1. A massive earthquake
2. Contagious virus
3. Global warming
4. Asteroid hitting earth
5. Alien invasion
6. The next World War
7. Other (specify)
Drought and rising waters will kill all life in 20 thousand years.
shareThis aired on ABC in 2006:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aU3c6EKUcf8
Too bad about the audio.
shareSolar event. Actual climate change from a week of mega flares. Cauterized Earth. Far more likely.
All the rest of your options would not eradicate mankind. There would be survivors that rekindled the species.
Fortunately that will not occur for millions of years.
๐คจ
A solar flare could happen any second.
share
Almost anything could happen any second, but the probability of a solar flare destroying Earth in the next million years is very small.
๐คจ
Small percentage?
Only "The next world war" and "global virus" are more likely. Solar flares go through their own seasons. We have observed flares in this small window of time in which our tech has made it possible that were significant enough to have had an impact on Earth if it were only at a different spot in its orbit. It could coincide with our location today or never. I don't think we know the percentages but they are certainly much higher than "asteroid impact."
But as ever, who knows? It certainly won't be alien invasion nor political weather leverage.
No solar flare has destroyed Earth in the last four million years, so the chances are miniscule.
๐
That is a fair point.
I'm just saying that we are right up next to the fire breathing dragon and it does breath fire. We circle it. Also in the category of "hasn't destroyed the Earth yet" is asteroid impact. There are so many additional parameters surrounding that that it just isn't in the same ballpark.
There is probably hard data to access on this. How many super flares have occurred in the path of Earth's solar orbit vs how many doomsday size asteroids have passed through the same (not just "close").
7. Human apathy and lack of proactiveness.
Example: we've been warned since at least the 1970s about fossil fuels being a finite energy source and hazardous to the environment. Yet very little progress has been made in adopting renewable, clean energy.
Warned by whom?
shareNo. That's why you get screwed in the drive through. ๐
share
That is anyone's guess, but I hope by that time we will have established colonies on other worlds so that the species
will not die.
๐คจ
observatons :
the human population has sextupled during my lifetime.
humanity, to date, has shown little aptitude for showing constraint on resource utilization, or any shared proprietorship.
humanity, to date, has shown itself to be natively hierarchical, using mainly sowing chaos and tribalism to ensure hierarchy dominance. this may or may not prove feasible in the long-long term.
authoritarianism or collectivism may at some point be forced upon humanity in the main at some point in the future, in the face of serious threats to humanity in general (medium to long-term).
the greatest threats, imo, in terms of likely immanence out, are :
0. climate change
1. unsustainable population growth, leading to 3.
2. nuclear exchanges
3. energy/food/resource scarcity
4. super volcanos
5. asteroid impact
When I was a kid, I found out that China had a 2 child limit. I thought that was a ridiculous concept and the government shouldn't tell us what to do to that extent. Then as I got older, I noticed the population of the city I lived in increasing and it started to make sense to me.
We're definitely headed toward an overpopulation problem and we have a "let's worry about it when the time comes" mentality about it.
yeah, i would augment that to a LWAIWTTC attitude about everything. now, humans are an ingenious species, but there is a survival, or at least catastrophic risk off letting large threats smack us in the face unprepared, and squandering scarce resources in any case, the climate first among them.
imagine the stress (by that i mean mass death & deprivation) of 6-9 billions of humans huddled in the habitable areas during a repeat of the younger dryas instability (which was only ~14K years ago, come by without our help), during the glacial period.
even apart from human-induced warming, inherent climate instability in the long-term will absolutely certainly be a principle challenge to a large human population. we are living in a climactic garden of eden, and have been for the last 12K.
it might well be that the long-term carrying capacity for humanity on earth is much smaller than at present.
I would argue that climate change really isn't a CO2 problem, but a human population problem. Very little recycled plastic actually goes back to make consumer products and most ends up in dumps (recycling centers have too much plastic to get rid of), yet we persist in creating everlasting trash to suit the needs of the growing population. It doesn't matter what form of pollution we're generating (our mining industry in particular will destroy many animal habitats just for a little bit of some mineral), the more humans there are the greater the demand for pollution will be.
There are way too many humans on this planet, and we plan to keep procreating and keep spreading until there is nothing but concrete everywhere, we'll build CO2 scrubbers to replace the trees (which we already are doing in the name of CO2 based climate change.)
You could be right. The bigger the population = more pollution. I'm from Toronto and our population has almost doubled in 30 years. The city itself doesn't look anywhere near what it did because of all the crap being built.
share[deleted]
7. Other (God)
share