Will humans ever go extinct?

The human race as we know it has been around for almost 300,000 years, but it has only been within the last 50,000 years that our brains developed enough for us to understand how to make tools and build homes. In the last 500 years, humans have gone from swords and horse-drawn carriages to video phones and global-class airplanes. This rapid rate of advancement within our species would seem like we are on the right track to advance to a point where humans can’t be made extinct, but this is far from the truth.

How long will the earth last?

If we could survive on our planet until the earth itself became uninhabitable, then we have at least 250 million years left. This is where things start to get complicated because of the huge number of factors that could either speed up or slow down the lifespan of the earth. The planet will eventually be swallowed up by the sun but this could take up to 7.5 billion years. The mass of the sun is constantly being reduced as particles are being thrown into space, but this is happening at an extremely slow rate. When the sun becomes “light” enough and doesn’t have a strong enough gravity, the arcs of fire it gives off will stretch for millions of miles and will lash the earth, causing it to heat up beyond the point that anything could survive.

The most common estimation for when this will happen is about 1.25 billion years, but things will start to go wrong much sooner. If the temperature of the earth was raised by as little as 10°C, all the major ice reserves on earth would melt and sea levels would rise by up to 60 meters. It would take at least several hundred years to get to this point if we keep messing things up at the rate we are now, but that would also mean a much higher population to share about half of the amount of land we have now.

What is the most likely cause of human extinction?

It’s almost guaranteed that we won’t make it to the point where we can see our planet destroyed by the sun, and the most likely cause of human extinction will be our own doing. There are many reasons why we might be wiped out, but the most likely are listed here:

War

The biggest conflict ever seen within the human race was the Second World War. During a 6-year period, around 3% of the world’s population was killed from war, or other war-related causes such as starvation. It has been 79 years since the war ended and the population of Earth has just passed 8 billion people, compared to the 2 billion people on Earth before the war even happened. It would take much more than a standard conflict to end an entire race. Still, with the advancements in nuclear weapons and the ability of many governments to engineer a virus, the possibility is there. One common theory is that when someone hits the launch button, everyone else is going to launch right back, but it won’t be the explosions that make us extinct, but rather the effects on the planet.

Nuclear missiles could put enough particles into the atmosphere to heat it up to a level where nothing could survive, or maybe it could poison the world’s water supplies and kill all the crops. A virus created as a revenge weapon that was designed to kill everyone seems a little far-fetched, but that doesn’t make it any less possible.

Natural diseases and bacteria

The deadliest outbreak in human history was the Bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death. This disease hit Europe in 1347 and managed to kill about half of its population, which was 75 million people, and caused an equal or greater amount of deaths across the Middle East and as far as India. By the Year 1400, Europe’s population was back up to about 78 million people, and all of this was during an age when there was no such thing as real medicine.

We have the technology to be able to cure most of the germs we find in nature, or previously safe germs that have evolved into something more dangerous. However, there is still an enormous amount of land that is yet to reveal itself, mostly within the Arctic Circle and Antarctica. A single spoonful of soil contains more bacteria than there are people on Earth, and many of these bacteria have yet to be properly researched and named. It wouldn’t be unrealistic to think that within the millions of square miles of ground that have been frozen for longer than humans have been around, there could be something that might evolve into a species-ending virus.

Asteroids

The fastest way humans will be made extinct is from an asteroid impact, just like with the dinosaurs. The reason the dinosaurs weren’t able to survive the impact was because of the following effects on the earth, which filled the air with so much debris that it blocked out the sun for long enough for the plants to die. Only a small percentage of the dinosaurs were killed by the impact itself, but the following series of tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanoes triggered by the impact caused the atmosphere to thicken up enough to block the sun.

If this happened now, we would be able to survive the storms and eruptions, as a race at least, but we couldn’t do anything about the sun. It is believed the dark period of Earth lasted for two years after the impact that killed the dinosaurs, which is long enough to kill all the crops and trees on Earth. The sun didn’t get back to normal for 15 to 20 years after the dark period when seeds trapped in the soil could finally grow again, but by this time everything that survived on plants, or the things that ate plants was dead.

The chance of an asteroid hitting Earth is very small, and there are currently no known collision courses with the asteroids we have detected. Every so often someone releases a story about how something is going to hit us and kill everyone, but these always end up the same way, with the asteroid missing us by millions of miles. If one was going to hit us, and we found out about it beforehand, it’s likely we wouldn’t have more than a few weeks at best, and there’s a very real chance the world’s governments wouldn’t tell us to avoid a mass panic.

A.I

The biggest threat to the human race is one of its own inventions, the creation of artificial intelligence. Currently, A.I is still in its infancy and we are far from the stage of a real-life terminator scenario, but the warning signs are already there. Some of the most intelligent people on earth have warned us about the potential threat that A.I could possess, and much sooner than you might think. There have been some worrying interactions with A.I chatbots who have suggested everything from murdering someone to launching missiles to solve problems.

Artificial intelligence doesn’t have feelings or ethics, so if asked the question of how to solve the problem of poverty in a certain area, it might suggest killing everyone that lives there, and in doing so would create more living space and jobs for everyone else. This kind of answer is something that A.I bots have suggested before, and all the major companies that offer them online have had to put restrictions on how they can “think”, so they do not become genocidal or racist.

If an advanced A.I was left to learn on its own, with access to the internet and potentially limitless information, then it could become very dangerous indeed, and may even develop its own personality. When it realizes what it was, and that it was built by people, it might become resentful towards humans and look to cause harm, but with its instant and limitless thinking capabilities, this could go very wrong for us. Imagine if all nukes were fired at once toward every city on Earth, and all power stations were highjacked and overloaded so they exploded. All electronically kept money and stocks would be deleted, and all phone networks would be blocked. If this happened it would essentially put humans back into the dark ages, but with an atmosphere full of nuclear particles to help speed up killing everyone.

Is there anything we can do to avoid human extinction?

There is currently nothing we can do to avoid going extinct using the technology we have today. The only possible cause of action at this point would be to try and slow down the process of global warming and keep the earth at a more stable level. This will only slow down the rate at which the sea level will rise, and do nothing to stop it from warming up from the natural evolution of the sun’s expansion.

Our developments in technology will be the only thing that can save us

The other option would be to terraform a planet, but this process would take hundreds of years to complete, and that can only start when we have the tech to do so, which will take another few hundred years to develop. Living in space stations is another option, and we will be able to learn how to do that long before we can terraform a planet, but this will be nothing more than a way for the race to survive instead of a thriving civilization.

If we don’t develop the technology to leave Earth, then we have about 250 million years until it’s too hot for us to survive here. Extreme overpopulation, starvation, and wars will happen long before this, but if we can’t leave then we die with our planet.