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Will the human species go extinct, sure it will, just as 90% of all species that have lived on this planet have gone extinct. If your asking will we bring on our own extinction, I'm of the opinion that if we can create out own plans for extinction then we can also create our own plans to prevent a self caused extinction. There have been a number of plagues that have ravaged the human race, but we are still here, so there is no reason to expect a plague in the future that will wipe us all out.
One thing about nature, if it has happened once, it will without a doubt, happen again, it's just a matter of time. We can spend our time worrying about climate change just to get hit by an asteroid, so matter what we plan for, it will most likely not be enough. Contrary to popular belief, the planet we live on is a dangerous place, it is dynamic not static, it has no remorse for destruction, it doesn't care who inhabits it, it does as it has done since the beginning and we are just along for the ride.
Interesting. One theory I heard is that nature is trying to kill us off with all of these diseases: Polio, aids, MERSA, etc., but we keep coming up with cures for it so they never fully develop and kill us all.
We'll be done when the next ice ages hits. Anything before that would require either a meteor or world-wide nuclear war. Seriously, the other catastrophes some think of might dwindle the human race, but we will still survive. You need something special to destroys us forever more. Then again, maybe some terrible disease will put the nail in the human genome long before any of the certain deaths.
An ice age like the one that existed during the Neanderthal times would drasticly reduse the human population and if it involved the northern areas would wipe out the dominant cultures. But I don't think it would wipe out humans. What other great kill offs have done is winnow down the population and kill off those who have physical weaknesses which perculde survival. One narrowed the field and led to all females being descended from a single woman, our genetic eve. A later one narrowed us down to all males being descendent of a single male, the genetic adam. What came out of at least the first was a stronger and smarter human.
An ice age would lead to a vast winnowing of the current human gene pool, but I don't think it would lead to no humans.
Even a terrible disease would have some who were immune. To totally eliminate species so numerous as us, it would have to be a dino killer level event. The conditions everywhere would have to be impossible for this form of life. But it would take with us all but the smallest of mammels too.
But consider that the dinos didn't even all die out since there are birds and they are the successors to dinosaures, and probably the carnavores. But large bodied dinos died out quickly in geological time.
Not sure if anybody has covered this, but what about a super bug/virus? There are viruses that are hibernating in areas that are covered by ice and have been in ice for thousands of years. Could it be an impossibility that one day we uncover them either because of accidental or on purpose? Imagine if the plague hits. But this time around the plague spreads easily with a 7 to 10 day incubation period. Enough time for the majority of the planets inhabitants to become infected and not even know it yet.
Just saying, nothing NOTHING is impossible.
The plague which hit europe in the 1300's and earlier was deadly to between a third to more than half of the population. There was no medicine, no knowledge of the source, and you got sick you died or you lived. But while it created in many places an empty countryside, with abandoned villages it did NOT kill off either the society or the species. This virus also killed off billions in times before. And it exists in nature.
A plague like this could reoccure and would cross the planet in a very short time. Our societies would be left reeling, with pits dug to dump the dead. Medicine would not be sufficent to help most. But it would end and the survivors were either immune or recovered and it would cease to be a danger for a time.
Disease can play havoc with societies and economics and a lot of things, but it is unlilely it would ever be an extintion level event.
Yellowstone would come close, but still there would likely be survivors left far distant from it.
Interesting. One theory I heard is that nature is trying to kill us off with all of these diseases: Polio, aids, MERSA, etc., but we keep coming up with cures for it so they never fully develop and kill us all.
If there was some conscious entity 'nature' (there's not) that was 'trying to kill us off' (there isn't) then it should be ashamed of itself coming up with such embarrassing feeble attempts as those you list.
AIDS? It has killed, it is estimated, less than 40 million people. That's well under 1% of the current population of the planet, and since those deaths stretch back decades the pool from which that small fraction of Earth's inhabitants is drawn is significantly greater than the current population of roughly 7 billion.
Polio? 90% of those infected are asymptomatic! And the majority of the small minority of those who do fall ill only suffer a minor illness from which they recover. How can that possibly be construed as any sort of threat to the species as a whole?
MRSA? The infection rate in the United States is between 30% and 50%, where it kills roughly 11k/year. For 11k people, that sucks. For the United States population as a whole, it's hardly a drop in the national bucket. Any pathogen that only kills less than 1% of 1% of all carriers in a population per year is anything approaching a threat to that population.
In order to kill off humanity, you would need a super-lethal, super-vectoring, super-rapidly-acting agent of some sort, the likes of which has never been known - for the very reason that there are no evolutionary drivers to create such a fantastic thing.
To get something like that, it would probably have to be bio-engineered, a sort of bio-weapon. But two serious problems arise here.
First, it takes considerable infrastructure to do something like this - either a state or, maybe, a substantially large biotech company of some sort. The inherent problem therein is that any state or company sophisticated enough to do that probably wouldn't come into being if it was simultaneously so self-destructive as to create a doomsday bio-weapon such as that. Nor would it be easy to assemble enough biologically educated and talented people to create and loose something such as that upon the world, all working with a uniformity of doomsday action.
Second, there's the vectoring. How do you create a pathogen that vectors fast enough without burning itself out? And how do you create one that reaches all the isolated human populations in the world? Once civil disorder sets in, the planes stop flying and the ships stop sailing and all sorts of isolated settlements on islands and in the rainforest and places like that become safe. Toss in the fact that many of those settlements will have radios so they can follow what is transpiring, making them extremely isolationist, and they survive.
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Originally Posted by nightbird47
The plague which hit europe in the 1300's and earlier was deadly to between a third to more than half of the population. There was no medicine, no knowledge of the source, and you got sick you died or you lived. But while it created in many places an empty countryside, with abandoned villages it did NOT kill off either the society or the species. This virus also killed off billions in times before. And it exists in nature.
A plague like this could reoccure and would cross the planet in a very short time. Our societies would be left reeling, with pits dug to dump the dead. Medicine would not be sufficient to help most. But it would end and the survivors were either immune or recovered and it would cease to be a danger for a time.
That very specific disease does recur - several individuals in the United States are diagnosed with the plague caused by Yersinia pestis (the bacteria that cause the Black Death) every year. They get antibiotics. They get better.
There was an Indian outbreak with dozens of deaths in the 1990s. A couple of years ago, there was an outbreak of similar magnitude in Madagascar. Even the woefully inadequate third-world medical infrastructures of those places, combined with modern knowledge of the disease, limits the outbreaks to a vanishingly small fraction of their historical impact.
Yersinia pestis can make life miserable for some number of individuals, but it is absolutely nowhere near a threat to the human species.
When I wrote my novel, Falling Through Time, I envisioned what the world would be like in 2084. I wanted to do a new outlook/update from the book 1984--a book I so much enjoyed.
In my book, various factors have come to play in greatly reducing the human population. It still survives, but in a much more egalitarian and natural way.
It was a fun book to give voice to some of my fantasies and views on where we're headed.
Sure, I guess you'd call it science fiction, but it's based on hard science projections--and not too different from many of your viewpoints.
We humans will survive in small pockets of more civil civilization, but our lives will be very, very different.
And not, necessarily, in a bad way.
Unless, of course, a large solid object finds its way Earthward and we go the way of the dinosaurs.
That very specific disease does recur - several individuals in the United States are diagnosed with the plague caused by Yersinia pestis (the bacteria that cause the Black Death) every year. They get antibiotics. They get better.
There was an Indian outbreak with dozens of deaths in the 1990s. A couple of years ago, there was an outbreak of similar magnitude in Madagascar. Even the woefully inadequate third-world medical infrastructures of those places, combined with modern knowledge of the disease, limits the outbreaks to a vanishingly small fraction of their historical impact.
Yersinia pestis can make life miserable for some number of individuals, but it is absolutely nowhere near a threat to the human species.
It's also carried by certain animals in forested areas, and occasionally people are camping out and have died because they're not near doctors. But it was the lack of any real treatment and the belief that 'bad air' caused disease that made it so deadly in Roman and medieval times. And it was new then. The survivors had a measure of resistance to it.
A more apt comparison would be a new virus which was previously unknown but spread with casual contact and could be transitted through the air. Maybe it mimics a cold at first. By the time it was identified and any measures taken patient zero would have transfered it to many others who had transfered it via air to many places. The quandry with medicine is that we don't build infrastructure to treat thousands at once since usually we won't need it. But should something happen it would be needed and even then not always be enough. In which case people die for lack of drugs and care. But only very seldom will this happen.
Such a virus is possible, and the population wouldn't have much resistance to it. But still a large percentage would live. It would have huge societal effects but not end the society.
More worrisome is the lack of new anti biotics and the way older ones are failing. And that as it doesn't pay to research them, drug companies aren't. Part of the reason we live as long as we do and we can take such chances without an early death from infection is they can be treated. Infection was a major cause of death, in many forms, before penniciln. What scares more doctors than a mega virus is no effective anti biotics, since it would return us to the risk of death from infection being quite real.
There was a fascinating show on pbs about this one town in medieval England. It wasn't large and a good many of its people were related. When the plauge hit, even in successive waves, they hardly were touched. Most who sickened recovered, while a slice of the population was lost elsewhere. A study was being done on Aids, and its dynamics, and it was noted that in the same town, which is much bigger but with a very stable population, there had not been one case. They dug up the cemetary and took dna samples, and samples from living people and there is a gene mutiation which was unique to the town, and apparently makes it impossible for either disease to spread past its initial stage.
If you take this on a world basis, some individuals would be more succeptable to disease, and when an epidemic came they would die. They would be replaced by the children of the survivors, who would likely not have the succeptability. This is why massive epidemics run in cycles, and sometimes only get one chance.
Interesting theory and it has it's merits. This however, will not bring the human species to an end, it will however, make things difficult for those who rely on energy, like the U.S. Just one CEM at the right time would almost destroy our culture.
A collapse of our power grid would set us back 100 years, I can see everyone going crazy because they can not access their computers, cell phones or watch TV, it would be mayhem in the streets.
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