How do you think the end of humanity will come about?

91 responses total.

Personally, I think science will kill us.  Not that I'm advocating against
the use of science - I think it's done a great many things.

But someday, someone is going to try to reproduce a black hole in a lab,
they'll be successful, and it will quickly suck up the entire world (followed
by the solar system but then who really cares).

The play seems out for an almost infinite run.
Don't mind a little thing like the actors fighting.
The only thing I worry about is the sun.
We'll be alright if nothing goes wrong with the lighting.

                        -- Robert Frost

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Undoubtedly,the last words uttered by the last human being will be, "Oh, shit."

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Well, he probably means that it will be to the effect of "oh Shit", in
whatever language that particular person happens to speak.

Although, most places by now have adopted the word "shit" into their current
vocabulary.

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        The Marklars of Marklar will come invading Earth with their Marklars
blazing.

I think our culture will evolve to the point where no one wants to have 
the responsibility of having kids anymore and we'll just slowly die out 
that way. 

If only that were true. I think we'll reach the point where the world 
is way over-populated before that happens.

Are you predicting plague, famine or war after that?  It already is way
overpopulated - you cannot keep destroying the air, water and soil at this
rate forever.  

I predict massive nihilism.

Humanity's end can't come from overpopulation, as that will lead to
massive reduction of the population, and some people will survive and
carry on. I don't see an *end* except via a large enough space rock
arriving, which it is fair to say is inevitable. The only out of this
scenario is populating Mars in time (low probability) or a friendlier
planet at another star (vanishing probability). 

Re #1: science can't wipe us out. Science is solely an intellectual
process. A product of science might, but I think that would be more
likely to be a constructed disease, rather than anything physical. 

Everyone knows it will be the grey goo escaping from the bedroom of a bored
teenage 31883 hackzor running Micro4fty nanotech 2020.  If you dodn't
believe me ask Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems.
Blame it on Alan Turing...

Actually, there are plenty of other places we could populate.  We
certainly have the technology today to populate the moon.  It would be
expensive, time-consuming, and it's not clear it would be "worth it"
(economically speaking), but it's certainly doable.

We're very close to being able to do the nearer asteroids which are in
some ways easier.  A worthwhile step to populating the asteroids would
be a mission to mars.  If we can succeed in sending people to mars and
back, that will demonstrate we have reasonable small self-sustaining
life-support, and can travel reasonable distances, both of which would
be necessary to populating the asteroids.  Self-sustaining life-support
could also make life on the moon much more attractive economically
speaking - our present technology to populate the moon would probaby
include sending massive amounts of oxygen and other raw materials to the
moon in some very expensive fashion.

Life in either of these places would be very different than life as we
have known it on Earth.  Most of these people would spend most of their
lives underground, as that is the only reasonable way we have at present
to be protected against radiation.  Low gravity would present special
challenges, and advantages.  Pregnant women on asteroids might need to
spend the 1st 3 months of pregnancy onboard giant centrifuges.  Old
people with heart conditions might well last longer.  Most people would
be spending almost their entire lives in small communities where they
are much more dependent on each other for both survival and happiness
than we are at present.  There would likely be very little place for the
individual rebel in such a society.  On the other hand, giant screw-ups
would be self-cancelling; the survivors are likely to be very suspicious
of any system that does not have multiple checks and self-balances, and
is not designed to last as a closed cycle stable system for the
long-run.  A natural size for these communities would be "about 100
people" -- this is a size that would work well with our psychology.
This is too small for good genetic diversity, so there would need to be
a larger looser sense of community, in which some large fraction of
young people are encouraged to migrate and join new communities to marry
& have children.

Either or both of these (settling the moon, migrating to the asteroids)
is likely to happen "someday"; there's just too many valuable minerals
and other reasons to get out there for somebody not to bother.  Sure
there are problems to confront to doing this, but they're all solvable,
and far less mysterious than the problems confronting the Wright
brothers, or JFK.

So far as "the big rock" goes - yes, in a geological sense it's
inevitable.  But by the time that happens, there's a very good chance
Homo sapiens won't be left anyways - as a species, we're only about
100,000 years old, and there's no reason to suppose that in 10,000,000
years we won't quietly evolve into something quite different.  The
interesting question may not be whether evolution will happen, but what
form it will take, and how much of it will even be "natural".

The 'end of the world' as far as we are concerned is actually more
likely to come from a very simple hardly 'living' organism - the virus -
perhaps assisted by humans.

Imagine a pneumonic plague virus with the virulence of the 1918 'flu'
epidemic, with the 'course' of HIV.  Could statistically happen in the
next millions of years.  But, consider some whacked out rogue nation
(like Iraq) with sufficient tech that designs such a 'bioweapon' that it
thinks doesn't reproduce and has a half life of 10 minutes - only they
are wrong and it has a half life of 10000 years...
Hopefully 'tech' on the countermeasure side will merely 'pace'
developments instead of being outstripped by it.

I'm not worried about anyone trying to kill everyone, what I am worried
about is someone just merely simply trying to kill somebody else that
ends up killing everyone.

We have 97 worlds to choose from as it is.  Well, not all of them are big
enough to support life, but many of them may be.

and all of them are too far away to be of significance.

There are a tremendous number of exceptionally valuable resources on and
 under the ocean floor. In many ways, they are no cheaper or easier to 
get to than those on asteroids, but it makes far more sense to build 
underground or undersea colonies here on Earth than it would to do so on
 the moon or asteroids.

That side discussion is not entirely unrelated to the subject of this 
item - How will humanity end? I think Grex will bore everybody to death.
 ;-)

hahahaha

Most of the imagined "resources" on the moon, and maybe even on Mars,
are not anywhere near as attainable as those on earth. The moon is
not *differentiated*. All resources on earth that are useful to humans,
apart from simple "aggregate", occur because of differentiation, either
through chemical processes (most ores) or biological processes (hydrocarbons,
some ores). That is, chemical and biological processes, acting over
millenia, with water and tectonics as agents, have concentrated minerals
into ore bodies or processed plant remains into accessible fuels. These
processes did not occur on the Moon, and possibly not on Mars. 

I don't think humanity will end, I think it will cycle through the rise
and fall of many civilizations, each ending in an overthrow of the existing
societal system and temporary return to anarchy, followed by the slow 
building of the next society.
Failing that, I'd like to vote for a "The Stand"-esque supervirus mistake.
Or possibly terrorists overdoing nuclear weapons.  Hmmm, possibly neither
of these would be enough to kill all of humanity off either.
<shrugs and wanders off in search of ice cream>

Killing _everybody_ with a virus (including highly isolated little groups
of natives in interestingly undesirable real estate, nuclear submarine
crews, the 1 person in 100,000 who's got a mutation which really screws
up the viral game plan, etc.) doesn't strike me as realistic.

"Deranged or Tragically Mistaken Scientist Destroys Earth With Artificial
Black Hole" sounds far better as a plot for a grade-B movie than as a 
serious scenario.

Runaway global warming & similar fun seem like fairly plausable ways to do
ourselves in.

Getting knocked off by genuine ET's who think of humans excaping the Earth
& running around in space in ways similar to Australians thinking about
rabbits strikes me as a real (if hardly actionable) danger.

Why can't humans go extinct?  A lot of other large animals have gone extinct
since coming in contact with humans, from passenger pigeons to giant sloths.
Most of the large mammals in North American disappeared about 10,000 years
ago not long after people arrived.

They did not have the intelligence to fight back, or adapt by using
resources to modify their habitat for survival. Humans arose in tropical
Africa, but now occupy very different environments, such as the shores
of the Arctic ocean. No other species is found both there and on
the equator (except introductions, migrating birds (a truly amazing
adaptation), and some marine creatures). To follow the scenario in
#24, there would have to arise a species more intelligent and adaptable
than humans: there aren't any and humans would kill any mutants like
that before they could gain any advantage.

Well of course they disappeared shortly after people arrived...would *you*
want to live with us?  I think that most of the extinct species had a lot
of help in going extinct from humans.  And since cannibalism and/or murder
are both illegal and socially unacceptable, I don't think we're going to
oblige by killing ourselves for fun.

Murder may be illegal but that does not prevent wars.

your self-loathing makes me happy, nun.

re #27:  Your comment is both trite and unrelated.  My point is that 
passenger pigeons went extinct and many other species extinct or endangered
because people killed them for sport or for food.  Humans are unlikely to
start killing each other on a large scale for either reason under current
societal custom, and therefore the comparison of humans to these other 
species is invalid.  War is a completely separate topic.  Furthermore, I
believe that most of the killing that occurs in a war is not considered
murder.

Humans would be less hypocritical if it were. 

Probably.  I submit that wars are occasionally beneficial in that they help
with the overpopulation problem.  They used to be bad from an evolutionary
standpoint because they killed the fit and able.  But these days, at least
in the U.S., I understand that there are multiple ways of avoiding active
duty, such as college.  A very artificial kind of natural selection...and
if this comment bothers you, I'd be happy to expound at length on my much
more disturbing views on welfare and the homeless.
<set fullname = ayn rand>

Maybe we need some kind of "Running Man" game show in real life?  Or maybe
"Survivor" should go for that last 95% of authenticity by having the tribe
members kill and eat each other.

Explain to the people in Bosnia and Kosovo that wars are good for them, that
they only had to be in college to avoid getting killed by a bomb.  Ethnic
cleansing is not likely to stop, especially as the world gets more crowded.

I don't think I agree with Carolyn, but if you're going to attack her for
something she said, you might as well read the entire paragraph.  When she
starts a sentence by saying, "but these days, at least in the U.S."
challenging the statement in the rest of the sentence by saying it's not the
case in Bosnia and Kosovo doesn't in any way say that what she actually said
is untrue.

I should also note that I don't think colonizing other planets makes all that
much sense at this point.  Presumably there are some other planets that have
some resources that humans need, but it's likely that no matter what other
planet people went to, they'd have to import some resources from earth.  Once
we get to the point of populating places that need resources imported,
populating places like New Mexico sounds a lot easier than populating the Moon
or Mars.

re 34:  Thank you for pointing that out, scg (and happy birthday!)  I'm not
actually convinced of my own argument, but it really annoys me when people
react on an emotionally conditioned level (war is evil!  you must give to
those who have less than you because otherwise you are a Bad Person!) and
I like to play devil's advocate.
re 33:  You're still missing the point on many levels.  First off, according
to my claim about war being occasionally beneficial, the war in Bosnia would
be good for the world's overpopulation problem.  Obviously it wouldn't be
good for those who got killed.  There might, however, be some kind of 
natural selection among the ethnic Albanians going on:  presumably those that
are smart/alert enough to pay attention to what's going on and figure out
how not to get killed have a survival advantage, and therefore the survivors
will have a generally increased abilities.  No, it's not fair in any sense
of the word.  Yes, it conflicts with all of your emotional conditioning.
In short, grow up...or move to Kansas.  I understand they've outlawed 
evolution there, in order to ignore reason and evidence and make everything
fit in with the world they want to believe in.
re 32:  Nah, no one in developed countries would be interested in 
participating.  You might get contestants from Third World countries, but 
people in the states aren't cold-blooded enough to appreciate it yet...
survival of the fittest, it'd be canceled within a week.  :)

I doubt that it takes more than normal intelligence, and luck, to survive
in a war. Much more important than genetics would be experience, training,
and guidance, which provide cunning, adaptability and emotional strength.
In addition, people that lack most of this also survive because they are
cared for by the others. Hence, I think war plays almost no role in
evolution. 

Isn't it still a matter of debate how much characteristics like cunning,
adaptability, and emotional strength are determined by genetics, and how much
they're determined by experience, training, and guidance ("nurture")?

People who completely lack those characteristics may be cared for by others,
and may not be sent off to war.  That doesn't preclude people somewhere in
the middle of the curve from being hard hit by adverse conditions, nor does
it protect those who don't have others to care for them.

I don't think saying "you must give to
those who have less than you because 
otherwise you are a Bad Person!"  is any 
more emotionally charged (or shortsighted) 
than saying "those who have less than you do 
so because they are Bad People!"  The second 
irritates me far more than the first.

Not that that necessarily has much to do with 
the end of humanity.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss