These are very interesting, particularly the Values Apocalypse. I'd be curious to draw up a longer and more detailed spectrum. I limited this one to seven to keep it low-resolution and memorable.

We could add here "Qualia apocalypses" - human are alive but become p-zombies may be after wrong uploading

Intelligence apocalypses - human go extinct, but no other form of intelligence appear. Or human survive but their creative intelligence permanently damaged and IQ never rise above 80. May be because global contamination by arsenic.

Gene allele apocalypses - many interesting alleles in human genom disappear. The remains look like humans but many interesting traits are lost.

Primate apocalypses - all high apes extinct including humans, new intelligence on Earth could appear only after 10 million years from now or more.

Mammal apocalypses.

Vertebral apocalypses

Values apocalypses - human values eroded and replaced by another values, like Nazi. Probably it has happened several times in history.

Evolution apocalypses - evolution just ends, human exists almost forever, but nothing new happens, no superAI, no star travel. Just the end of complexity growth. AI may appear but will be as boring as Windows 7.

Individuality apocalypses - humans become all very similar to each other. It already happened with globalisation.

Children apocalypses - human just stop to reproduce above replacement rate.

Art apocalypses - human lost interest to arts or ability to create really interesting art. Some think that it has already happened.

Wire-geading-euporium-superdrug apocalypses. New ways of the brain stimulation completely distract humans from real life. ̶T̶h̶e̶y ̶s̶p̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶t̶i̶m̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶F̶B̶

Wrong upgrade apocalypses - human basic drives are edited on birth so they are not aggressive, but they also lose interest to space exploration (S.Lem novel about it).

Farmers are nursing small pigs like their children, but later kill them and eat them. It may be unpredictable for pigs.

A spy who works like an ordinary person, but sometimes stole information.

As a cryonicist, I'm drafting out a text describing my revival preferences and requests, to be stored along with my other paperwork. (Oddly enough, this isn't a standard practice.) The current draft is here. I'm currently seeking suggestions for improvement, and a lot of the people around here seem to have good heads on their shoulders, so I thought I'd ask for comments here. Any thoughts?

As a cryonicist, I'm drafting out a text describing my revival preferences and requests, to be stored along with my other paperwork. (Oddly enough, this isn't a standard practice.) The current draft is here. I'm currently seeking suggestions for improvement, and a lot of the people around here seem to have good heads on their shoulders, so I thought I'd ask for comments here. Any thoughts?

I think we need to get clearer on what "why," "something" and "exists" mean.

For example, if you assume that numbers "exist", that is, you are willing to attach the descriptor "exist" to numbers, then you already have your answer: "Because numbers exist necessarily!"

Voila! End of story! Move over, folks, nothing(...) to see here.

Still, if you think that numbers are "something" and that they "exist," then it still doesn't answer why THE PHYSICAL world exists, or consciousness. I guess that now you can follow Tegmark's footsteps and say that everything is mathematics, and that's it. (But maybe there is a separate answer?)

So now (for Platonists) the "why" question is not why something exists, it is how to prove physical existence from the necessary existence of numbers or mathematical structures.

So like I said, before one tries to answer this question one first has to give some working definition as to what "why," "something" and "exists" mean.

turchin, i just want to say that i really like these idea-catalog infographics.

I meant that Internet knows about its own existence in form of scientific research which studies Internet and is published in the Internet. It is also self-aware by the mind of people who use it, nothing mystical here.

I suspect that this idea of self awareness differs considerably from what most people think of by self awareness. For example, your criteria would seem to classify the following things as self-aware:

1. A printed edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, if that edition contains an article about the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
2. A corporate IT department's Asset Management System (which is a computer-based repository of information about applications that the department manages), if it contains information about the Asset Management System.
3. Any literary work which refers to itself (e.g. John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, in which two of the characters discuss the opera itself at various points in the opera, or Denis Diderot's novel Jacques The Fatalist and His Master, which contains numerous asides in which the narrator discusses Diderot's novel).

Do you consider those things to be self aware?

Interesting list, thanks for posting it.

One question: You describe a quantum computer as "hypothetically more powerful than total calculation power of the universe". What does that mean?

On the one hand, even a deterministic Turing machine is hypothetically more powerful than the total calculation power of the universe, since a hypothetical Turing machine has an infinite tape. So your statement would appear to be trivially true (because you said "hypothetical").

On the other hand, it seems that no actual quantum computer can be more powerful than the total calculation power of the universe, since any actual quantum computer that we were to build would be part of the universe.

So, what does this statement really say regarding the power of a quantum computer?

You say of the Internet (search engines, database engines, exchange media, distributed calculations) that it is "self-aware". That seems like a strong claim to make with no further explanation. How did you arrive at that conclusion?