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How are humans going to become extinct?
- ggreer 13y agoTo summarize: At this point, humanity is its own greatest extinction risk. If we don't destroy ourselves in the next century, we will almost certainly inherit the stars. For a much deeper treatment of this subject, I recommend Global Catastrophic Risks, edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan Ćirković. The overarching point is straightforward (see the paragraph above), but the details of each threat are interesting on their own. 1. http://www.amazon.com/Global-Catastrophic-Risks-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199606501 http://www.amazon.com/Global-Catastrophic-Risks-Nick-Bostrom...
- ProAm 13y agoHumans will most definitely be the cause of human extinction on planet Earth. I would put my money on Homo sapiens not making it another million years on the surface of the planet.
- visakanv 13y agoHomo sapiens reached anatomical modernity about 200,000 years ago and began to exhibit behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago. I suspect that our descendants 1,000,000 years from now wouldn't consider themselves Homo sapiens- primitive, brutish creatures. (Consider how we feel about our ancestors from as recently as 50,000 years ago.)
- infectoid 13y ago> Consider how we feel about our ancestors from as recently as 50,000 years ago. Or a few thousand years ago for that matter. I think the social landscape with look and feel a lot different in the next 100 years.
- ekianjo 13y ago> Or a few thousand years ago for that matter. Actually we can relate very well with the concerns of people from a few thousands years ago. Writings from ancient Rome, from ancient Greece are still very contemporary in many, many ways.
- kamaal 13y agoA million years is too far. Even if it doesn't happen by then, we are going to run out of energy, get killed by super bugs or hit by a asteroid. The threat of human driven human extinction is more on the lines of a mutually assured destruction, weaponized nanotechnology or genetic engineering, irreversible climate conditions, over population of the planet etc.
- sdrothrock 13y agoThe article talks about disasters that could eliminate humanity, but I wonder if humanity is more likely to become extinct in the sense of no longer being "homo sapiens." For example, through a technological singularity or even just through accumulated gene therapy over generations.
- wmgries 13y agoThis is an interesting issue. At what point will our descendants feel that they are different enough from us through natural or guided (by science) evolution?
- toomuchtodo 13y agoAt what point did we determine we were substantially different than apes?
- philwelch 13y agoHubris. We're closer to chimps than chimps are to gorillas; we are apes.
- lutusp 13y ago> At what point will our descendants feel that they are different enough from us through natural or guided (by science) evolution? Easily answered: our species has existed for about 200,000 years. Based on that, and barring any speed-up in the rate of evolution by selection (natural or unnatural), we will have been replaced by another species in another 200,000 years. This will happen no matter what else happens -- assuming we're not subject to any global catastrophe, but simply evolve as a species into something we cannot presently imagine.
- arg01 13y agoI wonder if in the case of a technological singularity would you be able to tell that the original species was human? That is to say if we're at the point that we are augmenting our brains to that degree will the difference between a human/dolphin/great ape brain as a base be dwarfed by the technological layers on top of it? That's getting a bit speculative as a question though. It was more of a thought on how much/how little we might need to change to even constitute not being human.
- midnitewarrior 13y agoThe disastrous effects of exponential growth will be our demise.
- infogulch 13y agoI blame the economists. They had to drop out of their math degree because they couldn't understand exponential functions... surprise surprise now we have earth-destruction level superpowers trying desperately to keep up an economy based on unsustainable exponential growth.
- rimantas 13y agoBaseless extrapolation will be you demise. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg
- ilaksh 13y agoI feel a medium-term or maybe even short-term threat (in the next 10-30 years) not of extinction necessarily but of becoming completely irrelevant. People like to jump to the conclusion that artificial super-intelligence will want to eliminate humans. I don't think that is a foregone conclusion at all. However, if (when) super-intelligent artificial general intelligence "arrives", that pretty much makes normal unaugmented humans the relative equivalent of chimps. It means that our opinions and actions are no longer historically relevant. We will be, relatively speaking, obsolete mentally disabled people running along doing relatively stupid things. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_Juh7Xh_70 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_Juh7Xh_70 In order for our opinions and abilities to actually matter relative to the super-doings and super-thoughts of the new AIs, we really _must_ have this magical nano-dust or something that integrates our existing homo sapien 1.0 brains with some type of artificial super-intelligence. So that is what I am worried about -- will the super-AIs show up before the high bandwidth nano-BCIs (brain-computer interfaces) or before I can afford them. Of course, in the long run there may not be a good reason for AIs to use regular human bodies/brains at all and so that may be phased out for subsequent generations.
- salmonellaeater 13y agoEven an AI with innocuous goals will destroy humanity[1]. It would have to have explicitly pro-human goals in order to be anywhere near 'safe.' [1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
- kamaal 13y agoWell actually, no! There are a lot of things to this Armageddon-through-AI equation. Firstly this thing called 'energy'. A paper clip maximizer will long reach its demise before converting a maximum part of planet to paper clips, merely because it needs a lot of resources to produce energy, and maintain itself too. In fact true AI would not destroy anything. Because true AI would know it doesn't have sufficient data to make any such decisions.
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- Zigurd 13y agoGlobal thermonuclear war is still the #1 risk for destroying civilization and having a good chance of killing every human on the planet.
- ekianjo 13y agoUnlikely to kill every human on the planet, though, but to destroy the civilization, yes, and to make us go back in time in terms of scientific progress/knowledge etc... yes. In other words, it would make it way harder for humans to survive in the long run.
- sentientmachine 13y agoEven then it would probably not end our species. Even if every country had nuclear weapons and simultaneously vaporized every square inch of land surface (very unlikely), there would be a few carnival cruises and people who escaped to underground bunkers to hold out for enough years to repopulate some place later. It would be 99% losses, but the tough ones would survive. It may take a few thousand years to get back to where we were, but the buried technology would be found, and we would quickly get back to this point, with a lot more genetic resistance to the radiation fallout.
- lutusp 13y ago> Even then it would probably not end our species. Even if every country had nuclear weapons and simultaneously vaporized every square inch of land surface (very unlikely), there would be a few carnival cruises and people who escaped to underground bunkers to hold out for enough years to repopulate some place later. This is very, very likely, and there's even concrete evidence, based on the fact that the human race was nearly wiped out 70,000 years ago, but recovered. 70,000 years ago a huge volcanic eruption with global consequences called the "Toba event" reduced the human population to somewhere between 3,000 - 10,000 people. We know this by analysis of our DNA, which carries a lot of information that can be used to assess our genetic history. That record shows that a severe genetic bottleneck took place 70,000 years ago, and geographic evidence shows a corresponding massive volcanic event thought to be responsible. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
- lutusp 13y agoA quote: " ... international policymakers must pay serious attention to the reality of species-obliterating risks." Are these people all completely ignorant of evolution and science? No matter what happens in the future, one or another species-obliterating risk is a certainty. Here's why: 1. Our species has existed for about 200,000 years. 2. On that basis, and given our present knowledge of biology and evolution by natural selection, it's reasonable to assume that, within another 200,000 years, we will have been replaced by another species who either successfully competed with us, or into whom we simply evolved over time. 3. Human beings are a note, perhaps a measure, in a natural symphony. We're not the symphony, and we're certainly not the reason the music exists. 4. Based on the above estimate, there will be 10,000 more human generations, after which our successors will no longer resemble modern humans, in the same way that our ancestors from 200,000 years ago did not resemble us. 5. We need to get over ourselves -- our lives are a gift, not a mandate. 6. I plan to enjoy my gift, and not take myself too seriously. How about you?
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- sentientmachine 13y agoOur planet needs to create at least one offspring with a good chance of sprouting a fresh batch of DNA based life on another planet before we send ourselves back into the stone age. If we don't, there are only so many shots left for us to become a space faring civilization again. If our species can't get off this planet. We may die as surly as an ant colony in the middle of the desert. DNA based life on this planet will halt, without anyone to carry on the carnival somewhere else in the universe. This is serious business. If we don't fill the entire universe with efficient replicators to speed up the consumption of all energy to equilibrium. Then the reason the universe was created will have been for nothing. The stars must not be allowed to run down without our first harvesting them for our multitude of shenanigans.
- lutusp 13y ago> Our planet needs to create at least one offspring with a good chance of sprouting a fresh batch of DNA based life on another planet before we send ourselves back into the stone age. I hate to break this to you, but evolution isn't about humans or dolphins or spacefarers, it's about genes -- evolution is genes replicating, using organisms as vessels. In answer to the old question about which came first, the chicken or the egg, an evolutionary scientist answers, "a chicken is an egg's way to make another egg." Also, at a more mundane level, by the time our descendants are scattered across all the local star systems, they will be so different from us that we won't recognize them or feel any special kinship. But on reading your post to the end, I see you're probably kidding. Oh, well.