Most of the problems of the world are discussed fairly often.
Things like pollution, terrorism and other issues that are discussed ad nauseam in the media.
But the truth is there are other, often times more severe problems in the world, that only rarely discussed.
Because you deserve to know just how doomed the human race is,
we bring you the 5 greatest problems that are never talked about.
Most of the time, your discussion about world overpopulation.
But the truth is, the discussion tends to be more one sided.
There are places that are overpopulated such as Africa,
where the resources available simply do not measure up to the number of people that require them.
But his does not apply across the globe.
throughout the technologically advanced
world, in countries as diverse as Germany,
Japan, South Korea, and Lithuania, people
are having so few children that the
number of births is actually below
Replacement Level Fertility. Replacement
Level Fertility refers to the number of
humans that are required to be born in
order to at least equal and replace the
previous generation. With each generation,
there's a drop in total population as
the elderly die out, but without anyone
to take their place down the line to
fill jobs, contribute taxes, and be
productive. Throughout the West and the
East, fertility levels are dangerously
low and no one has come up with a good
solution for this. The causes of this are
manifold, the introduction of birth
control, women entering the workforce, and
postponing childbirth past the optimum
fertility window, which is ages 18 to 26,
a world filled with leisure and comfort
that is simultaneously too expensive,
making children a less than affordable
prospect and fewer and fewer jobs.
Unless this problem can be countered through,
for example, automation and similar
innovations, the industrial world would
be facing dim prospects in the future, or
perhaps none at all.
We humans evolve in
an environment that was incredibly harsh
and unforgiving and this led to
selection pressures
that favored attributes that would
increase our chances of survival and the
most important one was without a doubt
intelligence. And maybe you're inclined
to think that we're smarter today than we
were say 20,000 years ago but here you
would be wrong. According to researchers,
we're actually getting dumber and our
ancestors were more intelligent than we
are. Now, you might be asking, How is this
possible? But it's actually quite
elementary. Human intelligence was
birthed in an environment that was very
harsh and this harshness led to
selection pressures that gave us the
intelligence we now have. But as human
evolution is not stopped and we live in
an increasingly comfortable environment
with few if any challenges to our
survival,
we've been losing our intellectual edge.
So it might be a trade-off in the end as
the modern environment allows us to live
without being challenged, but it has also
cost us dearly in other ways. According
to one professor, an average Athenian
over 2,000 years ago would rank among
the smartest people around today, but
that is in the past now and how we will
overcome this deficit in intelligence
is anyone's guess.
We've all seen such
films as Terminator and its various
spin-offs but the threat of dangerous
hyper-intelligent AI, or artificial
intelligence, is something that some
scientists take very seriously to the
point that some believe it to be the
single most dangerous threat to the
human species. To put things in
perspective, imagine the mind of a man
such as John von Neumann the Hungarian
polymath and genius. It was said that he
could calculate complex equations in his
head at speeds roughly equivalent to
those of a pocket calculator and this is
truly impressive. For a human. And he was
the best of the best. As already
mentioned, a tiny solar pocket calculator
can do the same but even better and far
more complex computers can do far more,
such as beat grandmasters at chess and
engage in multiple effectively
superhuman operations simultaneously,
which is to say that we already have
limited AI that is better than the best
humanity has to offer. If AI continues to
advance its
capabilities, it will dwarf those of the
smartest humans, and if capable of many
functions at once or even the same array
as an average human, this could become
incredibly dangerous for human beings
because it would operate on a level
beyond human kin and supersede us in
everything it does and it could possibly
deem us disposable.
There was a time when
the world was ravaged by an unparalleled
number of deadly diseases such as the
bubonic plague and smallpox, but at this
time, few, if any people give serious
thought to the possibility of such a
thing affecting us today. Well, given the
fact that there is widespread knowledge
of the structure of viruses that is
understood down to the smallest detail,
cooking up a virus with unprecedented
destructive potential is far easier than
you may be inclined to believe.
Biotechnology and genetic engineering
could be a gateway to a new dawn for
humanity or its death knell as these
technologies put in the wrong hands
could easily annihilate the entire human
race. Given that there are 7 billion of us
roaming the planet, all in close
proximity to each other and constantly
traveling. Whether this happens or not is
something we will probably get to
witness in our lifetime or die in the
process of witnessing.
By far, the biggest
problem humanity faces is our almost
certain inescapable doom as just another
species that bit the dust. Our Sun is a
star and all stars are born, then live
and then die, and when our Sun dies, it
will take the Earth with it. There is
enough hydrogen in the Sun's core to
keep it going for another few billion
years, but eventually it will have all
fused into helium and when this happens,
it will not be able to generate as much
energy as before and will collapse under
its own weight and thus will begin the
process of our Sun transforming into a
red giant. And eventually, the Sun's core
will shrink into a white giant and the
earth will survive none of this.
But this will take billions of years and
the good news is we don't need to worry
about the death of our star because
we're probably going to die out long
before that. Extinction events throughout
Earth's history are well known and well
documented and some, such as the Permian
extinction event, nearly destroyed all
life on Earth. The truth is that we are
long overdue for a catastrophic
extinction event of a sort that nearly
wiped out all life before us. Whether it
comes to us in the form of an asteroid,
volcanic eruption, or something else, it
really is just a matter of time until we
are wiped out and go the way of the
dinosaurs. And the unknown element of
what causes this is the truly sinister
aspect, but it might be that we don't
need external help because humans can be
pretty stupid and destructive, and with
dozens of ways available to us, we might
just be skilled enough to end our own
lives before anything else out there
gets the chance. Either way, all life
coming to an end on this planet is an
inescapable inevitability. For more top
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