Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Not a chance within 100 years. Maybe in a couple hundred thousand.
Humans are like cockroaches: no matter how many are killed, the population manages to rebound in a generation or two. There's nothing that could happen that would mean the end of the end of the species, short of the sun going supernova.
I wish to ask an alternative question: what's so bad, or so regrettable, about humans going extinct?
All species go extinct, it's just a question of when. We seem hellbent on making it sooner rather than later. The average lifetime of a species is 2-4 million years. If you go back to Australopithecines I think we've just about used our allotment. No big loss. The extinction of the parasitic human species will not be missed despite our grandiose self importance. We are the most violent, sadistic and destructive of species.
In the short run, destruction of technological civilization is far more likely than total extinction. A few stragglers are bound to survive in isolated pockets barring a mega K/T event or nearby GRB. Our highly technological society is HIGHLY vulnerable. Mega solar flares can and will easily bring down entire power grids which would take years or decades (of chaos and social upheaval) to restore. We've put all our eggs in one digital/electronic/computer basket and there's no turning back now.
Possible Apocalypse perpetrators:
Climate collapse
Super solar flares
Super volcanoes
All out nuclear war
Gamma Ray Burst
Meteors/Comets
Pandemics
Energy depletion
We as humans, do not need any special event or natural disaster to wipe us out. We seem to do it just fine by ourselves. Leave us to our own devices and in much less time, at our own hands, we shall eradicate ourselves. Sorry, but the path we are on, the path of self annihilation is unavoidable. But that's just my opinion.
Unavoidable? It's hard to imagine how we'd do it, precisely.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Challenger76
I think a meteor is still a bigger threat than anything, even though the pro's try to dumb it down. As big as space is, endless meteors shooting in every direction imaginable it's really only a matter of time. Nothing they say can change my opinion on that.
I've watched all the theories that explain why it won't happen but it still doesn't say we are 100% safe.
Meteoroids hit the Earth's atmosphere all the time. The 'problem' with one big enough to eliminate humanity hitting Earth itself (thereby becoming a meteorite) is that such impacts are extremely rare. That's not theory, that's just observing the history of the Earth. Megafauna (ie, large animals, such as humans) have been on Earth for roughly half a billion years. No impact event has ever eliminated all megafauna, and the extreme diversity in the environments that humans occupy (almost all land, save the most arctic and alpine, and some water) as well as the extremely varied human diet make our species better equipped to survive such an event than any other megafauna species that has ever lived - including all the megafauna that have survived that five great extinction events that have occurred since the appearance of megafauna during the Cambrian.
You're right, we're not 100% safe. And there's not a 100% chance I won't win the powerball (actually, there is - I don't ever buy lottery tickets, but let's pretend I do). But the odds are still extremely one-sided. That's not opinion, that's just the realities of how vanishingly small the odds are on a per/year (or per/decade, or per/century, or per/millennium, etc.) basis of an impact event occurring that is likely to cause human extinction. And a simple projection of human advancement, even allowing liberally for setbacks (ie, Malthusian collapses here and there) suggest that we're likely to expand beyond Earth far, far sooner than an impact event occurring that would kill all humans.
Actually, a nearby supernova or gamma ray burst from somewhere in the galaxy may well be a more likely threat than an impact event, at least as far as human extinction goes. But even then, we're talking about events with frequencies in the hundreds of millions of years.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jaredC
Yea your right, my bad. We do have the resources on this little planet to sustain us indefinitely, forever. Right?
No, we don't. So? Malthusian collapses aren't even remotely likely to result in human extinction, but in a regression to a subsistence existence. Species that run short of resources don't go extinct - rather, their number decline rapidly. This, of course, solves the resource problem. Basically, a reset of perhaps a few hundred years would result. Unpleasant? To put it mildly. But not even close to extinction.
Quote:
Or, I mean it couldn't be wars or something that kill ourselves off? Nope.
Wars? No, it's hard to imagine a war killing all 7 billion of us. But go ahead and explain how that might happen.
Something? You might want to elaborate a bit about that one, too.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NHartphotog
Not a chance within 100 years. Maybe in a couple hundred thousand.
Humans are like cockroaches: no matter how many are killed, the population manages to rebound in a generation or two. There's nothing that could happen that would mean the end of the end of the species, short of the sun going supernova.
The sun can't go supernova - it's not big enough. But it will keep expanding, eventually baking the Earth into a waterless ciinder. In roughly a billion years, the sun will become too hot for the Earth's biosphere to survive. Of course, a billion years is a time-frame absurdly large. Ultimately, the sun will become a red giant, and the Earth will be absorbed into it. But it will long since have become uninhabitable. No matter. Any humanity surviving that long would likely have expanded beyond our solar system in some manner.
However, nearby (ie, within a few dozen light-years) supernovae can affect the Earth's biosphere. Happily, the nearest supernova candidate is 150 light-years away, moving away from the sun, and won't go supernova for a few million years yet.
We seem to do it just fine by ourselves? Aren't we up to 7 billion now? Show me any other mammal that has been so prolific.
WRONG!!
Some estimates have placed the rodent population at 4 to 6 times that of humans. So, we are looking at 28 to 42 Billion rodents in the World. If humans go i am sure the rodents will find some room to thrive.
Wars? No, it's hard to imagine a war killing all 7 billion of us. But go ahead and explain how that might happen.
Imagine, the world population reaches 10,12 billion. Starvation sets in. Countries with nuclear capabilities start demanding resources. All hell breaks loose. Nuclear war happens, followed by nuclear winter. The earth is covered by radioactive ash. The sun can no longer reach the surface of the earth. Crops will not grow, cattle and other meat sources die off due to no vegetation. We may not become extinct, but shortly after these things happen, it's a very good possibility. The reduction of population would help, but the inevitable will occur nonetheless.
Some estimates have placed the rodent population at 4 to 6 times that of humans. So, we are looking at 28 to 42 Billion rodents in the World. If humans go i am sure the rodents will find some room to thrive.
PedroMartinez was speaking of a single species, homo sapiens. You are speaking of an entire order of mammals, Rodentia - of which there are over 2000 species. No species of rodent comes anywhere close to the 7 billion humans on the planet. Even the Brown Rat, almost certainly the most successful rodent species, doesn't have quite the range, nor the population, of humanity. Further, that vast majority of its population is precariously dependent on one other species - homo sapiens. Humans, by contrast, are not so utterly dependent on any one species.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jaredC
Imagine, the world population reaches 10,12 billion. Starvation sets in. Countries with nuclear capabilities start demanding resources. All hell breaks loose. Nuclear war happens, followed by nuclear winter. The earth is covered by radioactive ash. The sun can no longer reach the surface of the earth. Crops will not grow, cattle and other meat sources die off due to no vegetation. We may not become extinct, but shortly after these things happen, it's a very good possibility. The reduction of population would help, but the inevitable will occur nonetheless.
Well, aside from the silly "We're starving, let's start launching nukes!" idea (someone page John Milius - I think he wants his Red Dawn script back), let's imagine a full scale exchange of nuclear weapons between the United States and Russia (toss in the rest of the countries if you want, but the U.S. and Russia have over 90% of the world's warheads).
5000 MTs are detonated worldwide (that's every nuke in the arsenal of the entire planet - which is not even a conceivable scenario). We'll even assume that every detonation is a ground-burst (wouldn't happen - many would be air-bursts, reducing the ejecta total). Anyway, bad news. Nuclear winter ensues. How does this compare with the K-T Event? The yield of the K-T Event was somewhere in the range of 50 to 1000 teratons. Energy, volatile production, and climatic effects of the Chicxulub Cretaceous/Te
A teraton is equal to 1,000,000 megatons. In other words, the K-T Event, which saw many species of megafauna survive, pumped far more than 10,000 times as much material into the atmosphere than would even the most extreme and unrealistic nuclear exchange imaginable.
And the idea that sunlight would not reach the surface of the Earth after a nuclear war is fantasy. Even the earliest nuclear winter models put forth by Sagan and company in the early 1980s (which are now widely considered unduly pessimistic, and even Sagan conceded before he died that they were) did not envision all sunlight being blocked out. Photosynthesis, diminished, would continue. A food-chain, however radically altered, would persist.
Actually, the reduction in population will always correlate with an increased ratio of subsistence materials to surviving human beings. Even if the detonations killed 90% of all humans immediately (impossible - we're not that concentrated in cities and there aren't enough nukes, not to mention the fact that tactical nuke targeting is frequently aimed at targets away from population centers - ships, silos, runways, etc). and that 99% of the immediate survivors died off in the following year, that would leave... 28 million humans. And they'd have a relative abundance of stuff (leftover foodstuffs, a massive surplus of dwellings and tools and fuel) as they adjusted to the new realities of the damaged but undoubtedly viable world.
Again, the vastly larger (five orders of magnitude larger!) K-T event still left many species of megafauna extant, and none of those species had the fantastic range of humans, or as diverse a diet, or the self-awareness to understand what was happening and respond to it appropriately.
And this is the point. You can simply claim "Nuclear war could kill us all off!", but the cold hard facts simply do not support such an eventuality. It's fairly easy to imagine reasonably plausible scenarios which seriously set-back the delicately interconnected modern human civilization. But kill off the species? Not so. Aside from those extremely rare extraterrestrial causes (impacts, supernovae, etc.), it's hard to come up with scenarios that completely eliminate the species.
The biggest extinctions have been due to supervolcanos. If Yosemity goes, full out, count out North America and expect a huge change in climate. But the weaker would die and the survivers would survive other places. Consider that in the 'great squeeze' which happened very early in human prehistory, as few as a thousand individuals survived. But they did, and in the process of surviving rewrote the complexity of the human brain so much they became homo sapiens sapiens...wise wise man.
It is entirely possible that some series of natural events could seriously slash the world population and to zero in some places. But while this would cause a long fallback in technology and lifestyle, the challenges of survival might trigger a winnowing of the survivors and a new level of human evolution too. But its unlikely it would cause complete extinction.
Well Canada might, by in Colorado for example, they are dying fast. In ten years it is likely that the conifer forests that cover the mountains will be gone due to beetle kill. The growth of beetle kill is rampant and there is no effective way to stop it. Barring a major climate change, the beetle will probably expand in range to include Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and New Mexico.
Back to the OP's question, yes I believe we will go extinct, but more likely from over population and an increasing inability to feed people, leading to other problems such as disease or anarchy.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
