Will humans ever go extinct?

Planet Earth is owned by the human race, with none of the millions of other species being able to even come close to our level of intelligence and creativity. With such dominance over our planet and the ability to create advanced technology and medicines, it seems unlikely that our species could ever become extinct. But how accurate is this view of us being close to indestructible and what are the chances of humans joining the long list of species that no longer exist?

How long will the earth be inhabitable?

If we don’t run into something else and simply have to wait until we can’t live here anymore, the most common estimate for Earth being habitable for humans is around 1 billion years. At this point, the earth will be too hot to maintain liquid water and the last surviving humans won’t be able to live anywhere, even underground, but 1 billion years is a very long time. The current rate at which the earth is warming will cause a huge amount of damage, but in terms of making the planet uninhabitable, this won’t happen for at least hundreds of millions of years.

(Our planet as we know it today, is over 4.5 billion years old and thought to last another 2)

The most likely causes of human extinction

Ourselves

The Second World War was the single most devastating war in human history, claiming the lives of around 60 million people. At the time the world’s population was about 2 billion people, which meant the event that caused the worst loss of life in human history only killed about 3% of the world’s population. The threat from ourselves comes more in the form of messing up our planet with either a man-made virus or extreme climate change. There are nine countries with their own nuclear weapons and several more that are storing them for other countries. It would only take one launch at the center of the north or south pole to melt enough water to wipe out millions of square miles of land, causing mass starvation and overcrowding. Examples like this are extreme, but it was only 90 years ago people were dropping atomic bombs on each other and attempting mass extermination, and that’s without the 12,500 nuclear missiles that exist today.

Another meteor

Dinosaur Killer 2.0 if you like, but this time we would be the ones trying to find the last scraps of food and overfishing the seas when the ash blocks out the sun and kills all the crops. The first asteroid hit in modern-day Mexico, northeast of the city of Merida, but the initial blast wasn’t the primary killer. The impact and shockwave killed everything within a couple of hundred miles, and tidal waves sent around the world claimed the lives of anything within a few miles of the sea, but the effects on the earth are what caused the most deaths. The impact set off hundreds of volcanoes and earthquakes, which collectively threw billions of tons of ash into the air in a layer so thick it blocked out the sun before falling back to earth and covering everything in a thick layer of light-blocking ash.

(The initial impact site of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs)

This caused mass extinction of plant life and any dinosaurs that weren’t killed by a tidal wave or volcano ended up starving to death. There were a few species that made it through, but the vast majority of land mammals perished. If this were to happen again, humans would likely survive, but only in small isolated communities that could produce food and power somehow.

Discovering a new virus or disease

The most devastating illness in human history is the bubonic plague, more commonly known as the black death. This killed around half the population of Europe, which was around 50 million people, plus an unknown number in the Middle East and many more as far as India. Today we can cure this disease with a simple injection, but new illnesses appear all the time and claim the lives of many, but none of them have come close to wiping us out. It is possible that with the melting of new lands like Antarctica and Greenland, a long-forgotten type of bacteria could exist in the soil, waiting to be freed from its icy prison by a warmer climate, but the chances of it being able to wipe us out are almost none existent. The real threat from a virus would be man-made, but the requirements to design such a virus could only be done by a very advanced nation, though creating something that would kill everyone on earth would be the definition of counter-productive.

(The frozen wasteland of Antarctica would provide millions of square miles of new land, and untouched soil that could contain countless new types of bacteria)

Mass volcano eruption

There are over 1,300 active volcanoes on Earth, but none of them come close to the size and power of the Yellowstone volcano in Wyoming. This super-volcano last erupted about 640,000 years ago and is thought to go off again within the next 100,000. The problem with this volcano is that it is the biggest one on earth by a long shot, and if it were to unleash a full eruption, it would likely trigger such strong ground tremours that other magma chambers of other volcanos would be disturbed and also go off, creating a chain effect of volcanos around the world.

(An example of the initial blast damage done by an eruption from the Yellowstone volcano)

The initial vicinity of any erupting volcano would have to be evacuated, and the earthquakes would cause many deaths, but the real threat would come in the form of starvation and cold. The amount of ash in the air would be enough to block out the sun for potentially years, which would lower global temperatures by as much as 30°C. Anywhere other than a few hundred miles on either side of the equator would be below-freezing for most of the year, forcing the earth’s population to cram into the tiny amount of farmable land there was and to fight over the rest out of sheer desperation.