When we think of the very real possibility of humans going extinct, the usual culprits
advanced are things like nuclear war and climate change, or even an asteroid impact.
But there’s way more out there that could take us out.
So here are ten unsettling ways humans could go extinct.
Number 10.
Not Enough Population Growth
Overpopulation is always advanced as a problem for human civilization in the sense that we
could go through a population correction.
From Malthus writing in the late 18th century to scholars today, it’s been predicted that
there is a limit to what earth can handle and provide for.
This may be a bit alarmist, Malthus’s prediction of population corrections were a bit spotty,
and today we can build space colonies and expand out to take advantage of the resources
of the solar system, but population ultimately does present challenges in any environment.
But maybe in a way that wasn’t widely foreseen.
One thing about our advancing civilization is that in the most developed countries, as
development occurs, birth rates seem to drop.
Assuming that will also be the case for currently developing nations, then there could come
a time when people voluntarily reproduce at below replacement levels.
If the entire planet reproduces at the rate of countries currently exhibiting the lowest
levels of population growth, it’s possible that the human species could go extinct in
a matter of centuries simply from a global desire to have fewer children.
Number 9.
Too much population growth
On the other hand, nothing says that global birth rates won’t instead start to rise
in the future.
There may already be some indicators that the populations of some developed nations
are starting to rise again.
If the population drops in some countries during the 20th century was an anomaly, then
overall population will continue to rise.
And rise it has, in 1800, earth had about a billion people living on it.
It took more than a century for that to double.
But since the 1930’s, it’s risen at increasingly higher rates to the current level of roughly
7.5 billion.
This means increasing resource use to support all those people, and just how high of a population
can be sustained without becoming a multiple planet species is ultimately unknown, but
thought to be around 12 billion people at current technological levels.
But, increasingly advanced technology can extend this.
But could this trend cause our extinction?
Not directly, but there would be population corrections.
But the problems inherent with feeding and keeping people alive on a truly overpopulated
planet with no more resources to provide does introduce drivers for things like nuclear
wars breaking out over resources, or out of control climate change brought on by such
high population numbers, or greater chances for pandemic diseases, all of which could
cause extinction.
Number 8.
Post-Humanism
Jellyfish are odd creatures.
They don’t really have things like eyes, or ears, or even brains, at least as we define
them.
So what happens if you take a jellyfish and you augment it with laser weaponry, armor,
a brain custom built for battle, teach it to master martial arts and shuriken throwing
stars and then unleash it on an unsuspecting humanity, at what point will scientists no
longer consider it to be a jellyfish?
That works for us too.
Humans are moving in a direction of technological advancement and this has and will continue
to change to our very existence.
Things like connectivity through the internet have revolutionized humanity in a very short
time.
We have literally addicted ourselves to brain prosthetics over the course of my lifetime,
the cellphones.
Now medical science looks to advanced prosthetics and even direct brain interfaces to solve
humanity’s medical problems.
But at some point, there comes a time when the technology becomes better than what evolution
originally gave us.
In principle, prosthetic limbs eventually could outperform biological ones.
This is the cyborg problem.
Do we augment ourselves with technology that is superior to biology?
That is a question that’s quickly coming at us.
But say for a moment we go with widespread augmentation, such as we did with tattoos.
That’s a body modification, and they are currently ubiquitous and have been since ancient
times.
Say technological augmentation goes that route and everyone becomes cyborgs.
At what point are we no longer biological, when will scientists declare homo sapiens
extinct?
Number 7.
The Silent Death
One of the major mysteries of the history of life on earth is what exactly happened
to this planet about 450 million years ago during the Ordovician-Silurian extinction
events.
This one was weird, and stands apart in the fossil record from most other extinction events
that have occured on this world.
In this case, deep water marine life wasn’t that badly affected in comparison to shallow
water dwellers, who were hit extremely hard.
In the case of the deep water animals, they tend to have more restricted habitats, something
that usually disfavors a species during an extinction event.
Possibilities include a nearby gamma ray burst or an uncharacteristically powerful solar
flare.
A weaker version of this may have happened around the year 775 that did not appear to
have catastrophic effects on life on earth.
Records from England of the period recount the appearance of a red crucifix in the sky,
which sounds suspiciously like an aurora borealis.
But tree ring data from this period records a spike in carbon 14, likely caused by a massive
solar flare.
These mysteries may never be solved, but whatever the cause, the point is, if it happened once,
it could happen again.
Number 6.
Natural Climate Change
Climate change is something we hear a lot about, but usually in the sense of anthropogenic
climate change.
But earth’s climate has always changed, going from warm periods to ice ages, and possibly
even the planet almost entirely freezing over at one point.
Even antarctica has in the past been host to steamy temperatures, and even palm trees
and dinosaurs as the continents drifted.
Climate change is also something that, at least locally, can happen very rapidly in
nature.
But if earth once almost completely froze over in a snowball earth event, then could
that happen again and force the extinction of humanity?
Thankfully, such a process would be slow, and one thing human technology can do is create
greenhouse gases, in which case excess atmospheric carbon dioxide would then be useful.
And in fact, there may already be enough heat trapping gases being put into the atmosphere
to prevent the next ice age, which is predicted to otherwise occur in about 50,000 years.
But, at some point, too much is too much.
Number 5.
Supervolcanoes
Earth is no stranger to volcanism.
It’s with us today, and has been with us since this planet’s crust cooled.
Most of the time, it’s a natural disaster that while can cost huge amounts in lives
and property damage, they aren’t usually something that can end our civilization.
Usually.
On occasion Earth’s volcanism has gone completely wild and produced eruption events, such as
the Siberian Traps, that were so severe that they caused mass extinctions.
Today, we still face the possibility of a supervolcanic eruption, such as the Toba supervolcano
that may once have almost caused our extinction.
Today, the threat of supervolcanos exist in several areas of the world, including yellowstone
in the US, and while it’s statistically unlikely to happen on any given day, over
time, it’s a risk.
If and when such an eruption does occur, it could be so severe that it could constitute
a mass extinction event of humans.
Number 4.
Interstellar Impactors
This is a relatively new variant on the asteroid impact possibility, but with a further spooky
technological possibility attached.
The idea of an asteroid impact ending human civilization is nothing new, and I’ve covered
it in other videos.
But that’s something that until now has been confined to our solar system in scope.
Something disturbs objects in the outer solar system and then they come into the inner solar
system and occasionally, one hits earth, and causes a mass extinction.
But the outer solar system isn’t the only place these objects could come from.
As the passage of the first known interstellar object through the solar system became evident
last year, and it passed fairly close to earth, it’s being realized that objects moving
at very high speed coming from elsewhere in the galaxy can enter the solar system, and
potentially hit earth and end human civilization.
The thing is, a small one may have recently hit us.
In a paper by Avi Loeb and Amir Siraj of Harvard, link below, they detail that a meteorite that
entered the earth’s atmosphere in 2014 was of interstellar origin.
Using data from a catalog of detected meteorite falls compiled by the Center for Near-Earth
Object studies using US government sensors, they found a meteorite that entered the earth’s
atmosphere on a hyperbolic trajectory, suggesting that it came from outside the solar system.
And it did so at some serious speed, about 134,200 miles per hour.
The object is estimated to only have been about 3 feet in diameter and posed no threat
to human civilization, and it does open up the possibility that interstellar rocks might
be found here on earth in the form of meteorites, which is certainly tantalizing from the point
of view that we could analyze something here on earth that originated from across the galaxy,
but it does raise a point.
What if much larger interstellar objects hit earth?
These objects, if they prove common, are potentially even more scary than solar system asteroids.
They could hit earth at much higher speeds, and greater energy, meaning that relatively
small objects are still seriously dangerous.
Thankfully, they probably don’t hit earth that often, though we don’t know that for
sure.
But, what if someone intentionally targeted one at us?
There are now speculative methods where a malicious alien civilization could toss a
rock, or even a planet, at us at relativistic speed and not just end human civilization
but blow the planet into smithereens.
This kind of a weapon may or may not be practical over great distances, this is very new stuff
on the speculative table, but it’s food for thought.
Number 3.
Nicoll-Dyson Destruction
It’s been said that one of the reasons we don’t see type III civilizations encasing
an entire galaxy’s stars in Dyson Spheres is that they are so dangerous that the should
be galactically declared illegal.
This is because, as with many technologies, it doesn’t just have to be a method of peaceful
energy generation.
It can also be easily weaponized.
And it represents one of the most potent weapons possible in the universe, enough to destroy
vast swaths of a galaxy.
The idea is simple.
Build a Dyson sphere or swarm around a star, modified with a hole to direct the star’s
energy, focus it on a planet, and that planet will be destroyed.
Anyone on that planet wouldn’t know a thing about it until the beam hit, and in principle
could be used at great distances.
Any civilization possessing such an array could effectively hold the rest of the galaxy
hostage, including us.
In short, it would effectively be a planetary extinction device.
Number Two.
Solar Flares and the Technology Trap
The sun is incredibly stable.
It provides life on earth with energy and has done so for billions of years, and will
continue to do so long into the future, but not permanently.
However, over very long periods of time, the sun does change.
It is growing in luminosity very slowly, but there will come a point where it will cook
earth, and cause the extinction of not only humans if we’re still around, but the extinction
of all life on earth.
Thankfully, that’s a long way off, but the sun can do something that would profoundly
disrupt human civilization right now, and if the wrong things happen here on earth,
could also contribute to or cause our extinction.
These are solar flares.
Most of the sun’s flares are directed harmlessly into space.
Even if one hits us, we’re protected by our magnetosphere and life itself is not usually
affected by the flares, indeed if one hit us head on tomorrow the animals wouldn’t
know anything happened, and in the past humans didn’t know about them when they hit other
than maybe observing bright auroras.
But our technology is very vulnerable, and that’s bad news for human civilization.
Imagine if everything suddenly stopped working.
Your cellphone, your car, your refrigerator, or your ability to pay for goods with a debit
card.
The transport of food would be halted in its tracks, meaning that the only food supply
you have is what you have on hand, or what you can loot.
Most people in the US for example typically keep less than three days worth of food on
hand.
Most of us are at all times mere days from the beginning of starvation.
It’s unlikely that we could get everything back up and running in such a doomsday scenario
in time to prevent massive amounts of death.
The skills that allow for industrial food production, for example, the tractors, the
equipment, the fertilizers and so on aren’t viable anymore.
This means we go back to methods of farming that most people have no longer have any idea
how to do.
In other words, this wasn’t a problem a century ago, but now being dependent on technological
methods of farming, we would have severe problem.
Add in the social upheaval that would no doubt follow the solar flare and the failure of
most technology, and it could be that some event could come along concurrent with the
aftermath that triggers extinction, indeed it seems likely that the one piece of technology
that’s probably well hardened against events like solar flares are the nuclear weapons.
But if in the aftermath nothing like that happens, it could be that we’ll see a huge
population contraction, but not an extinction of the species.
With some luck, people would survive that know how to do it.
And, it’s worth noting that there are still people on this earth, such as the inhabitants
of North Sentinel Island, that are uncontacted and still live in pre-stone age conditions.
For them, the day after the solar flare would be a day like any other.
Number One.
The Known Unknowns
This is more of a class of speculative methods of human extinction.
It’s anyone’s guess just how possible these are but it illustrates that we could
go extinct from something we haven’t yet thought of, or at least fully understand.
One example is an encounter with an extraterrestrial artificial intelligence entirely bent on accomplishing
whatever purpose it was originally built for.
The famous example here is If it were originally designed to manufacture paper clips using
the raw materials of the universe.
If it encountered earth and us, it would achieve the end of making as many paper clips as it
possibly can by disassembling and converting the planet.
Another is strange matter.
This is a hypothetical material made up of quarks, that if it actually exists, could
be extremely dangerous.
If certain thinking about strange matter is correct, in this case called a strangelet,
then earth coming into contact with it would result in earth’s matter, and all life on
it, being converted into strange matter along with a release of energy.
Earth would be left, after a time, a hot mass of strange matter.
And it’s always possible that science, or a rogue state or entity, might make a mistake
and create an insidious artificial virus that could cause extinction, or some other unforeseen
consequence of something perhaps seemingly unrelated.
But, for now, it also pays to remember that we’ve been here for a very long time, and
are currently very much not extinct and as we branch out into the solar system, the possibility
of extinction begins to drop.
But, the universe has to end sometime, so ultimately, sooner or later, it will be lights
out for homo sapiens.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently broadcasting from
my Faraday cage to avoid interference from …
John … It’s not a faraday cage, it’s your duvet and coat hangers…
Plastic coat hangars.
Hhhh.
What?
You’re not supposed to be on this channel.
We inked a treaty.
Well … you left the door open
That’s because the LeBaron was compromised, somehow you got in there when the door was
locked, not that that means much from a car built in 1985.
So, since you’re here, who do we have lined up for next week on Event Horizon?
An actor and podcaster.
He sounds very interesting.
Who?
Anson Mount.
What?
For corn’s sake, that’s Captain Pike in Star Trek Discovery!
Hopeless ANNA, hopeless.
It’s going to be a fun interview indeed.
And do check out my talk show channel, Event Horizon, link below, Now, just a moment.
John, they’re plastic, you don’t expec-
Ah!
Peace and quiet.
Always trick the AI into thinking they have the upper hand.
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