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.
I appreciate human innovation more than people here, which is why I believe humans will never become extinct, even with a Chicxulub event. An asteroid killed dinosaurs because they're dumb. We aren't. We are able to extract energy on earth (eg, nuclear), which can be used to manufacture food. Life would definitely suck, with 7/24/365 darkness, but humans would adapt. Other species would likely become extinct.
Not to mention the fact that an event like that won't happen for millions of years, and by then we will have colonized other planets and created new technologies to deal with nasty predicaments like asteroids.
I appreciate human innovation more than people here, which is why I believe humans will never become extinct, even with a Chicxulub event. An asteroid killed dinosaurs because they're dumb. We aren't. We are able to extract energy on earth (eg, nuclear), which can be used to manufacture food. Life would definitely suck, with 7/24/365 darkness, but humans would adapt. Other species would likely become extinct.
Not to mention the fact that an event like that won't happen for millions of years, and by then we will have colonized other planets and created new technologies to deal with nasty predicaments like asteroids.
Those are the odds. Of course, it could happen within our lifetimes (I won't say 'tomorrow', because an object that big would be detected by astronomers weeks if not months or years out) - the odds are simply overwhelmingly against it (but then, the same was true for the century the K-T event happened... such are odds), and vastly against it. But an object can at any time be ejected from the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud by a gravitational perturbation from a similar object, a nearby star, or the galaxy itself. And such objects are usually drawn into the massive gravity well of the sun, and we reside very near the bulls-eye.
Now, it appears certain we - or, rather, our successor species - will eventually become extinct, if for no other reason than due to the heat death of the universe - but we're talking a time-frame here in the quadrillions of years (a quadrillion years is about 70,000x the current age of the universe, so we have a while to get accustomed to the ultimate end).
Do you think the human species is headed for extinction?
An increasing number of scientists believe our species will be close to extinction as soon as 100 years from now. They base this extinction prediction on the acidification of our oceans, increasing droughts, floods, hurricanes/typhoons, death of our forests, extinction of as many as 40% or more of other species...and the likelihood of pandemics mowing us down.
One recent book on this topic is The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. She's not the only scientist to hold this viewpoint and prediction.
Their viewpoint is that we've impacted our Earth's systems (land, air, oceans) to the point that even drastically cleaning up our act is now too late.
What do you think?
Is the clock ticking on our extinction?
Will Humans Become Extinct Soon?
No.If by "soon" you mean some centuries into the future. But that's the blink of an eye in terms of the real passage of time. We're still a very young (and adaptable) species.
Mostly agree with others who have posted that humanity will eventually go extinct. But it won't be because we killed ourselves off or failed to adapt to an ever-changing ecosystem. It will be because we evolved, OR we augmented ourselves with enough technology to be essentially unrecognizable from the humanity we are today, leading to a singularity that essentially means technology advances faster and faster and eventually we humans are made irrelevant as fully conscious AI becomes aware of itself and machines start to take ever-larger shares of not just industrial output but intellectual output as well. We'd likely merge with AI at that point.
This will likely happen within the next 200 years.
Here's my scenario:
- Jihadists take over the world.
- They execute every religious group they don't like along with gays while also marginalizing women out of the work force.
- Thus they're down to about 30% efficiency.
- They can't invent a damned thing so progress stagnates.
- They don't like house pets, so the stray dog population explodes.
- The dogs realize humans aren't as smart as they used to be. So they attack.
- By 2150, a pit bull/lab mix is in charge of the world.
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.
