of volcano that can spew out a massive amount of lava and ash. This will clog the atmosphere, create a pseudo-nuclear winter and poison the water to acid levels over a huge territory. One such eruption could wipe out the population of almost all of America.

5)Nuclear war.
For now, making nuclear weapons isn't that simple, but the task is gradually getting easier. On the one hand, the geopolitical atmosphere isn't great right now, on the other - truly sick regimes could only harm their neighbors, if anyone at all. The only plausible scenario for a global catastrophe is a provocation staged by terrorists and the stupidity of one of the nuclear powers taking the bait. Russia is in a bad spot here: the guarding is poor, it can be blown up or stolen.

6)Bacteriological threat.
Everyone has heard of the avian flu. Well - there are lots of diseases like that. The threat is also growing thanks to the widespread use of antibiotics and the active fight against diseases. The better we fight, the harder they hit back.
There have been many pandemics, and bacteria and especially viruses - are the most perfect creatures on earth, with incredible abilities to adapt.
Considering that equipment for modifying and improving them is widely available, the threat increases manifold - soon a few tens of millions of dollars will be enough to obtain a deadly strain of some well-known disease. Creating an antidote takes a few months - by that time everyone will already be dead.

7)Global warming.
An absolutely one-sided point of view was presented in the film. Global warming is a fact, and it is caused by humans. That's what all climatologists think, except for a few bought by TNCs.
If we don't do anything, a large part of the inhabited territory will soon be underwater, terrible tsunamis and tornadoes will start, and a slow and unpleasant clusterfuck awaits us all.
Looks plausible, good thing at least it won't be right now.

Each episode was commented on by scientists - experts in their field. And they asked the most famous scientist on the planet - astrophysicist Stephen Hawking (Hawking) to cover it all as a whole.
Hawking is a cult figure in the world of techno-freaks. He is a paralytic, confined to a wheelchair, and capable only of blinking. Under his instructions, a system was created that allowed him not only to communicate with the outside world, but also to engage in scientific activity. He wrote the books "A Brief History of Time" and "A Briefer History of Time", which became bestsellers.
His commentary in the film looked unrealistically cool and futuristic: a motionless person of the "mad scientist" type, and a computer-synthesized voice, the meaning of whose words is repeated on the screen with subtitles.
Moreover, the commentary was very short, extremely clear, and grasped the essence.

The film's leitmotif is this: if we can't rein ourselves in, we'll die out. At best, almost everyone, not everyone.
And the practical advice is this: conserve electricity and the environment. Americans just can't do without moralizing :-)

It's a pity another scenario wasn't presented in the film - witty, but hardly comprehensible to the layman. They could have at least talked about it, if only as part of the episode on artificial intelligence.
This scenario is Vernor Vinge's singularity.