# Human Extinction



## DNJACK (Mar 28, 2018)

I have heard many people here saying that humans are going to go extinct in the next few centuries. I see no reason why to think that this will occur and I think that such fatalism is unproductive and may very well create a self fulfilling prophecy if a large portion of the population starts to believe it. Some people will question whether humanity deserves to live or not and my response is that they should think about how cruel it is to starve a small child, multiply that by over a billion and you get human extinction, as well as questioning whether there even needs to be a justification for human survival in the first place as justification is a human concept that may not apply to the existence of humanity itself


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## Dirt McGirt (Mar 28, 2018)

I think the instant we start colonizing other planets humanity will stick around indefinitely.

The only guanteed way we'll be wiped out completely with no way to stop it is with a big enough asteroid. We've spread and thrived in the hottest and coldest environments on Earth thousands of years ago. Now with all we have? Forget about it.


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## Red Hood (Mar 28, 2018)

People think a lot of things. I don't think it's a productive or healthy way to think, either. 

Anthropologically, humans adapt. We build shelters and develop tools that allow us to survive different environments, and we've been pretty good at this for a long time. I see no reason why this would stop, especially if, as @Dirt McGirt said, we spread to other planets. It would not surprise me at all if genetic modifications for for higher/lower gravity worlds and the like would be in our future.


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## swiv (Mar 28, 2018)

Dirt McGirt said:


> I think the instant we start colonizing other planets humanity will stick around indefinitely.
> 
> The only guanteed way we'll be wiped out completely with no way to stop it is with a big enough asteroid. We've spread and thrived in the hottest and coldest environments on Earth thousands of years ago. Now with all we have? Forget about it.



But what if the world's top minds came together to engineer a more perfect being, that ended up genociding us or putting us in zoos? Also I'm gonna leave this here:

http://www.sivatherium.narod.ru/library/Dixon_3/01_en.htm


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## Dirt McGirt (Mar 28, 2018)

swiv said:


> But what if the world's top minds came together to engineer a more perfect being, that ended up genociding us or putting us in zoos? Also I'm gonna leave this here:
> 
> http://www.sivatherium.narod.ru/library/Dixon_3/01_en.htm


Even in that case we would still have remote tribes that still just be chilling.

And I would put my bet on us spreading out across different planets before something like that came along


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## Ghostapplesause (Mar 28, 2018)

swiv said:


> But what if the world's top minds came together to engineer a more perfect being, that ended up genociding us or putting us in zoos? Also I'm gonna leave this here:
> 
> http://www.sivatherium.narod.ru/library/Dixon_3/01_en.htm



Human genetic engineering is banned worldwide so I do not think this future will come to pass.  The Man after Man book is really cool to look at but it downplays technology and Artifical Intelligence.


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## Save the Loli (Mar 28, 2018)

It will be coming within a few centuries, but only because we don't need to be biological anymore, we'd rather just live inside a computer all day.


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## From The Uncanny Valley (Mar 28, 2018)

Ghostapplesause said:


> Human genetic engineering is banned worldwide so I do not think this future will come to pass.  The Man after Man book is really cool to look at but it downplays technology and Artifical Intelligence.



It's actually just a regular scifi/horror book that uses a textbook format. When will people realize this?


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## Red Hood (Mar 28, 2018)

Save the Loli said:


> It will be coming within a few centuries, but only because we don't need to be biological anymore, we'd rather just live inside a computer all day.


Is this the Superior Future that Film Robert promised us?


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## BoingBoingBoi (Mar 28, 2018)

the population is supposed to level off by 2060 i think at around 10 billion, based on population growth projections. some say 11, some say 8. (for example, https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/scien...our-reasons-global-population-will-level-soon )

climate change will probably cause a few dozen holocausts' worth of death. (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligence...ccords-are-starting-to-look-like-fantasy.html)

there will be food shortages eventually, but wealthy countries will probably make out alright. the developing world esp along the equator, the middle east, africa, and central/south america will get the short stick. donny boy's wall is actually a pretty reasonable long-term solution to the coming migrant crisis. 

nuclear war would probably make things worse though.

i posted this the other day but this guy's talk is really, really informative:


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## Slap47 (Mar 29, 2018)

Dirt McGirt said:


> I think the instant we start colonizing other planets humanity will stick around indefinitely.



At that point, humans will evolve into different species due the years needed to traverse between different planets.


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## Un Platano (Mar 29, 2018)

Apoth42 said:


> At that point, humans will evolve into different species due the years needed to traverse between different planets.


Unless people are for some reason using methods that take them dozens of thousands of years to get anywhere, there's not nearly enough time for that to happen. Plenty of cultures have lived in isolation for very long periods of time and they're still very much human, like the Sentinelese people. It's not like people would head off in a space ship bound for an exoplanet in 100,000 years. If our technology were on that level, they just wouldn't go.


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## Save the Loli (Mar 29, 2018)

The Shadow said:


> Is this the Superior Future that Film Robert promised us?



Moon wheat ain't getting us there.



Un Platano said:


> Unless people are for some reason using methods that take them dozens of thousands of years to get anywhere, there's not nearly enough time for that to happen. Plenty of cultures have lived in isolation for very long periods of time and they're still very much human, like the Sentinelese people. It's not like people would head off in a space ship bound for an exoplanet in 100,000 years. If our technology were on that level, they just wouldn't go.



Converting a space colony capable of holding hundreds of thousands of people into a space ship which can safely go up to 10-20% the speed of light is easy. If that colony/ship is mostly empty when you leave then the colony can "grow" the population en route to wherever and the ship could go on forever if part of the colonists stayed behind. A lot of people would sign up for that journey, beats living in a normal space colony in the boring solar system when you and your descendents can go colonize the other side of the galaxy.

But we don't have to evolve into new species since we have genetic engineering where if we select a certain type of human, like the same thing around now just more physically and mentally capable, we'd be immune to natural mutations which over time cause evolution.


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## Your Weird Fetish (Mar 29, 2018)

Ghostapplesause said:


> Human genetic engineering is banned worldwide so I do not think this future will come to pass.  The Man after Man book is really cool to look at but it downplays technology and Artifical Intelligence.


Yeah and weaponizing space is illegal too, doesn't stop governments from having plans to knock out communications satellites. As soon as something is useful, people will do it. International law is meaningless.


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## Ghostapplesause (Mar 29, 2018)

Your Weird Fetish said:


> Yeah and weaponizing space is illegal too, doesn't stop governments from having plans to knock out communications satellites. As soon as something is useful, people will do it. International law is meaningless.



Anti-satellite weaponry was never banned.


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## jakefromstatefarm007 (Mar 30, 2018)

Human extinction would cause short term suffering. Everyone would suffer up to that event then all suffering would cease since there are no humans left. Humans living on would continue suffering indefinitely.


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## Your Weird Fetish (Mar 30, 2018)

Ghostapplesause said:


> Anti-satellite weaponry was never banned.


Not by the UN but we had a treaty with the Soviets over it IIRC.


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## Arctic (Mar 31, 2018)

Dirt McGirt said:


> I think the instant we start colonizing other planets humanity will stick around indefinitely.
> 
> The only guanteed way we'll be wiped out completely with no way to stop it is with a big enough asteroid. We've spread and thrived in the hottest and coldest environments on Earth thousands of years ago. Now with all we have? Forget about it.





Apoth42 said:


> At that point, humans will evolve into different species due the years needed to traverse between different planets.


Stop watching Star Trek lol, there's 0 chance that space humanity will ever seriously settle on other planets. Every other planet (and moon) in the solar system is either completely uninhabitable even in the most generous sense of the term (Venus, Mercury), a clump of gas (Jupiter, Saturn) or possibly habitable if we expend more than half of the earth's resources trying to painstakingly construct the right atmosphere (Europa, Mars). Don't even think about traveling to other stars, even the nearest solar system is more than 25 trillion miles away.

The usual counterargument here is "Well, back in the day people thought deep ocean navigation was impossible too!" which is insufficient in my opinion because deep ocean navigation doesn't require us to _literally break the laws of physics_ to make it work. For better or worse, we are stuck here. 


Spoiler


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## Dirt McGirt (Mar 31, 2018)

Arctic said:


> Stop watching Star Trek lol, there's 0 chance that space humanity will ever seriously settle on other planets. Every other planet (and moon) in the solar system is either completely uninhabitable even in the most generous sense of the term (Venus, Mercury), a clump of gas (Jupiter, Saturn) or possibly habitable if we expend more than half of the earth's resources trying to painstakingly construct the right atmosphere (Europa, Mars). Don't even think about traveling to other stars, even the nearest solar system is more than 25 trillion miles away.
> 
> The usual counterargument here is "Well, back in the day people thought deep ocean navigation was impossible too!" which is insufficient in my opinion because deep ocean navigation doesn't require us to _literally break the laws of physics_ to make it work. For better or worse, we are stuck here.
> 
> ...



We wouldn't have to even change atmospheres or anything to start Mars or even a moon colony. It would just take the development of stations/compounds that we can build there that people could survive in and go outside when need be with suits and a shit ton of cash to actually build and populate it.

Am I saying that's gonna happen soon? No, it is fairly possible within my life time.


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## Piss Clam (Mar 31, 2018)

Everyone posting here will be dead long before the end of the world.


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## ASoulMan (Mar 31, 2018)

No species lasts forever. Eventually the time will come when our species will go the way of the dinosaur.

How that will happen though, is unclear.


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## Ido (Mar 31, 2018)

There was that Mouse population experiment

When we get too overly populated I think we might begin to plateau but because sex is something humans enjoy I don't think it'll actually do much. So I say the sun will probably kill what's left of us before we go extinct.


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## DuckSucker (Mar 31, 2018)

This is gonna be the most edgelord answer, but I agree with @Ido. Youre thinking humans are too inherently selfless. Humans have a tendency to put our problems on other people, we are social creatures in a way and self-aware parts-of-a-whole probably become a little more selfish than they otherwise might be. When you have 7 or 8 billion people the average person's response is , "Hey Im just ONE guy, it cant hurt. I mean what do I really mean in the grand scheme of things?" And that adds up in a way. Like the average person may put society first but maybe in a way theyre putting it first because they realize theyre a link in the chain and are sharing their problems with others in a way. Whether it be having a partner to lean on for support or anything else, having kids, I mean no man is an island. 

It's kind of a multifaceted, very complex issue. It's called the human condition for a reason. It's like the ouroboros, yin and yang, life and death. If anything happens, it will be a lot further away than anyone can predict, and I feel like if it happens, it will be a self correcting thing or maybe it itself is the self-correction.


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## Deadwaste (Mar 31, 2018)

i await the death of the human species with open arms at this point. we shouldnt have survived into modern times


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## Save the Loli (Apr 1, 2018)

Arctic said:


> Stop watching Star Trek lol, there's 0 chance that space humanity will ever seriously settle on other planets. Every other planet (and moon) in the solar system is either completely uninhabitable even in the most generous sense of the term (Venus, Mercury), a clump of gas (Jupiter, Saturn) or possibly habitable if we expend more than half of the earth's resources trying to painstakingly construct the right atmosphere (Europa, Mars). Don't even think about traveling to other stars, even the nearest solar system is more than 25 trillion miles away.



Venus can be terraformed in 300-350 years using known science, and we have the technology available today. All you need is a giant space mirror/shade (which also solves global warming on Earth), an orbital ring, and some comets.

And we don't even need to settle on a moon or planet when we can just convert 10 billion tons of rock and gas into a big-ass space colony with Earth gravity and weather.


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## Hatoful Dandy (Apr 2, 2018)

But if we colonize other worlds, would our souls be weighed down by gravity?


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## Secret Asshole (Apr 6, 2018)

The thing about human extinction is that it presents problems for several reasons:

1) Humans are one of the most adaptable species on the planet. We live in deserts, the arctic, basically every single piece of land except Antartica, and even now we could probably live there with ease with our tech.

2) Genes do not disappear from the gene pool. Most genes are basically parasites and impossible to eliminate. That's why even when you see a black and white couple, some of the children are white as snow and even have red or blonde hair. Its basically impossible to eliminate a race. Most actually consider other human species disappeared only because of interbreeding, not because of war or extinction.

3) The population to maintain a decent gene pool without genetic damage is incredibly small. For example, to ensure genetic diversity, its estimated you only need 160 to 200 humans to maintain a stable population without genetic defects. That's incredibly small. Not to mention that once a population grows, latent genes will begin to express themselves and you'll still have a diverse population.

4) Our immune system is a highly complex mechanistically. Basically, we've got something called a membrane histocompatibility complex or MHC. This identifies foreign viruses, bacteria and pathogens. Its randomized, and its been proven that people are attracted to others with different MHC. The consequence of this is that we get random immunity to pathogens that don't even exist yet. Evolution hedges her bets. Not to mention that there are mutations that make people immune to certain diseases. About 1% of the population is immune to HIV. Even if HIV became airborne and super killer, 60 million people would survive because they are immune. 

The only way I see human extinction is massive nuclear war, a gamma ray burst, comet impact, a virus that renders everyone sterile, AI murdering all of us. Shit like that. If everything goes the way it is, it is incredibly difficult to eliminate us because of our intelligence, problem solving skills and the nature of our genetics.



Ido said:


> There was that Mouse population experiment
> 
> When we get too overly populated I think we might begin to plateau but because sex is something humans enjoy I don't think it'll actually do much. So I say the sun will probably kill what's left of us before we go extinct.



The mouse experiment has several flaws. 1) There was limited space. 2) Mice don't really do much but eat, fuck and reproduce. There's no culture or anything like that. 3) It is impossible for humanity to completely avoid disease. 4) Humans are creatives, and it doesn't take into account human ingenuity and creating and inventing things to keep us occupied. It can't really be used as a decent example for humans, but it is a warning to not get too complacent. Adversity breeds creativity, and I don't think we'll ever get to that utopian setting.


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## Tragi-Chan (Apr 8, 2018)

I think it's very unlikely that we'll go extinct, barring an utterly planet-annihilating catastrophe from space. A nuclear war, a pandemic or a natural disaster might wipe a majority of us out, maybe even destroy civilisation as we know it, but people are very good at adapting to circumstances. We might be reduced to a Stone Age existence, but we'd rebuild.


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## Yop Yop (Apr 9, 2018)

The only the way I can see us going extinct is with another plague, or with what happened in the The Road.

I'm not sure which would be worse honestly. The thought of the sky going black (most likely from a volcanic eruption), all plant and animal life dies, nothing grows, the oceans go empty, humans have only canned food and other humans left as food. It's the realist, most hopeless thing I've ever heard.


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## Your Weird Fetish (Apr 12, 2018)

Every modern human is the descendant of the survivors of massive die-back already probably, judging by some evidence of a huge genetic bottleneck in our recent history. And it's unscientific but my personal feeling is that we've survived lesser, civilization ending events many times before. Mostly because 1. Archaeology is littered with civilizations that got started and then died to some unknown catastrophe, leaving descendants that forgot their ancestors ever lived in cities (Harappans in India, a bunch of nameless peoples in the Amazon, etc) and 2. I personally find it difficult to credit that it took hominids half a million years to realize you could build homes to protect yourself from the weather and that if you stuck a seed in dirt, an edible plant would emerge.


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## ToroidalBoat (Apr 12, 2018)

"I have heard many people here saying that humans are going to go extinct in the next few centuries." - @DNJACK

Some argue it'll happen in less than a century. The ongoing 6th mass extinction certainly isn't helping.

I think one possibility is that humans may not go entirely extinct, but say goodbye to industrial civilization, like @Tragi-Chan said.


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## Tetra (Apr 12, 2018)

as long as we're tied to one planet, as others have said; we're going to die eventually.

And if we connect our planets to closely in the future, with instant travel and all that; we'll risk getting wiped out by a plague.

Even if we tie ourselves to/ become machines they can fail too, it's not like machines are impossible to get ruined.

But yeah it is rather unproductive.


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## Your Weird Fetish (Apr 12, 2018)

ToroidalBoat said:


> "I have heard many people here saying that humans are going to go extinct in the next few centuries." - @DNJACK
> 
> Some argue it'll happen in less than a century. The ongoing 6th mass extinction certainly isn't helping.


I always wondered how much of the current mass extinction is because of the simple fact that it's far easier to identify and catalogue currently extant species than species living in the distant past. The fossil record is a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of all organisms alive at the time by necessity. And the more species we know of in total, the more species we can recognize as going extinct.

Anyway, that's a stupid reason to assume humans will go extinct in the practically immediate future. We're not pandas. We're extremely adaptable generalists.


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## Bassomatic (Apr 13, 2018)

To be honest, I don't mean to sound edgy or greedy, I will pass before this is an issue. I don't worry about it. I don't know if my death will happen one second,one day, one year etc before it. Sure humans may die out, more so I think Homo Sapiens will die off. Perhaps "humans" will die but great great x20 grand kid bassomatic will be a new thing.I don't think the caveman I'm related to is mad they passed to see me.

If we pass as a species we do. I just can't stress much on the topic. I don't think I can do anything about it or it'll be with in my or my great great great grand kids lives.


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## Secret Asshole (Apr 13, 2018)

ToroidalBoat said:


> "I have heard many people here saying that humans are going to go extinct in the next few centuries." - @DNJACK
> 
> Some argue it'll happen in less than a century. The ongoing 6th mass extinction certainly isn't helping.
> 
> I think one possibility is that humans may not go entirely extinct, but say goodbye to industrial civilization, like @Tragi-Chan said.



The thing is humans are pretty ingenious, we're the only species that can actually prevent our own extinction. The guy that said 'climate change will kill us' is full of shit. The last ice age, only 15,000 humans survived. And that was before technology. 6 billion people come from 15,000. And that was the most extreme thing the planet had for humans. Not to mention our emissions decrease year after year and fossil fuel use has been decreasing. Natural gas is also less polluting than oil, which we have a ton of. 'Extreme Weather' might make some areas uninhabitable and lead to strife, but it will not lead to our extinction. Not to mention advances in agriculture and genetic engineering has allowed us to make massive leaps in farming and food production.

He's also full of shit on overpopulation as well. Once countries modernize, their birthrates decrease, not increase. Even people coming from the third world who have higher birthrates who move to first world countries have the same birth rate after a generation or two. People have been predicting overpopulation killing off humanity for centuries. It's never happened. He's making the same losing arguments that other people have made. Ask Thomas Mathus how overpopulation killing humanity turned out.

The only way humans become extinct:

1) Absolute Ice Age. Everything freezes. In this case, pretty much everything dies except for hardy microbes. All super volcanoes erupt at once.
2) Asteroid Impact, Gamma Ray Burst, anything from space
3) Nuclear Armageddon. In which I mean so many nukes are used to render nearly every piece of land uninhabitable. Even then you'll have people in bunkers and you only really need 200-300 people to repopulate.
4) AI Genocide
5) Plague. Even then, some people will quarantine themselves in bunkers and shit.
6) The sun explodes.

In reality, the only way I see humans becoming extinct is if we do it ourselves, space does it, or an AI does it. Humans are pretty much the most adaptable species on the planet that can live in any environment. There are people living in fucking Greenland, which is basically just a giant block of icy dirt. People live in the fucking Sahara. Don't give me that progtard 'CLIMATE CHANGE WILL KILL US ALL' shit. Fucking hell.

Anyone who says climate change or overpopulation will kill us is full of fucking shit. That being said, there's always the possibility that something makes our lives miserable and civilization collapses, which isn't extinction.



Your Weird Fetish said:


> Every modern human is the descendant of the survivors of massive die-back already probably, judging by some evidence of a huge genetic bottleneck in our recent history. And it's unscientific but my personal feeling is that we've survived lesser, civilization ending events many times before. Mostly because 1. Archaeology is littered with civilizations that got started and then died to some unknown catastrophe, leaving descendants that forgot their ancestors ever lived in cities (Harappans in India, a bunch of nameless peoples in the Amazon, etc) and 2. I personally find it difficult to credit that it took hominids half a million years to realize you could build homes to protect yourself from the weather and that if you stuck a seed in dirt, an edible plant would emerge.



The last ice age nearly killed off humanity. Its estimated as low as 4,000 and as high as 15,000 humans survived it. If primitive humans can survive it, I think we can deal with the changing climate.

EDIT:
Also that Easter Island comparison is fucking re.tarded. You know how big Easter Island is? 63 square miles. The smallest state in the us is 394 square miles (West Virginia). Easter Island died out because it was fucking tiny and too small to support a population. The world is a big place.


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## ToroidalBoat (Apr 13, 2018)

Secret Asshole said:


> That being said, there's always the possibility that something makes our lives miserable and civilization collapses, which isn't extinction.


So you think the "Olduvai Theory" is plausible: where industrial civilization collapses, but people survive -- even if it's in a perpetual or indefinite preindustrial-like state?


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## Your Weird Fetish (Apr 13, 2018)

How do we know it's never happened before? Not a lot would still be around tens of thousands of years later unless they happened to have invented plastics. Maybe not even then (we're starting to see bacteria that can digest some forms of it).


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## Save the Loli (Apr 14, 2018)

Tetraphobia said:


> And if we connect our planets to closely in the future, with instant travel and all that; we'll risk getting wiped out by a plague.



Even in the Middle Ages they quarantined cities and protected them from plagues. Imagine how easy it is to quarantine a planet or a space habitat.



ToroidalBoat said:


> So you think the "Olduvai Theory" is plausible: where industrial civilization collapses, but people survive -- even if it's in a perpetual or indefinite preindustrial-like state?



Eventually it would happen but it would take several semi-extinctions. People would know too much about how to rebuild industrial civilization, since they have all the manuals and maps right there.


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## Red Sun (Apr 14, 2018)

I don't believe that humanity can be rendered totally extinct by anything that won't instantly sterilize the planet, like some others have said. All the things that people usually consider likely causes of our extinction are totally capable of wiping out civilization, but not eliminating us as a species.



Secret Asshole said:


> The thing is humans are pretty ingenious, we're the only species that can actually prevent our own extinction. The guy that said 'climate change will kill us' is full of shit. The last ice age, only 15,000 humans survived. And that was before technology. 6 billion people come from 15,000. And that was the most extreme thing the planet had for humans. Not to mention our emissions decrease year after year and fossil fuel use has been decreasing. Natural gas is also less polluting than oil, which we have a ton of. 'Extreme Weather' might make some areas uninhabitable and lead to strife, but it will not lead to our extinction. Not to mention advances in agriculture and genetic engineering has allowed us to make massive leaps in farming and food production.
> 
> He's also full of shit on overpopulation as well. Once countries modernize, their birthrates decrease, not increase. Even people coming from the third world who have higher birthrates who move to first world countries have the same birth rate after a generation or two. People have been predicting overpopulation killing off humanity for centuries. It's never happened. He's making the same losing arguments that other people have made. Ask Thomas Mathus how overpopulation killing humanity turned out.
> 
> ...



I agree that climate change is very unlikely to result in human extinction, but dismissing it as "progtard shit" probably isn't wise. Unless you don't care about non-apocalyptic levels of suffering (which is a valid position but not one I'd assume you hold), it's worth noting climate change will probably cause more human misery than any event in living memory. I believe somebody earlier in the thread posted a source claiming it will "only" be comparable to several holocausts.
It's also worth noting that rhode island is the smallest state, but it's also massively bigger than Easter island so it doesn't really change your point.


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## Secret Asshole (Apr 14, 2018)

ToroidalBoat said:


> So you think the "Olduvai Theory" is plausible: where industrial civilization collapses, but people survive -- even if it's in a perpetual or indefinite preindustrial-like state?



Pretty much, more likely than human extinction. Civilization is a fragile beast. We're one bad solar flare away from a lot of electronics getting fried. Or just imagine a nuclear apocalypse and only the rich assholes in bunkers survive in the wilderness. Think they know how to build power plants or cities? Nope. But yeah, I think that's a more likely scenario.



Red Sun said:


> I don't believe that humanity can be rendered totally extinct by anything that won't instantly sterilize the planet, like some others have said. All the things that people usually consider likely causes of our extinction are totally capable of wiping out civilization, but not eliminating us as a species.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Whoops. Oh well. Anyway, people have been making apocalyptic predictions from climate change and they haven't happened. And honestly I trust human ingenuity to overcome that. The problem is most of the casualties from climate change won't be the first world, it'll be the third. They're the most vulnerable, lack the agricultural, scientific, technological and other resources to combat it. 

The thing is the developing world hasn't gotten off the ground. The first world is already developing solutions to combat severe weather events while combating climate change. I mean, the biggest killer in the third world is indoor air pollution where they cook with biofuel (aka shit) and fill their homes with soot. Same with wood. 

I don't really know how to prevent that as the third world already experiences severe brain drain with their smartest and best going to Western countries and it is simply too huge a problem to take care of the entire third world, especially with the corruption and violence it experiences. Even if you were to implement solutions to make their lives better, there's no guarantee it would last. So I really don't know how to prevent the massive misery thay climate change would inflict on them. And I don't really think anyone else knows either, as the first world cannot take in the third.


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## Your Weird Fetish (Apr 14, 2018)

Well no one (realistically) knows how to stop climate change period anyway. All the serious solutions are political or economic impossibilities. the most we'll ever get is weak legislation from politicians wanting to look like they're doing something. We're just gonna have to get used to the new equilibrium, whatever it may be.


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## ToroidalBoat (Apr 15, 2018)

Secret Asshole said:


> But yeah, I think that's a more likely scenario.


Could advances like bio-fuels or solar power help to avoid that fate?


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## Secret Asshole (Apr 15, 2018)

ToroidalBoat said:


> Could advances like bio-fuels or solar power help to avoid that fate?



The problem with Solar is the panels is that there's a limit. The sun generates only 1,000 watts per square meter (well, that reaches the surface of the earth). A nuclear power plant is around 4,000 square meters. We don't capture 100% with solar panels, but if we did, we could generate around 4  Million Watts in the same space. A small nuclear power plant generates 1,027 Million Watts in the same area. And it doesn't have downtime. Solar would be able to sustain small groups of people, but nowhere near the current population. I mean, I guess you could do solar until you rebuilt civilization.

If you could develop algae or something that create oil or natural gas, sure. But that would require space too.


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## kinglordsupreme19 (Apr 15, 2018)

Secret Asshole said:


> And it doesn't have downtime. Solar would be able to sustain small groups of people, but nowhere near the current population.



This is correct for Earth or planetary-based installations. For space habitats, good solar panels orbiting the star directly can provide continuous energy input. This is one of the rationales for the Dyson Swarm concept (ie, the original and most feasible variant of the Dyson Sphere); once you pay the fixed costs for getting material into orbit and you thus have the self-sustaining space infrastructure, it would be relatively easy to convert asteroids into self-sufficient rotating habitats. This is a far more optimal solution than settling Mars or other plaentary/sub-planetary bodies, since you can tailor such habitats perfectly to human life.


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## Your Weird Fetish (Apr 16, 2018)

I don't see environmentalists getting behind beaming power to Earth via giant masers.


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