What will end humanity

Or will nature equip humans to cope with this problem? These are highly unsettled questions. Although there is evidence that materialism is learned and shaped by culture , there are some who argue that natural selection may have predisposed our species with a desire to accumulate stuff.

Our belongings can offer us a sense of security and status that doubtless played a more important role earlier in human history. Somehow, creating new stuff has become a divine word in the collective human psyche.

It's obnoxiously seated in all our endeavours from ancient stories to modern research and development rooms. Humans have been conditioned to believe that creating something new is a meaningful purpose of life and is the only way to advance their ambitions. Yet we forget to put a cap on the use. The limits of science have never been more glaringly apparent when trying to solve this conundrum.

Reliance upon green technological solutions alone is flawed because the focus is still based on new stuff and more use — not to alter lifestyles or business models that handed us this problem in the first place. Even if we can replace all fossil fuel-based vehicles with electric ones, for example, cities are already struggling to take road space from cars and electric vehicles have their own footprint on the world's resources due to the materials needed to build them.

Every step in this direction will have a positive effect. Look at the carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet and the systems supporting. It accounts for about 3. It's possible to cut down emissions with one less email or avoiding an unnecessary photo sharing on social media — it may seem like an insignificant reduction from one individual but then add billions of such small actions together. Read more about the impact of our internet activity on the climate.

Big technology companies claim they are going green or set goals for carbon neutrality but they rarely encourage people to spend less time on social media or order fewer products. Rather advertising and marketing models convey powerful messages that reinforce the motto: create and consume more.

This irrational savage materialism is ingrained so deeply with traditions and cultural symbols as well. During this ritual, long lines of customers hit the malls and often get injured or trampled — but people are convinced that it's an effort worth the trouble. In the age of Anthropocene, humans may feel entitled to pin hope on technology to fix any problems so that they can continue to do what they are doing.

Faced with the accumulation of long-lived plastic in the environment, for example, a spurt of innovation led to biodegradable coffee cups, bags for life and reusable straws. But while it is true that a sustainable growth model that includes our environment has much larger potential to persist, we need a different approach to sustainability that addresses our massive consumerism.

The Covid has reminded us how fragile and unprepared human civilisation is when it comes to even known knowns like a pandemic. It has also taught us that human behaviour can be modified with minor actions like wearing mask to mitigate the intensity of global tragedies. The passive approach to proliferation of anthropogenic mass is not merely due to the lack of knowledge about its impact, but in general, it has also to do with human inclination t o dismiss facts that don't fit their worldview.

Humans are naturally disposed to disregard issues that are not challenging their daily lives or those which dilute their convenience. Additionally, humans might find the solace in the thought that nature might equip organisms to survive, no matter what we do. It is true that the slow and gradual, Darwinian-style evolution through natural selection is often overtaken in certain extremely polluted environments. In , a team of scientists in Japan found a strain of bacteria from bottle recycling facility that can break down and metabolise plastic.

So why does nuclear war make the list? Because of the possibility of nuclear winter. That is, if enough nukes are detonated, world temperatures would fall dramatically and quickly, disrupting food production and possibly rendering human life impossible. It's unclear if that's even possible, or how big a war you'd need to trigger it, but if it is a possibility, that means a massive nuclear exchange is a possible cause of human extinction.

As with nuclear war, not just any pandemic qualifies. Past pandemics — like the Black Death or the Spanish flu of — have killed tens of millions of people, but failed to halt civilization. The authors are interested in an even more catastrophic scenario. Is that plausible? Medicine has improved dramatically since the Spanish flu. But on the flip side, transportation across great distances has increased, and more people are living in dense urban areas.

That makes worldwide transmission much more of a possibility. Even a pandemic that killed off most of humanity would surely leave a few survivors who have immunity to the disease. The risk isn't that a single contagion kills everyone; it's that a pandemic kills enough people that the rudiments of civilization — agriculture, principally — can't be maintained and the survivors die off.

Mass extinctions can happen for a number of reasons, many of which have their own categories on this list: global warming, an asteroid impact, etc. The journalist Elizabeth Kolbert has argued that humans may be in the process of causing a mass extinction event , not least due to carbon emissions.

Given that humans are heavily dependent on ecosystems, both natural and artificial, for food and other resources, mass extinctions that disrupt those ecosystems threaten us as well. Weimar Germany amidst hyperinflation, in We'd need something even worse if humanity as a whole's going to destroy itself. This is a vague one, but it basically means the world's economic and political systems collapse, by way of something like "a severe, prolonged depression with high bankruptcy rates and high unemployment, a breakdown in normal commerce caused by hyperinflation, or even an economically-caused sharp increase in the death rate and perhaps even a decline in population.

The paper also mentions other possibilities, like a coronal mass ejection from the Sun that disrupts electrical systems on Earth. That said, it's unclear whether these things would pose an existential threat. Humanity has survived past economic downturns — even massive ones like the Great Depression. An economic collapse would have to be considerably more massive than that to risk human extinction or to kill enough people that the survivors couldn't recover.

A simulation of a multi-kilometer asteroid impact. Major asteroid impacts have caused large-scale extinction on Earth in the past. Most famously, the Chicxulub impact 66 million years ago is widely believed to have caused the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs an alternative theory blames volcanic eruptions , about which more in a second.

Theoretically, a future impact could have a similar effect. The good news is that NASA is fairly confident in its ability to track asteroids large enough to seriously disrupt human life upon impact, and detection efforts are improving. Scientists are also working on developing ways to deflect asteroids that would have a truly devastating effect , such as by crashing spacecraft into them with enough force to change their path, avoiding Earth.

An example of the possible distribution of ash from a month-long Yellowstone supereruption. Keep in mind that such an eruption is extremely unlikely. As with asteroids, there's historical precedent for volcanic eruptions causing mass extinction. The Permian—Triassic extinction event, which rendered something like 90 percent of the Earth's species extinct , is believed to have been caused by an eruption. Eruptions can cause significant global cooling and can disrupt agricultural production.

They're also basically impossible to prevent, at least today, though they're also extremely rare. Or pretend you visited at the 75 percent point. Then the future would have been only one-third the past duration. This statement would have turned out to be true for anyone who visited the wall in the shaded part of the diagram.

Gott made that prediction, except that he also made use of the knowledge that the wall was then eight years old. He reasoned that this prediction had a 50 percent chance of being right. You may feel that 50 percent is too wishy-washy and Gott just got lucky.

No problem: The method can supply predictions with any degree of confidence you choose. This is less impressive, given the extremely wide range — but it would have been correct, too. In short, the Copernican method is a mathematical parlor trick that does what it claims to do.

You must encounter something of unknown duration at a random point in time both important conditions! But if you meet those conditions, it works. Homo sapiens has been around for about , years. There has been a huge population explosion in the past few millennia.

Thus, as a random observer of my own species, I am far more likely to be living at a time when more humans are living such as right now.

This needs to be taken into account. The easiest way to do that is to use human lives, rather than years, as the marker of time. Imagine a complete, chronological list of the human race: every person who ever lived or will have lived, sorted by time of birth. I will again represent it as a horizontal bar. Half the people who will ever live are in the first half of the list. Half are in the second half. These statements are necessarily right, no matter how long or short the list may end up being.

I could be relatively early, if humanity has a long, populous future ahead. This claim will be true for the people in the second half of the list the shaded area. Is it true for me? Demographers have estimated the total number of people who ever lived at about billion. That means that about billion people were born before me.

Currently, about million people are born each year. At that rate, it would take only about years for another billion more people to be born. A sharp decrease in the birthrate could postpone doomsday. It might mean a global catastrophe leaving a handful of post-apocalyptic survivors. There has been speculation about how future technology might change the human condition. Genetically or digitally enhanced humans could live for centuries and have few children.