@DonaldHRoberts link? Because this world has well over 6 Billion people and I'll bet India alone has way more deaths a day......

@DonaldHRoberts their stats make No sense if you do even the slightest bit of math! For example, if 55,ooo,ooo+ die each year, that is Far more than 156,000/day!???! I Googled India deaths per day and it alone was over 200,000!

@DonaldHRoberts I just find it hard to understand why people quote as "gospel" stuff that is obviously weird.....

Stephen Hawking and Carl sagan were both of the opinion that contact with Alien races would probably end VERY badly for us.
All one has to do is look at why we went looking for new lands to exploit and what we did to the peoples already living there.

Yes in a recent survey in the USA that included a question on what might be the downfall of civilization in the west the most popular answer was "Zombie Apocalypse"

Say s it all really.

You might enjoy John Vervaeke and Chris Maestropietro's discussion on zombies. The talk is based on their book Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis. Here's a link to the first discussion.

@brentan, @LenHazell53 It’s been ‘world-wide plague,’ ‘WW3,’ or a ‘societal breakdown’ that pulls me in.. Never have gotten into the zombie stuff.

@brentan They seem to be over complicating the Zombie in modern cultural symbolism.
Taken basically the Zombie is alive but dead and in this sense is the ultimate consumer, it produces nothing other than other Zombies, but consumes everything in a literally mindless fashion.
Therefore it is a symbol for the modern consumerist society that values nothing cultural (art, music, philosophie) and simple consumes ravenously to satisfy it's hedonist gluttony until there is nothing left.

@LenHazell53 Yes indeed. They covered that well and quite a few other aspects of the zombie metaphor too.

It is absolutely astonishing to think our genes might be calling the shots on population control. I’ve enjoyed Camille Paglia’s take on civilisations being started by male violence, progressing to high culture and then degenerating into weakness and opening the door to another cycle from ‘barbarians’. I have a lot of empathy for homosexuals, especially since I discovered the attraction in myself, but I think civilisation is being threatened again by physical weakness. It might also mean that the survival of the species is being protected by what we perceive as threat. It might help us to think, not in terms of civilisation or morality, but at the level of the gene to understand how to go forward. The problem with that is that the last ones to do that were the Nazis. I wonder is there a gene-based ideology that protects civilisation and all the people in it?

@brentan It is fascinating but one should not confuse societal growth and degeneration with simple population fluctuations, both can happen completely independent of the other.
The ultimate fall of the Roman Empire was caused by rampant capitalism replacing the war ethic and the replacement of a militaristic government being overtaken by an economic one, this was in spite of the fact that the spread of Roman colonies actually reduced overpopulation and crowding.
And likewise the British empire was destroyed when the wealth of the empire and it's maintenance replaced pragmatic patriotism and so called civilisation, because of the ridiculous British idea that concentrated populations in cities were easier to control.
Homosexuality is in no way wrong and seems to be the first natural line of defense in nature against overpopulation a form of natural birth control, not to be confused with the filthy doctrine of eugenics, and is infinitely preferable to the violence brought about by instinct in people faced with overpopulation and the fear of a threat to personal survival.

@DonaldHRoberts Prophets of doom I can do without. I’m capable of understanding what’s going on in the world without being in a constant state of despondency.