self-annihilation

We make buildings to capture our longing for self-annihilation. We are surrounded by life and long for death.

I'm much more concerned about self-annihilation with nuclear weapons in the short run than any remote asteroid destroying us all.

And the possible avenues for self-annihilation are only expanding. It used to be "only" nuclear war and climate change, soon it's also gene editing, and the robot uprising is already on the horizon for the next 100 years or so.

Never experiencing anything new, endless bliss or pain would be indistinguishable or result in withdrawal and self-annihilation. At least if my body dies, it will still change over time and become something else.

On a purely subjective note, I don't see how escaping into virtual reality is a "darker" fate than nuclear self-annihilation. existence > non-existence

Or is it and its ilk of science degrees merely a relentless march to the day that the whole world disappears in one of two ways, self-annihilation or self-exile in VR? And even if we survive somehow, what about once the relentless march of science is over, when there are no more secrets to uncover?

Well, in a sense, its already been detected, but just not directly detected in a lab, produced by the LHC, or observed via any self-annihilation process. We know something it exists through cosmological observations - so in that sense its been found.

Presently, the greatest danger to humanity is self-annihilation. Making the transition to an interstellar species is imperative in order to eliminate this danger.

I've been lucky to have survived several different bouts of raging curiosity; as a species, curiosity about things like nuclear reactions has brought with it the risk of self-annihilation. Space exploration has claimed a number of lives, as has more conventional exploration throughout history.

Now, it won't allow you to end the cycle of rebirth to achieve moksha/mukti/nirvana, because all karma binds you to the cycle of rebirth, but it will let you "climb the ladder" to a life where you are better suited to pursue these ultimate goals of self-annihilation. So if you're a Christian the answer is probably "no" -- "harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle" and all that.

On one hand, the self-annihilation idea implies that super-predator civilizations, being extremely rate to exist, would not have strong motivations for exterminating competitors. What would possibly be the need, given the vastness of time and space, and the thermodynamic arguments given?

Folks often invoke "curiosity killed the cat" as a way to communicate "unenriched and empowerment-lacking people are prone to self-annihilation while in their search for harmony". What they don't do is follow the thinking to its conclusion: "But the cat was simply trying to gain root access beyond a seemingly impenetrable social inertia.

He's a Bayesian, and his priors are predicated on the belief that the lack of apparent intelligent life in the universe is attributable to self-annihilation. In all seriousness, calculating a probability of death from nuclear calamity isn't going to be possible without a great number of caveats and assumptions.

That drive is so powerful, Nietzsche’s saying, that when forced to the precipice of nihilism, we would choose meaningful self-annihilation over meaningless bare life. This insight was horrifically borne out in the Götterdämmerung of Nazi Germany, just as it’s being borne out today in every new suicide attack by jihadi terrorists — even as it’s being borne out here at home in our willfully destructive politics of rage."

The laws we know now would just be the ones that lasted - maybe because the others underwent some kind of self-annihilation, or maybe because the 'successful' laws we know now in some way reconstituted the cosmos, so that the others were no longer propagable and vanished. Apparently wave function collapse is a time-irreversible process, though it happens because of the 2nd law of thermodynamics rather than causing it.

It is widely agreed that we are on the very edge of self-annihilation and that we expend a tremendous amount of political effort simply not destroying ourselves. I can see that you're a relatively young and inexperienced account; I hope that you do some reading and improve your understanding of biology and history, rather than continuing to lean on mystic or mythic influences for your worldview.

Of course, to break the cycle, the dragon must spit out the Tail it is devouring, realize the tale being fed was simply a grand story of much harm and suffering, shadows on the cave walls of a fever dream, abandon the attitudes of self-annihilation, and move beyond the realm of the known into the fearsome great unknown where ethics has yet to be blown into a giant red balloon full of helium gas known as Penny-wise.