How's the world gonna end in your mind? Will mankind be gone? Will the universe be gone? Would surviving humans be thrown into chaos or band together? and the all important question... Will they keep trying to make new episodes of the Simpsons?
The way I see it is everything goes through cycles that are part of greater cycles which are part of a greater cycles and so on...and on...to infinity. The world will always change, it will expand and collapse, and expand and collapse, and at some point the world will change to another state. Nothing really ends, it just changes itself, adapts to the new criteria. A civilization on Earth will not demise, it will give birth to the new state of civilization from its ashes. The chaos was never there either, there was always some humans who were together. --- You want to know a particular cycle end within the cycles of civilizations...? correct?
Depends on your definition of apocalypse, I guess... If you're talking the Christian version, apparently this world will go to shit, but the rest of the universe will observe our small planet glow with the light of nuclear warheads and say "ooooo, pretty....". Personally, I believe Fallout 3 has trained me very well for the inevitable onslaught of zombies, dog-sized roaches, moles, and flies, and vampire people. I look forward to living the glorious free life the way Max did in the Australian documentary series "Mad Max". Driving a V-8 car with Nitros. In a world with scarcely any fuel. Think about that for a sec... Or I could just humble myself, enjoy life, and take the end as it comes and do my best (if it comes). Renewed societies after a nuclear war could be nice, somewhat pacifist societies, drawing from the nuclear war a page of "lessons learned in foreign policy".
Such a thing as "post-nuclear pacifism" would be good and bad. Think. Most of our world's innovations have been based on war and conflict. There's a risk that all progress would stop after we learned to survive as humans.
I would say it would be a combination of criteria, guirilla wars throughout, overpopulation issues, resource depletion, environmental degradation... my end would be something like a story from Wall-E...except people will still be living on Earth and there will be countless number of spaceships, ports...and etc. as well as dirt zones here and there amongst piles of garbage.
I'm not saying it's all hearts and rainbows... well, maybe I am... but of course technology will slow down for a while, till people start pissing each other off again and start revitalizing stockpiles of pre-war weaponry.
We cannot fully learn to survive as humans as universe is quite capable of providing is with infinite number of tasks that question our survivability on my levels of expertise and adaptability of our bodies.
Exterminate!!! not nessarly. Your correct that ALOT of invention has been through war but its not true to say it all has been. Look at emergency med for example, it was once true that almost all treatments for trauma were whatever had worked in the last war but now we have ambulance proffessionals and (more importantly for this debate) university resurch into pre hospital emergency health care. It might not be the case right now that ambos are more experianced and more knowlageable than there millatry medic counterparts but i see it as quite likly to be the case with in my working life time
