How are humans going to become extinct?

[-Matt-]

[Benno]

Does he really think it's going to happen within a century?

If we go extinct within a hundred years it will have to be because aliens glass the whole planet with plasmaphaserthermonuclear bombs, or a giant asteroid strike, or the core suddenly explodes. Human extinction will most likely be an extremely long and drawn out affair. Nobody is hunting us, and barring a major catastrophe like an asteroid strike, we're going to be just fine.

That said, there could be a nanoplague unleashed by a dark government research facility that kills us all. But probably not. But who knows? AIDS could become airborne, or even mutate into giant godzilla-type creatures and slaughter us all. Now THAT would be a real pandemic.

The dinosaurs themselves didn't die out in a day, did they?
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I'm autistic. That means I'm smarter than you.

[smegballs]

Obviously it's unthinkable to us, and the likelihood on any one day is infinitesimally small, but of course historically mass extinctions can and have happened.

I think human extinction is pretty unlikely in the near future, but some kind of "happening" that has major implications of the way we live our lives is moderately likely. A big thing of course is the oil situation, the whole planet consumes (quite literally), moves and works on a finite energy source that may not be around for too much longer. IIRC the jury is still out on whether global production has peaked or not yet.

I'd also I'd expect to see things like increasingly antibiotic resistant bacteria to play a part, agricultural pests that are more and more resistant to pesticides etc. Nothing that will make millions die overnight, but things that make the death rate marginally higher and make it that bit harder to grow enough food every year.

My take on the whole peak oil/climate change etc etc, thing is just to have fun. If I don't use that petrol up, someone else will. I might as well fly on planes, and razz around on bikes because someday in the future, it's not unlikely that I won't be able to do it anymore. The way I look at it: I'm not planning on having kids, so pretty much nothing I can do (short of becoming a millionaire and having a shit ton of money to spend) in terms of my personal consumption is going to use as many resources as raising kids and then that kids consumption through his/her life, not to mention potential for grandkids etc. Which IMO gives me license to not feel bad about doing "bad" for the environment stuff.

In a certain way I think we are in a kind of twilight of humanity atm, it's still nice and warm sitting on the terrace; so I will enjoy myself in the present and not worry to much about the impending nighttime.

[metalangel]

Slow news day? Or bored journo with an apocalyptic fiction fetish wanked too many times to Rust and decided to use his connections to bother some real eggheads about his fantasies of living in a corrugated shack stabbing other people to death for their baked beans?
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"A faired bike will get you 10x more clunge than a unfaired one." -Marlboro Matt

[pinkyfloyd]

We are going to breed ourselves into stupidity and then kill the earth.

Just look around you at the youth of today. They are the future, they are going to be teaching your grandkids. I wouldnt trust most of them with the remote for the TV let alone the world!
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illuminateTHEmind wrote: I am just more evolved than most of you guys... this allows me to pick of things quickly which would have normally taken the common man years to master
Hockeystorm65:.well there are childish arguments...there are very childish arguments.....there are really stupid childish arguments and now there are......Pinkfloyd arguments!
Teflon-Mike:I think I agree with just about all Pinky has said.

[Benno]

[smegballs]

Arithmetic, Population and Energy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOrvGDRLT7A

This is a good one to watch, and not based on hippy woo-woo shit.

A graph used that I like is this one (sorry for low res)

https://i.imgur.com/SXxEAgU.png

Y axis is amount of energy available for use by humans
X axis is time: present day +-5000 years

The pulse the period where humanity is discovering and using fossil fuels. I don't think our 7+ billion people have a good chance of being fed once we move outside of the shaded zone....

[Rogerborg]

We're not going to become extinct. There are enough of us[*] still living off of the land who will survive just about anything short of a direct impact from Nibiru.

We will have a massive die-back under the following circumstances:

1. Dinosaur killer asteroid impact.
2. Super volcano.
3. Nuke shooting war.
4. Oil and gas properly run out and we belatedly realise that "renewables" are a scam. Then comes the glacial period. Then the morlocks.

[*] If you're reading this, you're not part of that "us".
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GONE: HN125-8, LF-250B, GPz 305, GPZ 500S, Burgman 400 // RIDING: F650GS (800 twin), Royal Enfield Bullet Electra 500 AVL, Ninja 250R because racebike

[Skudd]

There will be a mass clearance due to the odd nuclear accident/stupid religion/natural event. Then what is left will be worked on by the few.
People will survive by luck not by design.
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Famous last words of Humpty Dumpty. " Stop pushing me "
Petty Anarchists look at "1984".............. The Visionary looks at "Animal Farm".

[dydey90]

We'll never go extinct, unless it is this century. We should have enough resources to sustain ourselves that long.
Within 50 years we should have the ability to construct a space elevator. This means dry docks for spacecraft, like the Enterprise.
NASA are already working on warp drives, no doubt they'll be able to tell us if it's possible before we start building the first capital ship.

Once we have the ability to travel to other planets, we can extract resources from them. Even if Earth does kersplode at that point, humanity can live on Battlestar Galactica style.
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This post is probably not serious and shouldn't be taken literally.
Past: CBR125,ER6f NINJA 650, ZZR600 Current: VFR750

[ThoughtContro...]

[AlanC]

Eta Carinae is going to go hypernova one day. Neither of its poles are pointed at the earth, so the gamma ray burst won't hit us, but if it did it'd be equivalent to about a kiloton of TNT per square kilometre of the earth's surface on the side of the planet facing the star. And this from something 7,500 light years away.

The Wolf-Rayet star WR104 is about 8,000 light years away, and one pole is pointed in our general direction. When it blows up we may be in trouble...

[Ribenapigeon]

I don't think extinction is likely any time soon. What is more likely is some global fuckup which will throw humanity back to the stone-age so disabling humanity from developing the technolgy to escape earth and condemning us to a fiery death when eventually the sun collapses.

[Lord Percy]

Nuclear war or massive asteroid. They're the only things, in my opinion.

The only thing that could truly fuck us over is something that ruins the atmosphere for more than one generation.

[Hetzer]

Or if MBT theory is correct, nothing will be allowed to make us extinct.
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"There's the horizon! Ride hard, ride fast and cut down all who stand in your way!"

[Im-a-Ridah]

It's a balance really. Obviously there are lots of people who are excessively paranoid about it, mostly relgious people and Americans, but there are many who don't make suitable plans for civil contingency, the government for example. We've seen an excellent case of the latter in Somerset recently. The core problem with "mass disasters" is the huge number of potential causes, and each requires vast spending in order to prepare for, to the point that most government spending would be preparing for extremely unlikely events. One would then have to consider whether the money would be better spend a fraction of that on a cancer screeening programme, or on treating heart disease instead, right now, and the answer is statistically going to be yes.

[dydey90]

[Hetzer]

[-Matt-]

Interesting to read everyones opinions

[Lord Percy]

[smegballs]

The space thing is one thing that I like to use to counter anit-capitalists.

"A system requiring infinite growth in a finite environment is doomed to fail."

That statement is of course true. When you open up the potential for using the solar system (we'll keep it local for the time being) there is a ridiculous amount of potential resources out there, that means all of a sudden resource availability isn't going to be limiting factor in human expansion anymore.

Take an oilfield. There are plenty of oilfields out there with plenty of oil in them, but current oil prices combined with current extraction technology means that it would take more money to extract the oil that what it is worth mean that it is uneconomically viable to extract at present. As oil becomes more scarce and prices rise it may well become profitable to extract, at the same time rising oil prices, and the potential for profit contained within, drives research into new extraction techniques for difficult wells that previously weren't worth bothering with.

I imagine the same thing will happen with space mining. At some point, minerals we need are going to become rare as fuck here on earth driving prices sky high. At this point some bright spark realises "hey if I bring back a few tons of palladium back from an asteroid I'll be rolling in coke and hoes for the rest of my life". Cue billions of dollars being invested in space mining technologies and a massive proliferation of said tech.

When you consider the NASA budget is only about $25bn, think of all the cool shit they could do if they actually had a fraction of say the US medicare/medicaid/military budget. I can't wait till space stuff actually fulfils some financial purpose and the investment floods in. IIRC NASA scientists have all sorts of cool projects planned by is crippled by a lack of funds.

[Lord Percy]

I think the relation between 'cost' and 'long term resource issues' is kind of moot, because money is a human construct for general trade and accounting, whereas the physicality of the resources is definite and properly observable.

So yeah you could pour loads of money into getting more resources. But surely it makes more sense to say, 'pour loads of resources into getting more resources'. And then the most important factor is simply the balance and cycle of resource usage.

A technique that won the Nobel prize in economics in 1973 is the Input-output model (yes it's apparently linked with socialism, booo hissss, but I actually learned it in a maths book), which is a model that takes into account all the input resources, considers their consumption and demand, and the amount of resources that are outputted at the end of the whole process. The great thing about it is that it doesn't involve money at all. It's basically a case of:

(X wood + Y coal + Z oil)available --->
---> is used/depleted/recycled by local/national requirements --->
---> (P wood + Q coal + R oil) leftover/deficit.

So you can really see how things will shape out at current consumption levels. And because it's a mathematical model, you can do tests, eg, "What if our oil consumption increases to X barrels per day?" and you can see if your economic resource system can cope with it. Quite genius actually. My explanation is far too simplistic to give it any credit.

I do wonder if many governments actually use this model. Or if they casually ignore it because we now all live under the paradigm of 'growth is good', without actually considering the use and distribution of what we have finitely available to us.

Sorry, massively off-topic.....

[fatpies]

[-Matt-]

[Im-a-Ridah]