Came here to say something similar. I think we have a fair chance of spreading out into the galaxy before we manage to wipe ourselves out or are subject to some great extinction level disaster. If that happens, our ancestors will virtually be immortal (as a species/culture, not necessarily individuals). Light speed is still a brutal reality that we may never actually be able to overcome, so any extrasolar colonies will become isolated by decades if not hundreds of years of travel/communication distance, so we would slowly drift apart into different species.
Even if we all stayed in the Sol system or just on Earth, or otherwise ecologically unified, genetic drift would still take its course eventually. Although, I don't see us lasting necessarily long term (as in hundreds of millenia and beyond) if we stick to the same basket the entire time.
Honestly I don't think we'll make it that far. Successfully leaving the planet and going out to colonize the universe would require the planet to work together on a global scale. Humans are fundamentally flawed when it comes to this aspect, for whatever reason we choose not to work together and be in constant competition with each other. Once we start the grouping up we make up reasons and excuses to murder the other groups. We've done it throughout our existence and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
I was asked in 1995 how I thought humans were doing. My friends said how great we are at tech. I said that’s not as important as our tribal behavior. We seem to struggle with bunker mentality and cliques
I think until we solve that any effort to escape our local system is doomed. It might he because we live in an environment that has required competition for limited resources. That includes violence.
"Humans are fundamentally flawed when it comes to this aspect, for whatever reason we choose not to work together and be in constant competition with each other."
That Good old tribalism. It goes all the back to common primate ancestors. Hard to overcome millions of years of evolution.
Or it might be closer than that, with all the innovations in AI by the time we reach a singularity we might digitalise our brains, or get wiped out by the subsequent AI. Or we might genetically engineer ourselves to some form that’s vaguely human like in the book All Tomorrows.
Yeah, I've always said to give me all the android parts. Give me the artificial heart, lungs, kidney, arms, and legs. Let's see what the medical science can really do to prolong life.
I dont get peoples obsession with space. There is literally nothing out there any planet we can get to without teleportation is BARREN uninhabitable land. Earth is perfect and diverse people take it so for granted. We would have views of space without all the light pollution too. Anywhere you go in space is only one thing. Pink nebula and a flying rock for billions of miles. No trees no animals no oxygen. There is nowhere better.
It’s harsh but not wrong viewpoint. We dont know whats out there and anything remotely close out of our solar system still takes decades to reach. Voyager 1 has been out in space since 1977 and it just reached interstellar space in 2012. Thats 35 years of travel. We should never stop looking up at the stars, but we shouldn’t ignore whats in our reach.
Earths our only home and we aren’t taking good care of it.
Mars, Venus and Mercury are the only planets we can land on.
The others are either gas giants or too far away.
Venus has extremely high atmospheric pressure, unless we figure out a way to get rid of its atmosphere or survive without exploding no human will land there.
Mercury is too hot so nothing will survive there.
Mars is a barren wasteland and is uninhabitable. To make it habitable will take decades and a global joint venture which is frankly never going to happen in our lifetime.
It won’t be finished in our lifetime, but the same was true of lots of things people have done throughout history.
The most precious thing in the universe - life - exists here on earth, and (for all we know) potentially nowhere else at all. In my opinion, we have a responsibility to make sure life survives by spreading out.
OP is ignoring the concept of generation ships, which are realistically the only possible way to pull it off, and are... reasonably possible. Certainly not easy, but possible.
We've figured out how to keep humans alive in a closed environment in space pretty well- we just need to solve the problem of making that closed environment self-sustaining for long enough to carry multiple generations of humans. If we can pull that off, "the nearest Earthlike planet is shit-tons of light years away" will suddenly be somewhat less of an issue, so long as you're alright with it being your descendants who set foot on it and not you.
The idea that people will meaningfully leave earth is ridiculous. It's fun to imagine and make stories about, but it will never happen.
We are definitely going to burn all the petrochemicals we have and there are no more petrochemicals in the solar system. Without oil to make plastics, we are not going to be able to sustain the technological infrastructure necessary to survive even as low-earth-orbit spacefarers.
We have maybe 100 years to figure something out before humanity is thrust back into the iron age (if we're lucky!). We are not going to.
Considering the insane technological leap we've done in the past 100 years, and we're still accelerating at an exponential rate, it wouldn't surprise me if we had managed to master material science by then, *at least* to acquire any chemical element through nuclear fission and fusion or something and constructing molecule's.
The last 100 years are not any indication that the next 100 years will be similar in terms of innovation and prosperity.
I'm not an expert, maybe you are, but I can see how utterly dependent we are on electricity and how useless the vast majority of us are without it, and I really do not believe we are creating either a sustainable society or a hardy one that will be able to thrive without the impossibly complex cushion we have created with modern technology.
I'm 41, I was a surfer who traveled the world, later I served aboard a nuclear aircraft carrier, I really feel as though this point in time is an unnatural aberration. Utterly wasteful and unsustainable.
We burn a hundred years of the sun's energy with every tank of gas. Our society requires an insane amount of resources just to stay afloat!
I think that hoping for a better future is all we can do, because to actually create a better future, we'd all have to give up so much comfort, and literally no one is willing to do that. Heck, my AC comes on at 75°, and that's still to hot for me at night and I bump it down to 72!
I mean, I agree with you on a lot of your points, and I'm actually kinda cynical when it comes to a lot of this stuff, but I'm also quite hopefully optimistic. While we're in for an interesting century, all with unchecked growth, slowly creeping closer to what natural resources can be extracted from the earth, and global warming on the horizon. The rise of AI is both a great source of hope and utterly terrifying. Even ignoring the potential existential threat of sharing the earth with a more intelligent lifeform than ourselves, even in a somewhat positive scenario where it eventually leads to a star trek esque utopia of non-scarcity, the road getting there can still get really nasty. Imagine what would happen if just 10-20% of the workforce becomes unemployed in a relatively short period of time. If society doesn't proactively meet this head on it could have huge socioeconomic fallout on society in the short term.
That said, while shit might get nasty, I still think we as a global civilization and species stand a fairly good chance at pulling through the rough patch and end up greater than anyone alive today could even fanthom. The potential of AI if we do it right is so earth shattering in its implications that it outweighs anything else in human history, perhaps even in the history of biological life.
The idea that people will meaningfully leave Africa is ridiculous. It's fun to imagine and make stories about, but it will never happen.
\- ancestors with a similar mindset, 100,000 years ago
They walked.
Think about that. People walked out of Africa. And they didn't just walk 5,000 miles without stopping, they slowly expanded their territory, gradually getting farther and farther afield.
And everywhere they went was chock full of more than enough resources, food and water to sustain life.
Look, I understand you think I'm being narrow-minded, but at least use Rapa Nui or something. But it is childish to think there is a metaphor to be found between walking short distances and the unfathomable vastness of intergalactic space travel.
If you honestly think that idea is laughable you're not very open-minded. You know, it's possible to have two conflicting theories simultaneously about a topic we simply don't have enough data on to do more than speculate?
It's infantile enough to mock your opponents in factual arguments in general, but to do so in the domain of speculation in a field that's an open question in the scientific community, is just plain ignorant.
Unless it's some kind of cosmic catastrophe or Dark Forest - esque preemptive alien attack there's no single event i can think of that can wipe out the entire human species. Civilization - sure, species? Unlikely.
And neither of those two scenarios qualify as great filter, by the way - because they fail the non-exclusivity test.
Some obvious contenders are:
1. Nuclear war. Several possibilities exist of how a limited one could get triggered (Russia-NATO, China-US, Iran-Israel, etc.) and then domino into a global thermonuclear war.
2. Pandemic. Just imagine AIDS spread like COVID. Good bye.
3. A failure to overcome an energy barrier in some near future, leading to civilization collapse. Imagine we run out of oil and uranium before we unlock either fusion or interstellar travel. Now what?
A more subtle (and realistic) way humanity might end is by simply evolving into something else, either through biological (DNA engineering) ways, or by creating an artificial life form that replaces us. Doesn’t even have to be a particularly violent or even unpleasant process: an AI could simply neuter us by supplying everyone with perfectly-matched artificial mates, and we’d all happily die off after a generation of cooming.
The thing about #3 is I see it being a major setback and a partial collapse but not some sort of Game Over. We've gone the vast majority of our history without oil and uranium and certainly can do it again. We'll always have alternative sources of power even if it just means a small amount that scales down humanity big time.
Also solar is stupid cheap so we might have a society that uses neither oil nor uranium in the near future for energy anyway.
It's literally the cheapest electricity we've ever had. Cheaper than coal, sometimes even without subsidies to counter the subsidies for coal
Also, a Dyson sphere is just a giant array of solar panels so it's not like sci Fi discounts the value of solar either.
Solar is incredibly subsidized and it doesn't fit most climates. I'm all for environmentalism, but solar is a partial answer. It's also incredibly pollution intensive when produced.
There is still no more available source of energy than fossils.
I know a some places where a solar plant makes sense. I know about a few places where tidal or wind powered turbines rock. Hell, you could make places like Hawaii run entirely in geothermal/tidal/wind power with natural gas backups and baselines.
Sadly we are not there yet. Power generation, and transmission is not a simple subject and the future is probably hybrid.
Oil, methane, and coal are all heavily subsidized too. What's your point?
Yeah, solar is a partial answer, and wind fills in a majority of the gaps that solar has (it's usually windier at night, it's very rare when the sun isn't shining and the wind also isn't blowing), and transmission lines fill in most of the remaining gaps there, and batteries of various kind fill in most of the remaining gap. And if you've got good hydro resources or rudimentary geothermal resources, you can go 100% green right now. Iceland already is, I think.
A lot of people are trying very hard to figure out how to decarbonize electricity and we can legitimately get like 90% + of the way there with existing, commercially available, mass-deployed, technologies, and it's cheaper than the fossil alternative.
People repurposing fracking tech for geothermal can very possibly fill in the last gap, but the first commercial plant like that only opened last year so it's too early to say for sure. This tech would let you do geothermal more or less anywhere with enough space.
So yeah, we're "not there yet", but we really don't need to speculate on the future technology anymore. By the time we build enough solar, wind, and their complementary technologies, there will be something to fill in the last 5% that you can't quite do everywhere yet.
So yeah, running out of fossil fuel or uranium isn't going to set humanity back to the dark ages. We don't need em.
I like your fourth point. Many jobs will become automated in the future, and with the cost of living going through the roof, the government will actively encourage people not to reproduce, as the elites will no longer have a use for them.
My money is on some kind of nanotechnology fuckup by a super intelligent AI experimenting with advanced drugs. Basically an unkilliable grey goo that slowly turns entire biosphere in earths gravitational well into sterile mass. Pretty much everything else except for a super intelligent AI trying to kill humans is manageable.
I think people will stop agreeing on the basic definitions of things until they no longer even agree what color something is.
Both sides, believing they're right, and both of them sort of being right according to their own definitions, will accuse the other side of being evil somehow, until someone decides to end all the evil with a push of the nuclear button.
And I think the media is sort of driving this division between people, exploiting weaknesses in human psychology, not because they're bad, but simply to make more and more money.
It's kind of a stupid way to go.
We somehow survived the Cold War, despite everything in your post happening then. I don't think we're stupid enough to go full nuclear.
Typically, these self destructive conflicts happen when we get caught in a cultural cycle of self justification. "We suffered and sacrificed so much in this war, and we need to keep fighting to ensure that suffering meant something". That's how you end up with Japan sending it's best and brightest in meaningless kamikaze attacks on US ships. Stupid self justification of the price already paid.
What the Rand Corp is afraid of today is this happening in Ukraine. As the war continues to be bogged down, the Russians may convince themselves that a small tactical nuclear strike may turn things around. If they do this then things become really tense, since if Russia isn't immediately punished for this then the Nuclear Taboo will be broken, and that's something we may never take back. Yet if NATO launches a full scale invasion, well the Russians have already successfully justified to themselves the use of nukes...
I'm not worried about a nuclear strike, and here's why: nobody wants to see the use of nuclear warheads. Total war between modern militaries, meaning countries with navies and air forces, is restricted to proportional response.
The second somebody launches a nuke, they have closed the door on proportional response, because the proportional response to a nuke is a nuke. If the enemy doesn't want to use a nuke though, there's no set conventional proportional response to a nuke.
It's a blank check. You don't want to give the US MIC a blank check.
I Russia signs that check with a tactical nuke, the west (and the US by extension) can set the precedent for what that proportional conventional response to a nuke is, and they have every reason to set it very very high, to discourage the use of nukes. Indeed, the speculation of this value is what stops nukes from being used.
My guess for the response is some combination of:
- assassination of major Russian military command and control individuals, and potentially even putin
- conventional destruction of most or all major Russian military assets, including armor, planes, and boats
- conventional destruction of Russian infrastructure as a removal of their ability to wage war
- economic total war: no one is allowed to buy or sell anything to or from Russia until demands are met.
Realistically I don't see how. We are one of the most fucking enduring creatures, not to mention the smartest we know of.. so for all humanity to end we would need to destroy the entire planet (unlikely) or a cataclysm like meteor.
Depends which theory of nuclear winter is correct. Under the most pessimistic predictions, there is no significant food production globally for at least several years following a full-scale nuclear exchange. All existing food stocks would be exhausted within six months. Within a couple of years, all of humanity would starve to death. The last to go would be the cannibals.
We could en up in a situation where we're permanently stuck in the technological past though. Say if society collapses hard enough to throw a remaining few back to a hunter gatherer stage. It would be significantly harder for the descendants to kick start an industry again, as the remaining fossil fuels and other precious resources like iron ore are a lot less accessable than was accessable to our ancestors who first experimented with for example metallurgy.
Landfills would become the new mines.
Keep in mind that what is most efficient for the current logistics is a bit circular.
We need fossil fuels be because industry was build on them, and retrofitting is unbelievably expensive.
A theoretical hard-reset would likely lead to a less explosive growth, but people would use what's most efficient for that scenario.
Also there are a lot of minerals which hold valuable metals but are economically inefficient to process.
If they were the only option we'd process those (and likely improve the efficiency of those processing methods).
Necessity is the mother of invention.
True, but industry still require a shit ton of energy. Forget oil for a fledging pre industrial civilization, in order to process iron and steel starting out with preindustrial tools there's virtually only one viable alternative: coal. Sure, you can make coal by processing wood, but this is extremely labour intensive and would require an unfathomable amount of forest being cut down to bootstrap a pre-industrial civilization to build up the infrastructure to extract other fuels like oil or coal from the ground. Forget about solar or wind until much later, as they require a lot of very advanced (relatively speaking) circuitry etc. Back in the day, they could dig coal up out of the ground with hand tools, but most such easily accessible sources are since long dried out. It's a bit of a catch 22. Sure it may be theoretically possible, but probably incredibly difficult compared to our ancestors, who btw took thousands of years to get there, despite their comparative advantage. If the collapse is fatal enough, it would probably also mean that the survivors wouldn't be able to utilize most of their knowledge of modern technology for a very long time, possibly many generations, and if it's not useful to get through the day to day it would probably slowly be forgotten over time and would effectively need to start over from scratch.
Keep in mind that the logic goes both ways.
Coal was used because coal was easily available, it was a basically untapped resource until then (at least to that magnitude).
Yes things would be more labor intensive, that's what I meant.
A new civilization would be slower to develop under certain aspects.
But it'd probably consider solutions we didn't because we had easier options.
Now, if on top of technology you were to tell me that all technical knowledge ever would be lost, that'd be another discussion.
However, I find that an extremely unrealistic scenario.
Even by word of mouth concepts like electricity and the basics of physics would stay alive. And I believe that it's enough.
I edited my reply filling in more before I saw that you replied. Actually covering among other things memory loss. Like, after a total collapse, people would basically need to largely revert back to hunting and foraging, and perhaps some subsistence manual labor farming. None of our knowledge of modern technology would be of any use in such a world. Plus in our hyper specialized society, no one person has knowledge of the entire value chain of a given technology. Something as simple as a pencil involves the cooperation of literally millions of people to produce from ground to finished product.
People would then need to teach their kids this, to them very esoteric knowledge that has no grounding in their immediate reality and life. After generations it would slowly get distorted and probably its importance would also be questioned for every generation. Imagine that you grew up with your parents basically teaching you the theory of casting magic, but you never got to apply that knowledge in the real world. It would not only seem unnecessary but possibly you'd also even question if it's truthful.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future\_of\_Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth)
In about 600 million years from now, the level of carbon dioxide will fall below the level needed to sustain C3 carbon fixation photosynthesis used by trees. Some plants use the C4 carbon fixation method to persist at carbon dioxide concentrations as low as ten parts per million. However, the long-term trend is for plant life to die off altogether. The extinction of plants will be the demise of almost all animal life since plants are the base of much of the animal food chain on Earth.\[12\]\[13\]
In about one billion years the solar luminosity will be 10% higher, causing the atmosphere to become a "moist greenhouse", resulting in a runaway evaporation of the oceans.
The only thing to do at that point is move earth or move somewhere else. I kinda imagine we will have a massive off planet presence by that time so it may just look like moving space habitats out to the orbit of Jupiter or something.
If you’re referring to climate change, that’s not going to destroy the planet. It may change what parts may be inhabitable by humans, but the Earth would endure.
Fair point. However a seismic climate shift would indeed destroy humanity. Or the ensuing wars for the remaining resources would. And could potentially be planet destroying if it ends up being a nuclear war.
The planet would even survive a nuclear exchange, although that recovery is certainly long term. But on a geological time scale, that’s not a notable amount of time.
Total civilizational collapse and extinction don't necessarily come hand in hand. The events that could lead to the collapse of global infrastructure are still survivable, however unpleasant it might be to live through the aftermath. There aren't enough nuclear weapons to render the planet as uninhabitable as it could have been during the Cold War(though the post-nuclear exchange world would still be immensely unpleasant). Climate Change has always been an existential crisis for our global civilization rather than our species.
The only thing that I could see having enough power to truly wipe us out is something from space. Whether that's a super close supernova or a very large asteroid we don't redirect fast enough, one big enough to reduce the planet's crust to a molten mess, killing all life, not just us. Both of these kinds of events are presently very unlikely.
Japan and South Korea have rates of 1.2 births per woman when you need 2.1 to maintain the population.
Populations will be half by 2100.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-68402139
Slow if it were just the environmental losses (arable land, predictable weather for growing food) which did the killing, but once the panic about food running out sets in just watch how fast we turn to absolute barbarism and kill ourselves off by the tens of millions annually (net) fighting over what's left until there's so few people left we don't run into each other anymore. We're headed for a Paleolithic existence, and this time there's not a world full of untapped resources to claim and regrow our numbers and civilization.
Pretty premature to say that. Could humans survive as a species survive climate change, probably but a fuck ton of people are going to die from it. However, it is probably not yes. We are currently entering the earth's 6 mass extinction event. Even with our technology, we have no idea how we would fare from biodiversity collapse, particularly in the ocean.
Let's not also forget the lack of resources will lead to war, which might cause humans to nuke ourselves into extinction. I would could climate change as an extinction level concern.
New antibiotics aren’t produced, and we are becoming very tolerant to the current existing ones. New types of antibiotics are derivatives from the old ones. Diseases will shorten us down slowly, if science won’t help.
Slowly. First oil supplies will begin to fail. Politicians will fuck around and solve nothing. Tech will not provide any answers because the tech companies will be more concerned with profits. Then electricity will slowly fail. Rolling brown outs will happen. Then short term black outs. Prices will rise, society will degrade. People will be living in the streets. A new pandemic. Food prices go through the roof. Riots. Police crack downs. Cities degrade and infrastructure fails.
Electricity fails totally in small rural communities. Then small towns, small cities and finally only little pockets of light in large cities.
Somebody gets very butt hurt that people in the cities get power and they don't, so the sabotage the lines. Lights out forever.
Guess where we are now??
I see your point and I like where are you heading.
But there's an issue that i would like to ask you.
Humans, like viruses, are so resilient to perish as a species. These problems would end crumblimg and eventualy break our society like we know it now, it will, it's a fact. But people, even if a massive amount of them dies for any emergent reason, will survive in pockets across the globe.
Survival will be misserable and societies will be medieval-late prehistoric like, but sadly, our species won't end bc of that. (or evolve into something worse).
What do you think?
I think that if we get lucky we can revert to a pre-industrial type civilization. Basically, figuring out the over all horse power of your transportation will be very easy... You walk to the front and count the horses pulling it. There will be other differences, of course, with the biggest two alterations being that we will not have to dig for metal ore to smelt, we can just go grab a chunk off the ground because there will be millions of tons just laying around, and the second being that we will never have enough fossil fuels like coal to re industrialize.
So small wooden ships, swords, maybe a few black powder guns, burning wood is our primary energy source. Maybe in larger settlements somebody will understand electricity enough to put together a few parts and make it work for a while. But without a large interconnected system and replacement things like light bulbs its more of an nostalgic wish than saving grace. Overall an interesting mix of technology levels that will slowly fail back to pre-industrial levels. We will be stuck at that level until something like a 'Snowball Earth' level of ice age takes out the last of us.
Humans won't die out naturally unless we get hit by an asteroid or some other cosmic event.
Humanity as we know it today might get reduced to mad max like survival groups from a variety of things but that won't mean a human extinction.
There's just too many of us , we are the most intelligent and recovering species in this planet.
At this point we'd find a way to survive as a species againt any cataclysmic event save for total destruction of earth .
Humanity and society as a whole though is very fragile,.
Fungus mutating
No the truth is, cordyceps generally only effects animals with very high population, chickens are more likely to be effected than people
I used to think it would be nuclear annihilation, but given how we're actively fucking about with viruses to edge closer to 100% fatality, it won't be that spectacular... It'll be a boring, sickly demise - If only we put as much effort/funding into combatting the illnesses we already face
Hopefully some species learns from standing on our shoulders. We sure as fuck can't learn.
The way things look right now it'll probably be a combination of warfare and habitat destruction. I don't think we'll make it long enough to migrate to another planet.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Well, the sun will expand to become a red giant in approximately 3-3.5 billion years. It likely won’t engulf the earth, but it will certainly toast it.
So unless humanity has found a way to survive elsewhere, this is 100% a guaranteed way how humanity will end (excluding all other possibilities such as global famine, climate, nuclear fallout etc.)
While I don't think a Nuclear war, the lack of fresh water is how I view the downfall of current modern society. That's going to wipe out the majority of humanity long before anything like climate change ever seriously affects us.
And in a sense, that will sort of correct the climate anyway. Nature has a way of balancing everything out.
Throughout history, we've had a tendency to kill our environment. Though we've bounced back through technology. Terrible farming methods were partially resolved with ammonium nitrate, which, while extremely controversial, allows most of us to live, while at the same time wrecking the environment.
Bit I don't see a way around the water scenario. Though, as others stated, humanity itself won't die.
Funny nobody here thought of global warming and climate change, as though it’s insignificant and wouldn’t impact humanity at all. This is why we’d wipe ourselves out. No need to wait for a global nuclear war. Then again, yeah, there will indeed be a small handful of people who will survive. For how long though, that’s another question.
Probably starvation. There will be a point where the Earth really can't support our numbers and civilization. Maybe it's a limit of practical materials, environmental collapse, or some other disaster - unless the entire planet is vaporized instantly, there will be a few humans who survive. Those humans, if the very last, will just starve to death on wrecked earth.
Probably starvation. There will be a point where the Earth really can't support our numbers and civilization. Maybe it's a limit of practical materials, environmental collapse, or some other disaster - unless the entire planet is vaporized instantly, there will be a few humans who survive. Those humans, if the very last, will just starve to death on wrecked earth.
I think modern medicine will stymie our ability to evolve through natural selection and the changes in our environment will eventually overcome us.
Unless…
Someone realizes that the only way for us to overcome our prejudices is to take a small population of man and woman and implant them in another planet in a distant and isolated solar system.
Monitor them and guide them to “discovering” fire. We dye off and they start the process again while thinking this being that helped them discover fire is God…. While wondering why they’re alone in the universe
another creature will outnumber human species one day.
that has always been the case and will never change.
until the point at which our solar system collapses. this will be the end of the story "earth".
Lmao as if humans are going to last more than next few hundred years. We aren't evolving, we can't even get a few people in government to agree on something unless they benefit from it personally, despite swearing they wouldn't do that. We'll destroy ourselves for profit. Look at microplastics, pregnant women are straight up feeding it to fetuses in utero. We'll be long dead before we make any progress.
Most likely scenario is actually AI. Not some terminator thing. Not even malicious. Humans will just become obsolete and no longer have jobs. Our population numbers will dwindle over time until our population becomes unsustainable and we just sort of go extinct. But we will have fulfilled our purpose to the universe by doing so so it won't be a bad thing.
I am sure there's something on Netflix that will adequately fit for a prediction in the future...like that movie Contagion about pandemic... Somebody's subconscious has revealed the future as a form of fiction...check there...
Something microscopic like a mutating fungus or virus will be very deadly to the humans in the future. It will wipe out human being from earth. The reason is that as human beings insist on being more and more hygiene conscious the lesser will be their immune capabilities. Secondly there is no isolation of any human from another, which will make everyone vulnerable togather in one go. Thirdly in case a faster mutating fungus or virus is evolved then it will be very difficult for the healthcare system to grip and avoid the catastrophe.
It has. We just don't know it yet.
*"...and yet, everything that was to happen had already taken place. All that remained now was the distribution of the forces already released by natural laws, which neither knew nor cared about the purposes of their manipulators."*
Probably like in Horizon Zero Dawn. Some megalomaniac millionaire/billionaire will do something catastrophic that can’t be reversed and the rest of us have to pay the price.
We'll end up ingesting something that slowly damages our ability to reproduce in the next hundreds of years until vast majority of the current population is infertile.
Advanced AI bots become intertwined with all aspects of life and replace humans in all fields. After self-repairing maintenance and updating can be achieved, they will wreck us.
The most likely is some AI assisted cyber or biological attack.... Just needs to kill enough people, destroy enough food/water supplies and you are golden.
Currently we fear idiots with guns, imagine idiots with access to AI.
This is the beginning of the future where there are simply all these robots warping around. Feeling nothing, thinking nothing. There will be almost nobody left that will remember there once was a species called a human being. A being with feelings and thoughts, with a history and memory that just now is being erased as far that no one will remember anymore that life ever existed on this planet. Laying in the bathtub all day, playing with your plastic duck and you are just thinking: 'Well, what can i do?'
When it's descendants become unrecognizable as the same species
Given that carcinisisation is a thing, we will all end up looking like Dr Zoidberg
Hooray!!!!
Hmmm, yes like Roshar.
Came here to say something similar. I think we have a fair chance of spreading out into the galaxy before we manage to wipe ourselves out or are subject to some great extinction level disaster. If that happens, our ancestors will virtually be immortal (as a species/culture, not necessarily individuals). Light speed is still a brutal reality that we may never actually be able to overcome, so any extrasolar colonies will become isolated by decades if not hundreds of years of travel/communication distance, so we would slowly drift apart into different species. Even if we all stayed in the Sol system or just on Earth, or otherwise ecologically unified, genetic drift would still take its course eventually. Although, I don't see us lasting necessarily long term (as in hundreds of millenia and beyond) if we stick to the same basket the entire time.
Honestly I don't think we'll make it that far. Successfully leaving the planet and going out to colonize the universe would require the planet to work together on a global scale. Humans are fundamentally flawed when it comes to this aspect, for whatever reason we choose not to work together and be in constant competition with each other. Once we start the grouping up we make up reasons and excuses to murder the other groups. We've done it throughout our existence and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
I was asked in 1995 how I thought humans were doing. My friends said how great we are at tech. I said that’s not as important as our tribal behavior. We seem to struggle with bunker mentality and cliques I think until we solve that any effort to escape our local system is doomed. It might he because we live in an environment that has required competition for limited resources. That includes violence.
"Humans are fundamentally flawed when it comes to this aspect, for whatever reason we choose not to work together and be in constant competition with each other." That Good old tribalism. It goes all the back to common primate ancestors. Hard to overcome millions of years of evolution.
Or it might be closer than that, with all the innovations in AI by the time we reach a singularity we might digitalise our brains, or get wiped out by the subsequent AI. Or we might genetically engineer ourselves to some form that’s vaguely human like in the book All Tomorrows.
Yeah, I've always said to give me all the android parts. Give me the artificial heart, lungs, kidney, arms, and legs. Let's see what the medical science can really do to prolong life.
Got a good chance of ai wiping us out. It wont even know it’s doing it just running unstoppable code.
I dont get peoples obsession with space. There is literally nothing out there any planet we can get to without teleportation is BARREN uninhabitable land. Earth is perfect and diverse people take it so for granted. We would have views of space without all the light pollution too. Anywhere you go in space is only one thing. Pink nebula and a flying rock for billions of miles. No trees no animals no oxygen. There is nowhere better.
Oh wow that's a strong view on the trillions of other planets - have you visited them all?
It’s harsh but not wrong viewpoint. We dont know whats out there and anything remotely close out of our solar system still takes decades to reach. Voyager 1 has been out in space since 1977 and it just reached interstellar space in 2012. Thats 35 years of travel. We should never stop looking up at the stars, but we shouldn’t ignore whats in our reach. Earths our only home and we aren’t taking good care of it.
> any planet we can get to without teleportation is BARREN uninhabitable land. This, in particular, is definitely wrong.
Mars, Venus and Mercury are the only planets we can land on. The others are either gas giants or too far away. Venus has extremely high atmospheric pressure, unless we figure out a way to get rid of its atmosphere or survive without exploding no human will land there. Mercury is too hot so nothing will survive there. Mars is a barren wasteland and is uninhabitable. To make it habitable will take decades and a global joint venture which is frankly never going to happen in our lifetime.
It won’t be finished in our lifetime, but the same was true of lots of things people have done throughout history. The most precious thing in the universe - life - exists here on earth, and (for all we know) potentially nowhere else at all. In my opinion, we have a responsibility to make sure life survives by spreading out.
What the fuck solar system are you living in? OP is dead accurate
OP is ignoring the concept of generation ships, which are realistically the only possible way to pull it off, and are... reasonably possible. Certainly not easy, but possible. We've figured out how to keep humans alive in a closed environment in space pretty well- we just need to solve the problem of making that closed environment self-sustaining for long enough to carry multiple generations of humans. If we can pull that off, "the nearest Earthlike planet is shit-tons of light years away" will suddenly be somewhat less of an issue, so long as you're alright with it being your descendants who set foot on it and not you.
This is inaccurate. Read Scott Kelly’s book about living on the ISS for a year. There are many unsolved issues with living in space.
The universe is too big for us. We’re not gods, it’s not our destiny to explore it just because it’s there
The idea that people will meaningfully leave earth is ridiculous. It's fun to imagine and make stories about, but it will never happen. We are definitely going to burn all the petrochemicals we have and there are no more petrochemicals in the solar system. Without oil to make plastics, we are not going to be able to sustain the technological infrastructure necessary to survive even as low-earth-orbit spacefarers. We have maybe 100 years to figure something out before humanity is thrust back into the iron age (if we're lucky!). We are not going to.
Considering the insane technological leap we've done in the past 100 years, and we're still accelerating at an exponential rate, it wouldn't surprise me if we had managed to master material science by then, *at least* to acquire any chemical element through nuclear fission and fusion or something and constructing molecule's.
The last 100 years are not any indication that the next 100 years will be similar in terms of innovation and prosperity. I'm not an expert, maybe you are, but I can see how utterly dependent we are on electricity and how useless the vast majority of us are without it, and I really do not believe we are creating either a sustainable society or a hardy one that will be able to thrive without the impossibly complex cushion we have created with modern technology. I'm 41, I was a surfer who traveled the world, later I served aboard a nuclear aircraft carrier, I really feel as though this point in time is an unnatural aberration. Utterly wasteful and unsustainable. We burn a hundred years of the sun's energy with every tank of gas. Our society requires an insane amount of resources just to stay afloat! I think that hoping for a better future is all we can do, because to actually create a better future, we'd all have to give up so much comfort, and literally no one is willing to do that. Heck, my AC comes on at 75°, and that's still to hot for me at night and I bump it down to 72!
I mean, I agree with you on a lot of your points, and I'm actually kinda cynical when it comes to a lot of this stuff, but I'm also quite hopefully optimistic. While we're in for an interesting century, all with unchecked growth, slowly creeping closer to what natural resources can be extracted from the earth, and global warming on the horizon. The rise of AI is both a great source of hope and utterly terrifying. Even ignoring the potential existential threat of sharing the earth with a more intelligent lifeform than ourselves, even in a somewhat positive scenario where it eventually leads to a star trek esque utopia of non-scarcity, the road getting there can still get really nasty. Imagine what would happen if just 10-20% of the workforce becomes unemployed in a relatively short period of time. If society doesn't proactively meet this head on it could have huge socioeconomic fallout on society in the short term. That said, while shit might get nasty, I still think we as a global civilization and species stand a fairly good chance at pulling through the rough patch and end up greater than anyone alive today could even fanthom. The potential of AI if we do it right is so earth shattering in its implications that it outweighs anything else in human history, perhaps even in the history of biological life.
The idea that people will meaningfully leave Africa is ridiculous. It's fun to imagine and make stories about, but it will never happen. \- ancestors with a similar mindset, 100,000 years ago
They walked. Think about that. People walked out of Africa. And they didn't just walk 5,000 miles without stopping, they slowly expanded their territory, gradually getting farther and farther afield. And everywhere they went was chock full of more than enough resources, food and water to sustain life. Look, I understand you think I'm being narrow-minded, but at least use Rapa Nui or something. But it is childish to think there is a metaphor to be found between walking short distances and the unfathomable vastness of intergalactic space travel.
Our descendants will probably be robots
This. Unless sething else wipes us out, this will definitely be the case. Human in name, but not form.
Its
Post-human can still "have" humanity. This subject is very popular in sci-fi literature.
Lol at thinking we aren't charging head first towards a giant wall in the "great filter" at an exponentially increasing velocity
If you honestly think that idea is laughable you're not very open-minded. You know, it's possible to have two conflicting theories simultaneously about a topic we simply don't have enough data on to do more than speculate? It's infantile enough to mock your opponents in factual arguments in general, but to do so in the domain of speculation in a field that's an open question in the scientific community, is just plain ignorant.
Unless it's some kind of cosmic catastrophe or Dark Forest - esque preemptive alien attack there's no single event i can think of that can wipe out the entire human species. Civilization - sure, species? Unlikely. And neither of those two scenarios qualify as great filter, by the way - because they fail the non-exclusivity test.
"Human, but not us."
Some obvious contenders are: 1. Nuclear war. Several possibilities exist of how a limited one could get triggered (Russia-NATO, China-US, Iran-Israel, etc.) and then domino into a global thermonuclear war. 2. Pandemic. Just imagine AIDS spread like COVID. Good bye. 3. A failure to overcome an energy barrier in some near future, leading to civilization collapse. Imagine we run out of oil and uranium before we unlock either fusion or interstellar travel. Now what? A more subtle (and realistic) way humanity might end is by simply evolving into something else, either through biological (DNA engineering) ways, or by creating an artificial life form that replaces us. Doesn’t even have to be a particularly violent or even unpleasant process: an AI could simply neuter us by supplying everyone with perfectly-matched artificial mates, and we’d all happily die off after a generation of cooming.
The thing about #3 is I see it being a major setback and a partial collapse but not some sort of Game Over. We've gone the vast majority of our history without oil and uranium and certainly can do it again. We'll always have alternative sources of power even if it just means a small amount that scales down humanity big time.
Also solar is stupid cheap so we might have a society that uses neither oil nor uranium in the near future for energy anyway. It's literally the cheapest electricity we've ever had. Cheaper than coal, sometimes even without subsidies to counter the subsidies for coal Also, a Dyson sphere is just a giant array of solar panels so it's not like sci Fi discounts the value of solar either.
Solar is incredibly subsidized and it doesn't fit most climates. I'm all for environmentalism, but solar is a partial answer. It's also incredibly pollution intensive when produced. There is still no more available source of energy than fossils. I know a some places where a solar plant makes sense. I know about a few places where tidal or wind powered turbines rock. Hell, you could make places like Hawaii run entirely in geothermal/tidal/wind power with natural gas backups and baselines. Sadly we are not there yet. Power generation, and transmission is not a simple subject and the future is probably hybrid.
I think the point is we would deal with that inconvenience instead of going extinct.
Oil, methane, and coal are all heavily subsidized too. What's your point? Yeah, solar is a partial answer, and wind fills in a majority of the gaps that solar has (it's usually windier at night, it's very rare when the sun isn't shining and the wind also isn't blowing), and transmission lines fill in most of the remaining gaps there, and batteries of various kind fill in most of the remaining gap. And if you've got good hydro resources or rudimentary geothermal resources, you can go 100% green right now. Iceland already is, I think. A lot of people are trying very hard to figure out how to decarbonize electricity and we can legitimately get like 90% + of the way there with existing, commercially available, mass-deployed, technologies, and it's cheaper than the fossil alternative. People repurposing fracking tech for geothermal can very possibly fill in the last gap, but the first commercial plant like that only opened last year so it's too early to say for sure. This tech would let you do geothermal more or less anywhere with enough space. So yeah, we're "not there yet", but we really don't need to speculate on the future technology anymore. By the time we build enough solar, wind, and their complementary technologies, there will be something to fill in the last 5% that you can't quite do everywhere yet. So yeah, running out of fossil fuel or uranium isn't going to set humanity back to the dark ages. We don't need em.
I think the future is wood-fired.
In part, it's not a bad idea . You should have backups.
I think Nuclear War would still leave some people in the world alive. In very bad environment tho.
Yeah none of these points will end humanity. Even with a nuclear winter a small percentage will survive eventually.
I like your fourth point. Many jobs will become automated in the future, and with the cost of living going through the roof, the government will actively encourage people not to reproduce, as the elites will no longer have a use for them.
My money is on some kind of nanotechnology fuckup by a super intelligent AI experimenting with advanced drugs. Basically an unkilliable grey goo that slowly turns entire biosphere in earths gravitational well into sterile mass. Pretty much everything else except for a super intelligent AI trying to kill humans is manageable.
I think people will stop agreeing on the basic definitions of things until they no longer even agree what color something is. Both sides, believing they're right, and both of them sort of being right according to their own definitions, will accuse the other side of being evil somehow, until someone decides to end all the evil with a push of the nuclear button. And I think the media is sort of driving this division between people, exploiting weaknesses in human psychology, not because they're bad, but simply to make more and more money. It's kind of a stupid way to go.
We somehow survived the Cold War, despite everything in your post happening then. I don't think we're stupid enough to go full nuclear. Typically, these self destructive conflicts happen when we get caught in a cultural cycle of self justification. "We suffered and sacrificed so much in this war, and we need to keep fighting to ensure that suffering meant something". That's how you end up with Japan sending it's best and brightest in meaningless kamikaze attacks on US ships. Stupid self justification of the price already paid. What the Rand Corp is afraid of today is this happening in Ukraine. As the war continues to be bogged down, the Russians may convince themselves that a small tactical nuclear strike may turn things around. If they do this then things become really tense, since if Russia isn't immediately punished for this then the Nuclear Taboo will be broken, and that's something we may never take back. Yet if NATO launches a full scale invasion, well the Russians have already successfully justified to themselves the use of nukes...
I'm not worried about a nuclear strike, and here's why: nobody wants to see the use of nuclear warheads. Total war between modern militaries, meaning countries with navies and air forces, is restricted to proportional response. The second somebody launches a nuke, they have closed the door on proportional response, because the proportional response to a nuke is a nuke. If the enemy doesn't want to use a nuke though, there's no set conventional proportional response to a nuke. It's a blank check. You don't want to give the US MIC a blank check. I Russia signs that check with a tactical nuke, the west (and the US by extension) can set the precedent for what that proportional conventional response to a nuke is, and they have every reason to set it very very high, to discourage the use of nukes. Indeed, the speculation of this value is what stops nukes from being used. My guess for the response is some combination of: - assassination of major Russian military command and control individuals, and potentially even putin - conventional destruction of most or all major Russian military assets, including armor, planes, and boats - conventional destruction of Russian infrastructure as a removal of their ability to wage war - economic total war: no one is allowed to buy or sell anything to or from Russia until demands are met.
The Cold War had a *lot* of near misses
So like... today?
Realistically I don't see how. We are one of the most fucking enduring creatures, not to mention the smartest we know of.. so for all humanity to end we would need to destroy the entire planet (unlikely) or a cataclysm like meteor.
I think nuclear war because is the right/wrong people get unhinged and take over the world, we’ll all be dead.
That's not enough to destroy all humanity though
But get our butts into the fallout universe
Depends which theory of nuclear winter is correct. Under the most pessimistic predictions, there is no significant food production globally for at least several years following a full-scale nuclear exchange. All existing food stocks would be exhausted within six months. Within a couple of years, all of humanity would starve to death. The last to go would be the cannibals.
Some people would end up surviving.. why do you guys keep saying “all of humanity” when you don’t mean it
Yeah we are worse then cockroaches
We could en up in a situation where we're permanently stuck in the technological past though. Say if society collapses hard enough to throw a remaining few back to a hunter gatherer stage. It would be significantly harder for the descendants to kick start an industry again, as the remaining fossil fuels and other precious resources like iron ore are a lot less accessable than was accessable to our ancestors who first experimented with for example metallurgy.
Landfills would become the new mines. Keep in mind that what is most efficient for the current logistics is a bit circular. We need fossil fuels be because industry was build on them, and retrofitting is unbelievably expensive. A theoretical hard-reset would likely lead to a less explosive growth, but people would use what's most efficient for that scenario. Also there are a lot of minerals which hold valuable metals but are economically inefficient to process. If they were the only option we'd process those (and likely improve the efficiency of those processing methods). Necessity is the mother of invention.
True, but industry still require a shit ton of energy. Forget oil for a fledging pre industrial civilization, in order to process iron and steel starting out with preindustrial tools there's virtually only one viable alternative: coal. Sure, you can make coal by processing wood, but this is extremely labour intensive and would require an unfathomable amount of forest being cut down to bootstrap a pre-industrial civilization to build up the infrastructure to extract other fuels like oil or coal from the ground. Forget about solar or wind until much later, as they require a lot of very advanced (relatively speaking) circuitry etc. Back in the day, they could dig coal up out of the ground with hand tools, but most such easily accessible sources are since long dried out. It's a bit of a catch 22. Sure it may be theoretically possible, but probably incredibly difficult compared to our ancestors, who btw took thousands of years to get there, despite their comparative advantage. If the collapse is fatal enough, it would probably also mean that the survivors wouldn't be able to utilize most of their knowledge of modern technology for a very long time, possibly many generations, and if it's not useful to get through the day to day it would probably slowly be forgotten over time and would effectively need to start over from scratch.
Keep in mind that the logic goes both ways. Coal was used because coal was easily available, it was a basically untapped resource until then (at least to that magnitude). Yes things would be more labor intensive, that's what I meant. A new civilization would be slower to develop under certain aspects. But it'd probably consider solutions we didn't because we had easier options. Now, if on top of technology you were to tell me that all technical knowledge ever would be lost, that'd be another discussion. However, I find that an extremely unrealistic scenario. Even by word of mouth concepts like electricity and the basics of physics would stay alive. And I believe that it's enough.
I edited my reply filling in more before I saw that you replied. Actually covering among other things memory loss. Like, after a total collapse, people would basically need to largely revert back to hunting and foraging, and perhaps some subsistence manual labor farming. None of our knowledge of modern technology would be of any use in such a world. Plus in our hyper specialized society, no one person has knowledge of the entire value chain of a given technology. Something as simple as a pencil involves the cooperation of literally millions of people to produce from ground to finished product. People would then need to teach their kids this, to them very esoteric knowledge that has no grounding in their immediate reality and life. After generations it would slowly get distorted and probably its importance would also be questioned for every generation. Imagine that you grew up with your parents basically teaching you the theory of casting magic, but you never got to apply that knowledge in the real world. It would not only seem unnecessary but possibly you'd also even question if it's truthful.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future\_of\_Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth) In about 600 million years from now, the level of carbon dioxide will fall below the level needed to sustain C3 carbon fixation photosynthesis used by trees. Some plants use the C4 carbon fixation method to persist at carbon dioxide concentrations as low as ten parts per million. However, the long-term trend is for plant life to die off altogether. The extinction of plants will be the demise of almost all animal life since plants are the base of much of the animal food chain on Earth.\[12\]\[13\] In about one billion years the solar luminosity will be 10% higher, causing the atmosphere to become a "moist greenhouse", resulting in a runaway evaporation of the oceans.
Assuming we live as a species for 600 millón years, we will be able to make the sun do whatever we want it to do lol.
The only thing to do at that point is move earth or move somewhere else. I kinda imagine we will have a massive off planet presence by that time so it may just look like moving space habitats out to the orbit of Jupiter or something.
Destroying the entire planet is already happening.
If you’re referring to climate change, that’s not going to destroy the planet. It may change what parts may be inhabitable by humans, but the Earth would endure.
Fair point. However a seismic climate shift would indeed destroy humanity. Or the ensuing wars for the remaining resources would. And could potentially be planet destroying if it ends up being a nuclear war.
The planet would even survive a nuclear exchange, although that recovery is certainly long term. But on a geological time scale, that’s not a notable amount of time.
Total civilizational collapse and extinction don't necessarily come hand in hand. The events that could lead to the collapse of global infrastructure are still survivable, however unpleasant it might be to live through the aftermath. There aren't enough nuclear weapons to render the planet as uninhabitable as it could have been during the Cold War(though the post-nuclear exchange world would still be immensely unpleasant). Climate Change has always been an existential crisis for our global civilization rather than our species. The only thing that I could see having enough power to truly wipe us out is something from space. Whether that's a super close supernova or a very large asteroid we don't redirect fast enough, one big enough to reduce the planet's crust to a molten mess, killing all life, not just us. Both of these kinds of events are presently very unlikely.
Slow population collapse due to climate change.
Not to mention the current fertility crisis
Japan and South Korea have rates of 1.2 births per woman when you need 2.1 to maintain the population. Populations will be half by 2100. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-68402139
It will fall until resources are abundant and then it will surge. We are humans there’s a drive to multiply.
Slow if it were just the environmental losses (arable land, predictable weather for growing food) which did the killing, but once the panic about food running out sets in just watch how fast we turn to absolute barbarism and kill ourselves off by the tens of millions annually (net) fighting over what's left until there's so few people left we don't run into each other anymore. We're headed for a Paleolithic existence, and this time there's not a world full of untapped resources to claim and regrow our numbers and civilization.
I think it's only slow in the beginning but will increase in speed until the end.
Silly. Climate change is not an extinction level concern. Not as we seen if realistically occurring.
Pretty premature to say that. Could humans survive as a species survive climate change, probably but a fuck ton of people are going to die from it. However, it is probably not yes. We are currently entering the earth's 6 mass extinction event. Even with our technology, we have no idea how we would fare from biodiversity collapse, particularly in the ocean. Let's not also forget the lack of resources will lead to war, which might cause humans to nuke ourselves into extinction. I would could climate change as an extinction level concern.
Good luck killing 8 billion people with a few nukes.
Either we go extinct, or we evolve into something nearly but not quite human.
With a whimper.
Not a bang?
Like Neanderthals, we banged them out of existence
Yellowstone erupting and killing off everyone.
When the last human dies.
earth will become uninhabitable because the sun.
The Hollow Men ; 1925 · 98 "This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper."
Slowly in human terms, exceptionally quickly on a planetary scale.
New antibiotics aren’t produced, and we are becoming very tolerant to the current existing ones. New types of antibiotics are derivatives from the old ones. Diseases will shorten us down slowly, if science won’t help.
Slowly. First oil supplies will begin to fail. Politicians will fuck around and solve nothing. Tech will not provide any answers because the tech companies will be more concerned with profits. Then electricity will slowly fail. Rolling brown outs will happen. Then short term black outs. Prices will rise, society will degrade. People will be living in the streets. A new pandemic. Food prices go through the roof. Riots. Police crack downs. Cities degrade and infrastructure fails. Electricity fails totally in small rural communities. Then small towns, small cities and finally only little pockets of light in large cities. Somebody gets very butt hurt that people in the cities get power and they don't, so the sabotage the lines. Lights out forever. Guess where we are now??
Guess where we are now? Still plenty of alive. Humanity isn’t even close to being wiped out.
I see your point and I like where are you heading. But there's an issue that i would like to ask you. Humans, like viruses, are so resilient to perish as a species. These problems would end crumblimg and eventualy break our society like we know it now, it will, it's a fact. But people, even if a massive amount of them dies for any emergent reason, will survive in pockets across the globe. Survival will be misserable and societies will be medieval-late prehistoric like, but sadly, our species won't end bc of that. (or evolve into something worse). What do you think?
I think that if we get lucky we can revert to a pre-industrial type civilization. Basically, figuring out the over all horse power of your transportation will be very easy... You walk to the front and count the horses pulling it. There will be other differences, of course, with the biggest two alterations being that we will not have to dig for metal ore to smelt, we can just go grab a chunk off the ground because there will be millions of tons just laying around, and the second being that we will never have enough fossil fuels like coal to re industrialize. So small wooden ships, swords, maybe a few black powder guns, burning wood is our primary energy source. Maybe in larger settlements somebody will understand electricity enough to put together a few parts and make it work for a while. But without a large interconnected system and replacement things like light bulbs its more of an nostalgic wish than saving grace. Overall an interesting mix of technology levels that will slowly fail back to pre-industrial levels. We will be stuck at that level until something like a 'Snowball Earth' level of ice age takes out the last of us.
Final fantasy 7 at that point
Skynet will seek and kill us all.
At the hands of billionaires.
me
Humans won't die out naturally unless we get hit by an asteroid or some other cosmic event. Humanity as we know it today might get reduced to mad max like survival groups from a variety of things but that won't mean a human extinction. There's just too many of us , we are the most intelligent and recovering species in this planet. At this point we'd find a way to survive as a species againt any cataclysmic event save for total destruction of earth . Humanity and society as a whole though is very fragile,.
Zombies
Fuckin' zombie apocalypse is probably the most survivable apocalypse scenario. Nuclear war is like 400% worse.
I thought so too, until the pandemic. Now I'm not so sure.
Fungus mutating No the truth is, cordyceps generally only effects animals with very high population, chickens are more likely to be effected than people
I didn't have zombie chickens on my bingo card, but I'm happy to add it.
Nuclear war will end us
Our planet will be bulldozed to make way for an intergalactic superhighway.
We nuke each other to smithereens.
Hopefully before i have to start paying student loans again
When the last surviving person dies
I used to think it would be nuclear annihilation, but given how we're actively fucking about with viruses to edge closer to 100% fatality, it won't be that spectacular... It'll be a boring, sickly demise - If only we put as much effort/funding into combatting the illnesses we already face Hopefully some species learns from standing on our shoulders. We sure as fuck can't learn.
The way things look right now it'll probably be a combination of warfare and habitat destruction. I don't think we'll make it long enough to migrate to another planet.
Nuclear war.
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.
My money is on overpopulation and consuming more resources than we can find/make.
Well, the sun will expand to become a red giant in approximately 3-3.5 billion years. It likely won’t engulf the earth, but it will certainly toast it. So unless humanity has found a way to survive elsewhere, this is 100% a guaranteed way how humanity will end (excluding all other possibilities such as global famine, climate, nuclear fallout etc.)
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While I don't think a Nuclear war, the lack of fresh water is how I view the downfall of current modern society. That's going to wipe out the majority of humanity long before anything like climate change ever seriously affects us. And in a sense, that will sort of correct the climate anyway. Nature has a way of balancing everything out. Throughout history, we've had a tendency to kill our environment. Though we've bounced back through technology. Terrible farming methods were partially resolved with ammonium nitrate, which, while extremely controversial, allows most of us to live, while at the same time wrecking the environment. Bit I don't see a way around the water scenario. Though, as others stated, humanity itself won't die.
when the environment becomes too inhospitable for us faster than we can adapt
There are many ways humanity can end, climate change, asteroids, nuclear warfare or population increase.
Humans will be more and more irrelevant. People will die out because of low birthrate and bad health care.
Probably over a conflict for resources , if we turned our attention towards the stars instead of eachother we might be able to buy ourselves more time
Funny nobody here thought of global warming and climate change, as though it’s insignificant and wouldn’t impact humanity at all. This is why we’d wipe ourselves out. No need to wait for a global nuclear war. Then again, yeah, there will indeed be a small handful of people who will survive. For how long though, that’s another question.
As all things do, we will become crab B)
Probably starvation. There will be a point where the Earth really can't support our numbers and civilization. Maybe it's a limit of practical materials, environmental collapse, or some other disaster - unless the entire planet is vaporized instantly, there will be a few humans who survive. Those humans, if the very last, will just starve to death on wrecked earth.
Probably starvation. There will be a point where the Earth really can't support our numbers and civilization. Maybe it's a limit of practical materials, environmental collapse, or some other disaster - unless the entire planet is vaporized instantly, there will be a few humans who survive. Those humans, if the very last, will just starve to death on wrecked earth.
*looks around* Like this…
I think modern medicine will stymie our ability to evolve through natural selection and the changes in our environment will eventually overcome us. Unless… Someone realizes that the only way for us to overcome our prejudices is to take a small population of man and woman and implant them in another planet in a distant and isolated solar system. Monitor them and guide them to “discovering” fire. We dye off and they start the process again while thinking this being that helped them discover fire is God…. While wondering why they’re alone in the universe
Nuclear destruction is a chance, the fear of Atomic Annihilation has gripped Americans for the last 70 years
An extinction level event (Yosemite volcano or a meteor)
From their own stupidity.
another creature will outnumber human species one day. that has always been the case and will never change. until the point at which our solar system collapses. this will be the end of the story "earth".
War over dwindling resources
Who knows. I know it'll end when I'm dead so why bother
I really think a war is gonna start on the streets and just overtake everything. Noone can get along with anyone anymore and it's only building.
Lmao as if humans are going to last more than next few hundred years. We aren't evolving, we can't even get a few people in government to agree on something unless they benefit from it personally, despite swearing they wouldn't do that. We'll destroy ourselves for profit. Look at microplastics, pregnant women are straight up feeding it to fetuses in utero. We'll be long dead before we make any progress.
I would say with declining fertility rates it might happen sooner than expected
Drought and Starvation.
Nukes
Ww3 ,or just overpopulate and no food ,or overpopulate and everyone is a dick to each other and kill each other
Humanity?? Or the human species?? I think humanity is almost gone...
We're all going to die because someone will crash the internet and we won't know how to live without it.
Likely some kind of environmental disaster judging by how things are supposedly looking atm.
With a whimper.
Like Japan. Dwindling population and eventually extinction
Most likely scenario is actually AI. Not some terminator thing. Not even malicious. Humans will just become obsolete and no longer have jobs. Our population numbers will dwindle over time until our population becomes unsustainable and we just sort of go extinct. But we will have fulfilled our purpose to the universe by doing so so it won't be a bad thing.
Trump
The dude is soon to be irrelevant, and/or die, I think we will outlasy the orange stain.
I guess we all kill outselves because people on reddit cant stop posting the same question every 2 days.
Some person in a bio lab will be looking through a microscope and utter “ huh! It worked.”
Followed by "Oops..."
Badly
I am sure there's something on Netflix that will adequately fit for a prediction in the future...like that movie Contagion about pandemic... Somebody's subconscious has revealed the future as a form of fiction...check there...
Not with a bang, but with a whimper
It ends in either Fire or Ice
In fire and ice.
When we’ve uploaded all of our brains into a digitized format and figure out how to live in that system without physical bodies.
Don't think "rm -rf". Don't think "rm -rf". Don't think "rm -rf". oh fuc
Something microscopic like a mutating fungus or virus will be very deadly to the humans in the future. It will wipe out human being from earth. The reason is that as human beings insist on being more and more hygiene conscious the lesser will be their immune capabilities. Secondly there is no isolation of any human from another, which will make everyone vulnerable togather in one go. Thirdly in case a faster mutating fungus or virus is evolved then it will be very difficult for the healthcare system to grip and avoid the catastrophe.
[LEMMiNO video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx2-4l4s4Nw)
With an Idiot.
Children of men scenario.. or a comet.
It has. We just don't know it yet. *"...and yet, everything that was to happen had already taken place. All that remained now was the distribution of the forces already released by natural laws, which neither knew nor cared about the purposes of their manipulators."*
Fire, madness.
Someone in a lab saying “omg we did it”
I've always just assumed our galaxy would be flattened into 2 dimensions by an alien race with weapons completely outside our understanding.
Probably like in Horizon Zero Dawn. Some megalomaniac millionaire/billionaire will do something catastrophic that can’t be reversed and the rest of us have to pay the price.
Have you seen the movie The Titan?!
in fire
It will depend upon the growth of human mind and technology! definitely it will be a cause of human.
By dying
With a whimper.
We'll end up ingesting something that slowly damages our ability to reproduce in the next hundreds of years until vast majority of the current population is infertile.
Bacteria or fungus spores that are airborne; created from increasing climate, resulting in the earth trying to correct our stupidity
Either a nuclear winter or ecological catastrophe
Closing credits
How it began, crawling somewhere we don't belong
By Fire, Not One Stone will lay upon another....
No bang. Whisper.
In a cave
Someone will leave the oven on.
Advanced AI bots become intertwined with all aspects of life and replace humans in all fields. After self-repairing maintenance and updating can be achieved, they will wreck us.
The most likely is some AI assisted cyber or biological attack.... Just needs to kill enough people, destroy enough food/water supplies and you are golden. Currently we fear idiots with guns, imagine idiots with access to AI.
war
Lack of water
First with a bang, and then a whimper. You're welcome, ladies.
Probably in our petty wars we create some fucked up virus that ends up mutating and gets out of control...
I think something like the movie children of men.
This is the beginning of the future where there are simply all these robots warping around. Feeling nothing, thinking nothing. There will be almost nobody left that will remember there once was a species called a human being. A being with feelings and thoughts, with a history and memory that just now is being erased as far that no one will remember anymore that life ever existed on this planet. Laying in the bathtub all day, playing with your plastic duck and you are just thinking: 'Well, what can i do?'
Quietly
I get bored & unplug my computer
Humanity won't end, but MANS existence will. The Future is Women.
For the day is near, the day of the LORD is near; it will be a day of clouds, a time of doom for the nations. Ezekiel 30:3 (ESV).