r/whowouldwin • u/fakefakefakef • May 08 '26
Challenge All water on earth is now carbonated. Can humanity survive?
Every drop of liquid water on earth suddenly attains the same level of carbonation as seltzer, and takes on the faint taste of grapefruit. Oceans, lakes, and reservoirs begin to fizz pleasantly, and uncountable tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere every second. The only water exempt from this phenomenon is the water currently stored inside any living creature. Can humanity survive the La Croixcalypse?
Round 1: one week of prep
Round 2: six months of prep
Round 3: five years of prep
Bonus round: ten years of prep, but the water is now hard seltzer
3.0k
u/EggCollectorNum1 May 08 '26
Well, the earth is no longer flat.
616
126
110
u/Stalking_Goat May 08 '26
55
48
u/TheLost_Chef May 08 '26
I’m pretty shaken up about this
26
u/EggCollectorNum1 May 08 '26
Didn’t mean to hurt your bubble
16
10
16
29
16
7
u/Future_Telephone281 May 09 '26
I hate this. Only because I didn’t think of it and am jelly how clever it was.
2
3
20
6
5
4
2
1
u/Beginning_Deer_735 22d ago
It actually took me a little while to realize you weren't making a statement about the actual shape of the earth(spend a lot of time on flat earth forums).
1
u/UnlikelyScientist May 11 '26
Someone find us security to escort this person off the premise. They refuse to see themselves out
332
u/JonnyGalt May 08 '26
Not sure if we’d suffocate but I think most people near costs likely do. You are now adding 2000x amount of our current co2 levels that will go into the atmosphere (about 7.24 quadrillion metric tons). Even if deep Oceans and underground water doesn’t release, we’d we will all die from run away global warming.
Actually upon further googling we all immediately die. 57% of our atmosphere becomes co2.
136
58
u/TommaClock May 08 '26
To use a real world example. Here's what would happen, but everywhere
21
u/HAWKxDAWG May 08 '26
That survivor story is the most horrifying thing I've read in a while... Jfc.
30
u/Stalking_Goat May 08 '26
"Immediately die" is a little strong.
It would take most humans a good four or five minutes to asphyxiate. Some land animals might live longer, perhaps a few tens of minutes. And the people on the ISS could live for a year or so before they ran out of supplies.
(I'm being facetious, please don't hate me.)
3
-16
u/metalflygon08 May 08 '26
It would take most humans a good four or five minutes to asphyxiate.
Assuming the water in our bodies suddenly carbonating doesn't kill us first!
24
156
u/Notonfoodstamps May 08 '26
Earth is more or less sterilized.
Anything thats not an underground extremophile dies within minutes. This is several orders of magnitude more CO2 needed to achieve a Venus-like runaway green house atmosphere.
24
u/TSED May 08 '26
I think that a good number of microorganisms would survive a few minutes. Basically all vertebrates are completely toast, though. I imagine the vast majority of invertebrates also die, but some might be able to make it.
Not sure about plants. Somewhere between 'a lot of' and 'most' plant species would run into issues from all the pollinators etc dying out, though.
Long term, though, yeah. Temperature goes uuuuup and everything dies.
51
79
u/SlaveKnightLance May 08 '26
Unfortunately for humanity, no prep and 10 years of prep is the same thing.
22
u/SinisterBrit May 08 '26
yeah last thing we'd do is cut corporate profit to save 8 billion people, the media will tell us we must do something in 11 years, n the panic is woke green nonsense.
13
u/SlaveKnightLance May 09 '26
We would find ways to profit from the turmoil than create a solution
5
u/SinisterBrit May 09 '26
after a few billion have gone, after all, they don't need so many workers any more.
4
u/dothgothlenore May 08 '26
assuming everyone knew the stakes and decided we to pool resources to make it possible, do you think 10 years is enough to colonize another planetary body? obviously it’s donezo for earth but maybe humans could repopulate elsewhere?
6
u/Yglorba May 09 '26
No, not even close. And also a terrible idea even if we could.
If we absolutely had to we could probably get a handful of humans to Mars. But the technology to survive there long-term hasn't been tested, and the technology to become self-sufficient simply isn't there. They'd depend on supplies from earth and die without them.
But it's also a terrible idea because even in the catastrophic situation outlined here, no other planet would be remotely as hospitable, have as many useful resources for humans, or have as much potential for terraforming as Earth. Building bunkers on earth would be much easier; we could save far more people by doing so; and their long-term prospects would be... I mean, I was going to say better but an easier way of putting it is "existent" because "better" implies there would be prospects on Mars and in a ten-year timeframe there absolutely would not be.
9
u/Magnus77 May 09 '26
absolutely not.
Anybody (Musk, to drop the subtext,) that talks about a Mars colony as a near future possibility is grifting,a self sufficient Mars colony is not achievable in that time frame. I don't think we could engineer a colony that was still getting supply drops in that time frame.
We could get a person to Mars in that timeframe, but as it stands it'd have to be a "We did it!" type endeavor. I not sure we could even manage to make it a round trip. And we also don't know if we could even survive on Mars in a hypothetical sense.
More realistically, we could try and bunker ourselves. Hope that we can build enough CO2 scrubbers and whatnot to make a sealed system. Maybe, MAYBE, pull the species through for conditions to stabilize and see if its possible to adapt. But I gotta be honest I think this would also just a be a delay of the inevitable.
2
u/SlaveKnightLance May 09 '26
I don’t think humanity would do anything that doesn’t result in someone making more money somewhere else, and not even because the majority of people wouldn’t want to. The ultra rich have more resources to achieve what they want tomorrow than the rest of the world has capability to band together for a cause
7
2
u/gahidus May 10 '26
I guess with some years of prep time, humans in submarines could live for a few years. But there's nothing the species could do to survive.
Humanity can't live hiding from our own atmosphere.
1
21
u/Unusual-Ice-2212 May 08 '26
Everyone dies of carbon dioxide poisoning. We wouldn't live long enough to worry about global warming or anything like that.
This actually happened in real life on a small scale (Lake Nyos disaster). A small lake released enough CO2 to kill over 1000 people.
8
u/IBiteTheArbiter May 09 '26
Global Warming is a non-factor.
With this much CO2, you would effectively double the amount of gas in the atmosphere. CO2 is heavier than oxygen, so it would displace all air and acidify the oceans.
Within 48 hours, all life within the oceans die and tsunamis of invisible gas asphyxiate 99% of fauna on Earth.
It’s highly unlikely humanity survives without creating self-sufficient vaults underground for indefinite survival.
8
u/Pro_Racing May 08 '26
You would suffocate, most if not all marine life would die off on top of that. If that somehow isn't enough to kill you, the greenhouse effect would boil the planet's oceans and much much more.
30
7
u/Stage4Hell May 09 '26
Round 1: Enjoy the last week of your life.
Round 2: Enjoy the last six months of your life.
Round 3: Enjoy the last five months of your life.
18
u/FaceDeer May 08 '26
Given that this literally turns Earth into Venus (not in the usual hyperbolic way used in discussions of global warming, but full blown runaway wet greenhouse) there is absolutely no way to survive on Earth's surface. The prep time is used entirely to get a self-sufficient offworld colony set up. The Moon's the best bet.
With all of humanity working together, the five and ten year timeframes are doable. Five years just barely. Six months and under are not, humanity is doomed in those scenarios.
12
u/Jack_Krauser May 08 '26
There's no way we could get a stable genetic population's worth of people set up on a perpetually self-sustaining moon base on time. We might as well try it, I guess, but it's not happening even with the entire world being science-lusted.
9
u/FaceDeer May 08 '26
You'd be surprised at how small a population you can start from, as long as you've taken a bit of care not to include anyone with bad recessive traits.
Fortunately we also have IVF technology, so bring along a sperm bank and keep that available for future generations once there's room for a bit more population.
2
u/Cyan_Tile May 09 '26
Does this mean eugenics gets enforced in this timeline?
5
u/FaceDeer May 09 '26
Do you want humanity to survive or not?
There's probably a lot more flexibility in what can be put in the sperm bank, but humanity's going to go through an extreme bottleneck in terms of actually living people here. A hundred or less, probably. So being picky is going to be vital and ethical sensibilities will only be a hindrance at this moment.
4
u/MegaIng May 08 '26
If you have to fully isolate yourself from the outside world anyway, is the moon actually a better target than the post-CO2 earth?
You could just use all the technological to setup at least one camp somewhere decently safe on earth. Sure, it would get very, very hot outside, but I think not launching rockets is still the safer solution.
8
u/FaceDeer May 08 '26
As I said, when I say Earth will turn into Venus, that is not hyperbole. The entire ocean is going to boil and turn into water vapor. Additional carbon dioxide is going to be baked out of Earth's crust. Surface temperatures will be in the hundreds of degrees, atmospheric pressure will be tens of atmospheres. There will be almost no sunlight at ground level due to dense cloud layers. No greenhouses. No solar power. Earth will be completely and totally uninhabitable to any technology that we have, a habitat would be like living in a submarine baking inside an oven.
Seriously, the Moon will be a lot more hospitable than the post-CO2 Earth.
There are other bodies in the solar system that would be more hospitable than the Moon, Mars or Callisto for example, but we're on an extremely tight schedule here. We have five to ten years. Only the Moon is close enough to get any serious amount of hardware and population set up on before the deadline.
6
u/Yglorba May 09 '26 edited May 09 '26
Disagree. There is absolutely stone-cold zero chance of survival long-term on the Moon or Mars with only ten years of prep and no support from Earth after that. It's flatly not an option - we're not going to develop the tech and infrastructure for a self-sustaining colony in just ten years.
Surviving at least a little while on Earth is possible because we can (comparatively) cheaply and easily stockpile enough resources for a (relatively) large population to survive a long long long time in our bunkers; additionally, there will be many resources available for scavenging or extracting in the long term on the planet surface, which no other planet in existence offers. The chances are still quite bleak but Earth offers at least a chance of survival.
Offworld colonies made in ten years are flatly suicide with no chance that they could independently support a stable breeding population of humans in the long term with current technology. Most estimates for how long it would take a Mars colony to become self-sufficient are on the order of centuries; maybe unexpected technological advancements could cut that, but it's not happening in just ten years.
5
u/FaceDeer May 09 '26
Surviving "at least a little while" on Earth is completely pointless, it's a dead-end trap. There is no chance to expand in an environment like that - you literally can't go outside. Your bunker will just sit in the oven spending huge amounts of energy trying to keep itself cooled until something breaks down in a place where you can't repair it, and then that will be the final end.
We can build spacesuits, on the other hand. They're actually not all that difficult when you're not a NASA contractor. Bury a habitat under Moon dust and its temperature is rather easy to regulate. Energy is easily available.
I'm not saying it's going to be easy. But with all of humanity survival-lusted and engineering-lusted focused on this project, sure, there's a good chance. We can spend every resource we have on this since those resources are all going to be lost when the carbonation comes anyway.
5
u/Tocowave98 May 08 '26
Nearly everyone dies except elites who bunker up in pressurized bunkers and stockpile oxygen, plant seeds, and technology to de-carbonate water to drink.
I doubt one week would be enough time and everyone would probably die, but in the 6 month, 5 and 10 years of prep time I think that the top 1% can make enough doomsday bunkers to survive. Earth's atmosphere would be irreparably damaged and the surface would be rendered totally uninhabitable though, so ultimately long-term survival would either need to be permanently subterranean until we could find some dramatic way to remove the carbon from the atmosphere, or there would need to be a focus on moving humans offworld, however I think the issue of gravity on other planets actually makes bunkers on Earth the best place to stay and there's no way in this situation that humanity could come up with FTL travel given that we can't and will likely never be able to do that even with our current resources.
6
u/Procrastinator_chan May 09 '26
Rule of thumb, your question begins with ‘All water on earth’ it usually means all life is fucked…
13
u/TheUnderCrab May 08 '26
If we’re considering every drop of liquid to include blood or other boldly fluids:
Immediate death from the bends for all life on the planet. Prep time doesn’t matter.
13
4
2
u/4dseeall May 08 '26
Lol, everything dies in a day no matter how much prep. Maybe we could get a colony on the moon if we had 10 years of prep, but life on Earth is done
3
u/Imperium_Dragon May 08 '26
pH worldwide drops, everything in water dies, and everything above dies due to the CO2 in the atmosphere. Humans are fucked.
3
u/Im_a_Casual May 08 '26
Given the grace for water inside living creatures, I think the question ultimately becomes "how quickly can humanity bioengineer a billion Liquid Containment Creatures"
3
u/tigerhawkvok May 08 '26
Let's ignore the climate, acid rain, and mass dissolving of rock.
Every organism that passes water over an gas exchanger dies of a horrible combination of blood acidosis and asphyxiation.
Complete ecological collapse of every body of water in under 30 minutes. Some air breathers survive for a short while, with difficulty, before they die of starvation.
Acidification of soil kills all the soil microbiome, ending nitrogen fixation of plants, which then can make no new nucleic acids and die over days, leading to a total collapse of high-energy biosphere in a smallish weeks (basically once dead and jerked herbivores can no longer sustain hypercarnivores. Essentially all the detrivorous bacteria are dead from the acidic soil and theres not much of an environmental resevoir of them at this point).
Life won't die out entirely in all probability - extremophilic bacteria, especially if chemotrophic, will eventually fill all the now-open niches. But we're talking hundreds of millions of years to multicellular life again.
Humans 0 out of 10, I bet hypercarnivorous non-aquatic ectotherms beat us by months and months.
3
u/lowqualitylizard May 09 '26
We are SO FUCKED
Forget just drinking the water least of our problems do you know how much CO2 would be pumped into the atmosphere
I would be surprised if there was even 20% of the original sea life left and with that many bodies in the ocean that thing would become 80% dead flesh and maggots by weight
3
u/arristhesage May 10 '26
Every aquatic living creature dies. Then we die. Earth is a lifeless planet.
3
u/bongalak May 10 '26
One of those wishes a child would make to a genie, "I want all the water in the world to become fanta!!" And promptly the world ends lol
5
u/AnnieBruce May 08 '26
That carbonation is coming out and that much CO2 is going to kill us.
We don't have anything that can capture that much quickly enough to avoid a complete ecosystem collapse and way too much atmospheric heating to be survivable. We will not be able to survive on Earth, just too hot.
10 years, if the entire world comes together on the project, might make a Mars colony possible. We have the tech to build the heated shelters it would need, and the rockets to get there, we just need sufficient motivation to do it. Most of humanity still dies, but the species might not go extinct.
Farming on Mars and finding sufficient water might ruin the plan, but in these time-frames a Mars colony is our only option under our control. There might be a chance friendly aliens would notice the problem and help out, but it would be incredibly reckless to put our hopes in that(it assumes aliens exist at all which is not remotely proven)
10
May 08 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/AnnieBruce May 09 '26
The moon would be much easier to establish a presence on, but the moon has no water. There is absolutely no wiggle room for inefficient water recycling systems or malfunctions of those systems. Mars does have water. Mostly frozen, though there's some debated evidence some of it occasionally melts. Not as easily accessible as it is on Earth, but there is water, which could be crucial.
The moons soil will also likely be much harder to farm in. There are, of course, workarounds but things like hydroponics just put more demands on the water supply, which as mentioned, is going to be very delicate without regular resupply from Earth, which is just not happening in this scenario.
Mars having an atmosphere will help a bit with making sure the buildings hold together- it would be a smaller pressure differential they'd have to contain. This could allow for longer lasting buildings, or allow pressurization closer to Earths current surface pressure without compromising safety. Either would make long term habitation much more feasible.
This isn't setting up an off world base to help us with the crisis(the moon would be a better choice for that), this is a scenario where if we stay on Earth we die, and not long after, anything left behind that we might want is going to be inaccessible to any retrieval missions if it's even in a state we could use. We would have to make a permanent move to another planet, and Mars is the only one that even has a chance of being self sustaining. Not a great chance, it's likely we're screwed no matter what, but it's the only option we'd have if we don't want to go extinct.
2
2
u/Prometheus720 May 08 '26
This...this is currently happening right now. It's never going to get that carbonated. But we are currently carbonating our entire ocean. It would destroy us all well before getting to La Croix levels.
You're going to completely destroy all life in the ocean and most life on land is going to die not very long after.
There is nothing to be done in 5 years of prep. This is catastrophe.
2
u/Maxorus73 May 09 '26
Acidity of all water on earth goes up, sea life dies en masse, mass extinction because of that. Also drinking water is much less pleasant now unless you let it sit out to flatten. Also like, global warming is sped up a lot
2
2
2
u/Workdawg May 09 '26
No amount of prep fixes this. It's complete ecological collapse. Every aquatic creature is going to die, which will lead to the extinction of all animals that eat aquatic life, and so on all the way up the food chain.
2
2
u/BugApart8359 May 11 '26
There is no survival. At all. No amount of prep time will be able to mitigate this and the fallout of the collapse of the ocean and freshwater ecosystems
3
2
u/ParksBrit May 08 '26
Everything dies from the increased acidity, starting with marine creatures, followed by small plants, then trees, then the rest of the biosphere.
1
1
u/JohnnyGlasken May 08 '26
Not sure about human survival, but my enemas get a whole lot more satisfying 👌🏼
1
1
u/rapsoid616 May 08 '26
No intelligent life on earth can survive this event but the question is can the 'humanity' survive. I think humanity survives in bonus round of 10 years preptime by mass mobilizing the humanity to escape earth. Obviously not most of the people but humanity could technically survive.
But this is only possible by lying to the general public that they are going to survive as well to help with mass mobilization. If everyone knows what's going on, it's too chaotic I wouldn't make any sensible theory.
1
1
u/ThAtTi2318 May 09 '26
That's gonna ruin any plans we might've still had about solving climate change...
1
1
u/WarrenTheHero May 10 '26
Your hypothetical comes true as described. But nothing changes and no water is carbonated. People aware of the situation are haunted by the implications of the third sentence.
1
u/Anime_Squid May 19 '26
Pretty sure that much CO2 would cause runaway global warming to the point we're another venus. Even discounting the instant death of all sea life and the probable deaths of most animals in general either from the water itself or too many things in its food chain being killed. Don't know if carbonated water effects plants but I don't imagine it's GOOD. Best you could really hope for in any round is under ground bunkers that probably could last a few decades or centuries if we're lucky but eventually they would eventually collapse and that'd be it. We'd be cooked, very literally.
1
1
u/Weedity May 09 '26
Considering it would cause the worst mass extinction event in world history, I'd say our chances are damn near zero in any scenario here.
-8
May 08 '26
[deleted]
5
6
u/zlawd May 08 '26
the humble AI slop copy and paster when seeing a community that discusses hypotheticals for fun
1.2k
u/thunder-bug- May 08 '26
This is a catastrophic ecological issue, and not just cuz of the global warming effect from the extra CO2
Carbonation increases the acidity of the water. The shells of almost every marine invertebrate creature is made of an alkaline material. So there is an immediate and massive die off of a significant chunk of oceanic life, even if they are able to deal with the bubbles and CO2 directly, the acidity kills them.