Gigadeath: Billions of people, or some number roughly comparable to the number of people alive, die.
That happened during the 20th century.
Human extinction: No humans survive afterward. (Or modified slightly: no human-like life survives, or no sentient life survives, or no intelligent life survives.)
Wait wait wait... These are four vastly different things.
Existential disaster: Some significant fraction, perhaps all, of the future's potential moral value is lost.
Since a whole lotta people here don't believe in morals, or at least not without so many qualifications that the average Joe wouldn't recognize what they were talking about, you need to explain this in a different way.
"Doomsday argument doomsday": The total number of observers (or observer-moments) in existence ends up being small – not much larger than the total that have existed in the past.
Not all observers are equal; so counting them is not enough. Is a singleton a doomsday?
Existential disaster: Some significant fraction, perhaps all, of the future's potential moral value is lost.
Since a whole lotta people here don't believe in morals, or at least not without so many qualifications that the average Joe wouldn't recognize what they were talking about, you need to explain this in a different way.
It all adds up to normality. The average Joe might not credit our explanations of what morality is. But such explanations are about what morality is "behind the scenes". That is, they are explanations of what stands b...
Analysts of humanity's future sometimes use the word "doom" rather loosely. ("Doomsday" has the further problem that it privileges a particular time scale.) But doom sounds like something important; and when something is important, it's important to be clear about what it is.
Some properties that could all qualify an event as doom:
Examples to illustrate that these properties are fundamentally different: