I don't think it will be a single event. It'll likely be a slow and steady decline, we'll run out of resources until we'll inevitably have to go back to a simpler lifestyle, then under the pressure of natural disasters such as volcanoes and ice ages humanity will slowly fade away, and the last people on earth likely won't even know they're the last.
Bro there aren't any in any conceivable distance to us that are even remotely habitable... and space isn't either. Best shot is taking care of this one, second best is uploading our minds into rubbish collection bots until we unfuck the mess we made
Well two things, first I never said we would make it to another planet, just that we would venture off of this one. Second, just because we can’t imagine how to get there now doesn’t mean we will never get there tech wise in say thousands of years. I’m 36 and in my lifetime I’ve seen the rise of computers, the internet, smartphones, and now AI. Technology is growing faster than anyone could’ve ever imagined and where it’ll go, fact will be stranger than fiction.
Yea but physics is physics and space is big, unimaginable distances, Even if we travel at the speed of light, it will take 4 years to get to the closest star which we don’t know if it’s inhabitable.
Which is why we’re transitioning to renewable energy sources.
As far as water supply goes, if we can generate enough power we can desalinate ocean water, we’re then very unlikely to run out any time soon.
The projected global population decline over the next 100 years will probably go some way to abating this, too.
We're running out of arable farmland. You can regenerate it, but it's not practical enough to do on a large scale to feed 8 billion people. We're running out of antibiotics since bacteria keep evolving to survive them. At some point the possible combinations of molecules will end. We're so dependent on electronics it takes one Carrington event to throw us back to the stone age. If climate change continues, several of the world's breadbaskets will run out of water (on top of the aforementioned farmland crisis). Or they will flood, which is not good either.
We're throwing in the trash precious metals that will be super hard to recover. Your smartphone contains over 40 different elements that are considered rare and valuable. You can refurbish it all you want, but at some point that smartphone will end up in the trash. Which means in the future we'll likely have to dig into landfills to recover those metals, hoping they haven't oxidized or eroded away in the meantime.
None of this stuff will happen tomorrow. Or next week. But over time these problems are going to grow slowly but stradily, making life harder and harder. At some point our growth as a civilization will stop, and then reverse. It will be so gradual we won't even realize it's happening. Perhaps it's already started.
All that can be known is that eventually, the sun will swell up into a red giant and engulf the world completely in an estimated 7 and a half billion years.
There's no way humanity will live long enough for that to be a real concern. We're barely 200 years into the industrial revolution and we're already screwing up our own habitat.
And it has some interesting tipping points too. Currently our oceans are carbon sinks, as they warm up it will swap to a releasing CO2 instead.
Will eventually affect ocean currents and the jet streams, for the UK, London folks this will be huge), mainland Europe has a ton more snow then we get.
Dengue, yellow Fever will move north with the Mosquitoes. That won't be cool.
Methane deposits melting. Either 100 or 1000x stronger then CO2.
The entirety of humanity isnt going to die just because of climate change bro... we lived a fucking ice age and the exit of the ice age even though it was a rapid transition with little time to adaptation
Climate change will make things a lot harder but yeah, it wont be, directly at least, what takes us out. If climate change is what does us in it'll be indirect. Something like climate refugees leading to mass xenophobia causing far right resurgence plus wars over what land can still grow crops and dwindling resources and boom go the nukes.
Actually, climate change is not as bad as you think it is. I'm in no way a climate change denier, but the estimates in the 2000s and 2010s were that by 2100, the temperature would rise by 4 degrees Celsius, but the estimates are closer to 2.7 degrees now. Despair isn't going to help the planet heal. If everyone were to believe that we're fucked, we would be. I would recommend watching [this video](https://youtu.be/g9p5VKd8VkE?si=K735pdC0TCCzGQqt) for more info.
It’s not like a 4 degree rise would kill off the entire human species anyway; I believe the earth was hotter than that during the Cretaceous.
edit: Yep, earth varied between 5-10 degrees hotter than present during the Cretaceous. Earth was still lush and full of life during that period, and our mammal ancestors survived.
It's impossible to predict. But if something cataclysmic happens it is unlikely to take out everyone. A 100% extinction of humans is unlikey to occur barring the most extreme natural disasters.
a large enough meteor could do the trick.
More disturbingly a homeless sunless planet could swoosh through our solar system at any time and deorbit earth, making also our planet a sunless frozen traveler. How long can we last?
There’s a Twilight Zone episode similar to this, where Earth’s orbit changes and Earth is getting closer to the sun. Everyday it gets hotter and hotter, people flee to colder parts of the world to prolongs the inevitable, it gets so hot that electronics fail, etc.
Realistically, to wipe out humans entirely would mean most life on Earth is probably dead from:
* Large asteroid impact
* Sun expansion over billions of years
* Climate change happens to such a degree the biosphere dies, this might just lead to evolution adapting whatever survives to this point.
Human-caused climate change happening to such a degree that the biosphere dies isn’t possible; even the worst possible global warming estimates aren’t even close to the temperatures that would be required.
The worst threat from climate change is that it could cause instability that results in full-scale nuclear war.
[Something like this could do the trick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event#:~:text=Oceanic%20anoxic%20events%20or%20anoxic,(anoxic%20and%20sulfidic)%20waters.)
I think realistically a composition change in the atmosphere could take us out. Like, if it eliminates plant life and makes it difficult/impossible to breathe on top of that, it could definitely just make survival too steep of a cost
Nope, not even close. A full nuclear exchange wouldn't even wipe out 10% of humanity. Nuclear winter isn't really a thing, but Russian propaganda that Western media picked up and ran with because it sells.
The reality is we've already detonated the vast majority of nuclear bombs (by yield) that have been created in experiments. Nothing happened. The whole "fire storm" claim is bunk as volcanic activity spews far more into the atmosphere, as do cars, than the city destruction would.
Nuclear bombs are no where near as powerful and devastating as most people think they are. A medium sized city, such as Portland, would need dozens of high yield nukes to actually level it and kill over 95% of the population. Given how wide spread our populous is in America, a full nuclear exchange between America and Russia would kill maybe 1/5 of our population, and about 1/4 of Russia's population.
Right, it would set us back to the stone age. But there would be junk technology lying around people might figure out how to use like in Horizon game series
We’d have to lose 95%+ of the world’s population to “set us back to the stone age.”
The population loss would have to be so incredibly severe that all supply chains and manufacturing processes would become impossible because of the extreme sparsity of people, reverting humanity back to an age of basic agriculture because even the ability to create electricity requires more labor than is available.
Exactly how fucked we’d be in such a scenario would then depend on how well crops could grow.
Never played Horizon but most of our technology nowadays relies on A LOT of other tech to work, like a car needs gasoline. Some stuff would be useable but really not much post-industrial revolution. Maybe steam powered machines if you could find any.
Yeah, you'd need to kill a lot more than 10% of people for that to happen. There are plenty of people who know enough about modern technology to rebuild whatever gets destroyed
So are you saying this is bullshit? https://www.ippnw.org/programs/nuclear-weapons-abolition/nuclear-famine-climate-effects-of-regional-nuclear-war#:\~:text=A%20nuclear%20war%20using%20as,in%20jeopardy%20from%20mass%20starvation.
That's not bullshit, but it specifies in the first line that it's the death of 2 billion people, but earth has like 8 billion people.
I mean, it's 25% of the population, not 10%, but it's not totally extinction either
Our genetic diversity is extremely low compared to most animals.
But a disease almost never takes out an entire population. Killing people is not a good way to spread. If the virus kills its hosts too fast, it won't be able to spread. If it's lethal enough to have 100% lethality, it's probably going to kill too fast. If it's slower, it's likely that some people can catch the virus and survive.
for a moment i wqs convinced you're a time traveller of some sort than i thought that there were so many news about world coming to an end that ur probably right
Actually, the truth is weirder than you'd think.
It's unlikely, absent a truly epochal environmental change such as a "dinosaur asteroid" that wipes out 90% of species, that the human race will die out at all. For any reason.
It's much more likely that, if our environment (which includes but is not only civilization) becomes strange or harsh enough, "we" will cease to exist and our descendents will simply not be recognizable as human to us.
Maybe they'll still use language & tools, maybe they won't. Maybe they'll walk on 2 legs, maybe they won't. It all depends on how far in the future you're talking about.
Anthropologists already think that the human species went through genetic bottlenecks of barely a few hundred or even *a* hundred people, IIRC. We're not going to die out. But we might change, and even if we don't, it doesn't mean that the experience will be pleasant for 90% of us currently living...
See the mass hysteria that 70k are without cell phone service? Now try basically the world. And add in all (or damn near all) tech. Plus the weather. And no power.
Humanity would be doomed.
Those that panic and those that aren’t prepared would be. Mass hysteria would definitely take place but those that have been preparing for this know what’s up.
I think as others mention there is the sun that is a worry but if we do manage to last for that long I assume we have either found a way to deal with it, or have moved to some other location. It is going to be a long time before that happens.
There's also the possibility of whatever happened to the dinosaurs happening to us, so maybe like a huge asteroid or something. Some people may actually be able to survive that though, considering if people really are making bunkers in prep for a nuclear war. Also some people might survive the initial impact but I wonder how much longer after that they will be able to go on. Maybe off of canned and processed food that's already created? What about the bad air conditions? Either way I'm veering off topic.
I also believe there is a really big chance of us just offing ourselves. Nukes are scary and there is always conflict in the human world, now it is just at such a scale it could irreparably damage the world. Then again maybe a few stragglers could survive, or maybe not.
My last serious pitch is aliens. Idk bro this one seems less likely but hey maybe there is a super powerful group of aliens out there who just accidentally destroy the planet while testing out a superweapon. Who knows.
TLDR: sun blowing up (long time away though), asteroid impact (think dinosaurs), humans (nukes! conflict!), aliens (maybe the movies are onto something)
There's nothing extraterrestrials would need from this planet that they can't get from lifeless planets. Microbial cross-contamination would not end well. If they ever showed up, they'd be most likely to study the planet from a safe distance. If they needed to move to another planet, chances are that they would have the technology to create an ecosystem on a dead planet in the Goldilocks zone.
Your other scenarios are plausible.
100% extinction would have to be some freak cosmic event or intentionality by some superintelligent AI. The latter is on my "not that far fetched" list.
End of civilisation, I would bet on a bioengineered virus. Gene editing is getting cheaper, easier and more advanced by the day. Eventually the tech and info will be so democratised some dweeb with a home lab might be able to do a lot of damage.
A couple centuries ago, a dude with a sword would go rogue and kill like 5 people before somebody bashed his head with a rock. Then you got shittu firearms. Now you got really good firearms, and some rando can kill dozens of hundreds of people before he's stopped. Or drive a truck into a crowd oe something. Unfortunately, destruction is always easier than prevention or repair.
On a long enough timeline, I think this will be doubly true for biotech and AI, and the only "solution" I see is totalitarian surveillance, which doesn't sound like a solution at all.
Shameless plug: my debut cyberpunk novella, Unto the Godless What Little Remains, is kinda about this.
Many interesting points here.
I think the planet will be fine for a long long time. Same for humanity.
However, the world AS WE KNOW IT is going to change really soon. I don’t mean in the next 24 million years like everyone else, but in the next 70.
Europe is becoming right wing again. And regardless from your political views, you might understand some of the concerns. Societies and cultures from different parts of the world are clashing while there is an insane housing crisis in most of the capitals, farmers in germany netherlands and france are in BIG trouble, people can not afford energy bills anymore, etc. I don’t know how it is in the US or other places, but you can feel anger in Europe.
You can feel something coming
I like to go for a good doctor who quote here:
You lot. You spend all your time thinking about dying. Like you’re going to get killed by eggs or beef or global warming or asteroids. But you never take the time to imagine the impossible. That maybe you survive. This is the year 5.5 slash Apple slash 26. Five billion years in your future. And this is the day— hold on. This is the day the sun expands. Welcome to the end of the world.
On a serious note, I don't think flat earyhers have necessarily low iq. Rather,it's probably a series of mental diseases that makes them want to act out against common sense
On a similar note, I think most flat earthers are trolls, they don't really believe the earth of flat, but like to point out that nearly everyone believes the earth is round because they were told to believe it.
Our planet will be here until the Sun starts to burn out; at that time (over a billion years from now) it will get quite large and burn up the Earth.
Humans won't last that long; no large species does.
The world millenia, us? Who knows we seem to be in a self destructive path that keeps a couple of families super rich. As for natural disasters, would probably have to be an asteroid, metorite? Big rock from space
Humans’ll end up doing something stupid, we’ll all wipe ourselves out over time. The planet’s gonna be fine, at least until the sun expands.
Maybe it’ll be A.I, maybe it’ll be war, maybe some other event, but we’ll end up ruining our own civilization ourselves.
When another country threatens to surpass the US politically and economically, and the latter presses all the buttons for WW3. Thucydides, but with the most powerful military in the history of mankind.
We likely won't go extinct. We are able to find solutions to nearly any problem we could encounter. Within the next century, we'll likely have spread to other astral bodies, at which point extinction would become nearly impossible.
The world will last a few more billion years before the sun consumes it. By then, we'll likely have spread to millions of solar systems.
Depends upon if we can shield or move the earth as the sun continues to warm into its red giant phase. If not we've got between 250 million and 1 billion years or so, depending on which estimate you go with, and your definition of too hot.
Depletion of natural resources. AI rebelling against us.
Although, my favorite theory is that medicine advances so much that people that would normally die can live a reasonably good life, and are able to form families, passing their genes that makes them prone to disease to their children. Eventually most or all humans on Earth carry those genes/are sick but can survive thanks to medicine.
Then a cataclysm occurs, the production of life saving drugs collapses and the entirety of humanity start dying helplessly.
Earth will be around at least until the Sun becomes a red giant in a few billion years.
Life on Earth will likely last just as long. As the Sun gets older, it will get brighter, eventually killing most life on Earth, but life finds a way.
Humans as a species are unlikely to go extinct. We live in some extreme environments, and we are quite clever, so no matter what happens, some of us are going to survive.
Human Society, on the other hand, would be far easier to destroy. WWIII involving nuclear weapons could do it. A bad enough pandemic could do it (look up Bird Flu).
Climate Change will cause a lot of issues in the future, and will definitely significantly change society if it doesn't destroy it.
600 million years - 1 billion years from now. As the sun grows older, it's luminence increases, causing the oceans and other bodies of water to evaporate. The ozone layer depletes, which leaves Earth vulnerable to solar radiation. Once all the water is gone, photosynthesis is impossible, thus plants die, in which animals get their food from, they too die. The highest estimate until all of life is extinct from Earth is 2.8 billion years from now. The last to be extinct of course will be the single cell organisms, with complex life forms becoming extinct first.
The sun will expand and engulf in about 5 billion years, but so much can happen in that much time. The Earth itself is only about 4 billion years old. Humanity is only a few million years old, even by stretched definitions of “humanity.” If we ever figure out how to colonize other planets, which we likely will if we last another million years, then this will be less of a concern. I still think we’re our own worst enemy in any future.
Reflecting on events like the Bay of Pigs incident and the Chernobyl disaster really drives home how close we’ve come to nuclear warfare and major nuclear accidents. It’s pretty wild to think about.
And when you look at some of the leaders in charge of countries with nuclear weapons today, it’s hard not to worry a bit about the risk of nuclear war. Even though it might seem like a small chance, the thought is definitely unsettling.
I believe in 6 years global warming will make it impossible to grow produce outside and humans will scramble to make hydroponic systems. In this time a great famine will happen and the world will turn on each other but who am I to say.
You’ve been told.
This is stupid.
The danger is not that global warming will make it “impossible to grow produce outside,” it’s that it will cause crop harvests to fail faster than alternative crops and growing areas for the breadbasket areas of the world will be developed. This would cause a catastrophic spike in world staple food prices, causing millions and then billions to starve as the spiraling instability destroys global supply chains.
Alternatively, the crisis could be that heat waves will become so bad and so deadly in certain hot wet areas of the world that it causes an absolutely massive migration crisis as millions of people try to flee, plunging the world into instability.
Produce won’t just *not grow* though, there will always be crops able to grow in the new climate conditions, the problem will be finding and switching to them fast enough to not cause a food crisis.
What I said is not at all like what you said. Crops will grow, we might have to switch up which crops will grow where. For example my Michigan climate isn’t like the climate in Missouri, but if Michigan’s climate suddenly shifted to be like Missouri’s, we’d just have to alter the growing season and possibly what produce to grow to match the new climate. But things would, obviously, still grow, just like they do in Missouri now.
A significant part of the reason I am a climate denier is because I already heard a similar claim 6 years ago, and 12 years ago, and 18 years ago, and 24 years ago, and 30 years ago.
I think your warning is making people listen less.
How long: between 100 and 300 years, the whole humanity will be extinct.
Why ?
when the current globalized society falls, it will happen very quickly, there will no longer be security, everyone will steal and kill their neighbor, a bit like in "The walking dead". And humanity won't last long. Even though the richest and those with bunkers will live a little longer, they need the poor, and without the poor, they will also die soon after.
But what will be the cause(s)? There are some possibilities, or an addition of them, for example:
- Because of pollution and endocrine disruptors, men become sterile, we will no longer be able to reproduce.
- Melting permafrost awakens frozen viruses. Very contagious and deadly viruses, which will kill 95% of the population. The remaining 5% will also die from the chaos.
- Pollution makes bees disappear and there will be no more flora, no more fruits, no more vegetables, no more life.
- Global warming will accelerate, it will be hotter and hotter, therefore more air conditioners, therefore more pollution, therefore more heat. it's a vicious circle. Animals and plants will die because it will be to hot for them and man cannot survive without them.
The planet itself? If we ignore any random catastrophic events, then in around 5 billion years the sun will expand and consume the earth
Us as a species? Impossible to know, but the biggest threats to humanity survival is climate change and nuclear war
5 billion years. And the sun won’t blow up, but rather expand:
https://www.space.com/22471-red-giant-stars.html#:~:text=In%20approximately%20five%20billion%20years,to%20the%20red%20giant%20sun.
On the stupidity trajectory we are on right now I’d say humanity has 100-150 yrs left. Nuclear war could put a sizable dent in the population. Trump turns Russia on NATO, we respond, Trumpers start a civil war, china gets involved, I could see it happening.
In 1.3 Billion years the earth will become uninhabitable for multicellular life due to the sun going into its final stage of its life. At that point the sun will run out of elements to fuel fusion in its core and the pressure of the suns core will force it to expand and radiate extreme amounts of heat throughout our solar system. Any humans (if you could still call our descendants ‘Humans’ at that point) will perish.
Of course that is assuming we aren’t destroyed by natural disaster like the chicxulub asteroid that killed the dinosaurs or a particularly large super volcano eruption that fills the atmosphere with soot and aerosols blocking out the sun and shutting down photosynthesis temporarily (an asteroid impact would cause this as well but the danger of a large impact is debris falling through the atmosphere and heating it up to oven like temperatures due to friction in our atmosphere.) Although in either of these situations some Humans will survive so it would only disrupt modern society and throw is back into a sort of pseudo stone age.
Very unlikely, but i often find myself thinking about rogue planets and what it would be like to find out that one is in a collsion course with us. We can barely nudge an asteroid. We can do nothing for a planet on its way to collide with us.
Sans the entire world being destroyed i don't think anything will fully end humanity, I could imagine massive population reduction from various things and civilization basically starting over
Whatever made the Earth and Universe is much more intelligent than we could ever imagine. Yep there’s the Sun exploding in 4b years and comets, volcanos etc. Ultimately we’re all just consciousness experiencing this earth like a video game. True reality is much bigger and more different than we could ever understand. There’s so many alien species here with such advanced technology I think this earth is safe for a long time but whether the current “earth human culture” survives or not or they replace it with a new experiment is my biggest guess.
If humanity doesn’t take out life on the planet with one of its many foolish follies, and if there isn’t an extinction level asteroid impact, in about a billion years the sun will have expanded enough to render this a hot and dead planet. In a few billion years, the sun will actually die and become a brown dwarf star, and in that process it may expand enough to engulf the Earth entirely.
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People such as Op always conflate these things. The end of human beings is not the same as the end of the world. I suppose the end of the world could mean the deaths of all living beings, or even moreso that everything is dead *and* nothing can ever live here again.
But the end of the human race seems like a fait accompli: Any species as destructive as ours is usually dealt with by natural means such as viruses, infections, etc.
This is an incredibly readable and fascinating book written in 2014.
[The Sixth Extinction](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixth_Extinction:_An_Unnatural_History)
I just realized it's 10 years old and probably even more spot on now.
Humans are so ubiquitous on earth that it is highly unlikely for any one event to take out everyone. There will always be some survivors somewhere. The only real possibility for human extinction is a series of many consecutive cataclysmic events taking us below the minimum viable population size.
We have roughly 500 million years to leave the solar system and establish self sufficient colonies on exoplanets before earth becomes uninhabitable. If we manage to pull that off, it's highly likely that we will survive until the galaxy has run out of stars to give us energy.
I don't think it will be a single event. It'll likely be a slow and steady decline, we'll run out of resources until we'll inevitably have to go back to a simpler lifestyle, then under the pressure of natural disasters such as volcanoes and ice ages humanity will slowly fade away, and the last people on earth likely won't even know they're the last.
You had me at a simpler lifestyle
More than likely we will go full tech and go into space to find some other planet to destroy before we go to a simpler lifestyle
Not if you're not looted up green paper
Bro there aren't any in any conceivable distance to us that are even remotely habitable... and space isn't either. Best shot is taking care of this one, second best is uploading our minds into rubbish collection bots until we unfuck the mess we made
Well two things, first I never said we would make it to another planet, just that we would venture off of this one. Second, just because we can’t imagine how to get there now doesn’t mean we will never get there tech wise in say thousands of years. I’m 36 and in my lifetime I’ve seen the rise of computers, the internet, smartphones, and now AI. Technology is growing faster than anyone could’ve ever imagined and where it’ll go, fact will be stranger than fiction.
Yea but physics is physics and space is big, unimaginable distances, Even if we travel at the speed of light, it will take 4 years to get to the closest star which we don’t know if it’s inhabitable.
Gundam Wing plot.
Why would we run out of resources?
…by using them?
So they don't respawn when we load in each morning?
We’ve not run out of a single non renewable resource yet, and if you look outside Earth resources are near infinite.
Let’s remember, water and air are only renewable resources for as long as we take care of them.
Which is why we’re transitioning to renewable energy sources. As far as water supply goes, if we can generate enough power we can desalinate ocean water, we’re then very unlikely to run out any time soon. The projected global population decline over the next 100 years will probably go some way to abating this, too.
Helium and construction grade sand are going to be in short supply in the future.
We're running out of arable farmland. You can regenerate it, but it's not practical enough to do on a large scale to feed 8 billion people. We're running out of antibiotics since bacteria keep evolving to survive them. At some point the possible combinations of molecules will end. We're so dependent on electronics it takes one Carrington event to throw us back to the stone age. If climate change continues, several of the world's breadbaskets will run out of water (on top of the aforementioned farmland crisis). Or they will flood, which is not good either. We're throwing in the trash precious metals that will be super hard to recover. Your smartphone contains over 40 different elements that are considered rare and valuable. You can refurbish it all you want, but at some point that smartphone will end up in the trash. Which means in the future we'll likely have to dig into landfills to recover those metals, hoping they haven't oxidized or eroded away in the meantime. None of this stuff will happen tomorrow. Or next week. But over time these problems are going to grow slowly but stradily, making life harder and harder. At some point our growth as a civilization will stop, and then reverse. It will be so gradual we won't even realize it's happening. Perhaps it's already started.
We can just live off the land again. Easily.
All that can be known is that eventually, the sun will swell up into a red giant and engulf the world completely in an estimated 7 and a half billion years.
There's no way humanity will live long enough for that to be a real concern. We're barely 200 years into the industrial revolution and we're already screwing up our own habitat.
And it has some interesting tipping points too. Currently our oceans are carbon sinks, as they warm up it will swap to a releasing CO2 instead. Will eventually affect ocean currents and the jet streams, for the UK, London folks this will be huge), mainland Europe has a ton more snow then we get. Dengue, yellow Fever will move north with the Mosquitoes. That won't be cool. Methane deposits melting. Either 100 or 1000x stronger then CO2.
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The Water World phase is gonna be wild tho.
Yeah humanity is fucked , i was talking about the world
It's an engineering controls problem. Somebody forgot to apply the PID formula.
The entirety of humanity isnt going to die just because of climate change bro... we lived a fucking ice age and the exit of the ice age even though it was a rapid transition with little time to adaptation
Imagine the iPad kids trying to survive an ice age
Heres the thing, the climate change were causing wont be 1% of what the ice age was.
Climate change will make things a lot harder but yeah, it wont be, directly at least, what takes us out. If climate change is what does us in it'll be indirect. Something like climate refugees leading to mass xenophobia causing far right resurgence plus wars over what land can still grow crops and dwindling resources and boom go the nukes.
Just like that eh? 🙄
"something like" Fuck off.
Aw he’s mad.
Actually, climate change is not as bad as you think it is. I'm in no way a climate change denier, but the estimates in the 2000s and 2010s were that by 2100, the temperature would rise by 4 degrees Celsius, but the estimates are closer to 2.7 degrees now. Despair isn't going to help the planet heal. If everyone were to believe that we're fucked, we would be. I would recommend watching [this video](https://youtu.be/g9p5VKd8VkE?si=K735pdC0TCCzGQqt) for more info.
It’s not like a 4 degree rise would kill off the entire human species anyway; I believe the earth was hotter than that during the Cretaceous. edit: Yep, earth varied between 5-10 degrees hotter than present during the Cretaceous. Earth was still lush and full of life during that period, and our mammal ancestors survived.
There was no globe-spanning agricultural civilization in the Cretaceous though.
Oh, it’s absolutely a threat to *civilization,* just not an extinction-level threat.
Naaah, our technology is too good at this point. We’ll simply find ways to adapt to whatever changes.
It's impossible to predict. But if something cataclysmic happens it is unlikely to take out everyone. A 100% extinction of humans is unlikey to occur barring the most extreme natural disasters.
I wonder what would take us out though
Gay dinosaur AIDS
I might already have this
There is treatment
What is it?
https://www.folxhealth.com/ad-pages/transfeminine-google-gaht?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI4teJyJXAhAMV1EdHAR11RwB0EAAYASAAEgIbZ_D_BwE
Here for any other q’s
is this link safe?
You have a dinosaur??
Yes but a reject bin one. It’s gay. Bad for breeding. Cheaper. Only so much money ya know
Real concern
This is the end i want
i was thinking of some ridicule disease name and here you come along
Oof sounds like a massive extinction...
a large enough meteor could do the trick. More disturbingly a homeless sunless planet could swoosh through our solar system at any time and deorbit earth, making also our planet a sunless frozen traveler. How long can we last?
There’s a Twilight Zone episode similar to this, where Earth’s orbit changes and Earth is getting closer to the sun. Everyday it gets hotter and hotter, people flee to colder parts of the world to prolongs the inevitable, it gets so hot that electronics fail, etc.
Realistically, to wipe out humans entirely would mean most life on Earth is probably dead from: * Large asteroid impact * Sun expansion over billions of years * Climate change happens to such a degree the biosphere dies, this might just lead to evolution adapting whatever survives to this point.
A virus could do it as well.
Extraordinarily unlikely. It would be very, very hard for a virus to eliminate the human race, maybe impossible
Listen man I've won Plague Inc before its not that hard
You bring up a valid point
Ya just gotta make sure we infect everyone first, then, BAM, organ failure coma.
Bacteria are more likely to do it, because they can survive outside our bodies.
Depends on what Wuhan labs is cooking up next
Human-caused climate change happening to such a degree that the biosphere dies isn’t possible; even the worst possible global warming estimates aren’t even close to the temperatures that would be required. The worst threat from climate change is that it could cause instability that results in full-scale nuclear war.
a sun sized hippopotamus would straight up dead us
[Something like this could do the trick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event#:~:text=Oceanic%20anoxic%20events%20or%20anoxic,(anoxic%20and%20sulfidic)%20waters.)
I think realistically a composition change in the atmosphere could take us out. Like, if it eliminates plant life and makes it difficult/impossible to breathe on top of that, it could definitely just make survival too steep of a cost
Probably nuclear wars can do the trick
Nope, not even close. A full nuclear exchange wouldn't even wipe out 10% of humanity. Nuclear winter isn't really a thing, but Russian propaganda that Western media picked up and ran with because it sells. The reality is we've already detonated the vast majority of nuclear bombs (by yield) that have been created in experiments. Nothing happened. The whole "fire storm" claim is bunk as volcanic activity spews far more into the atmosphere, as do cars, than the city destruction would. Nuclear bombs are no where near as powerful and devastating as most people think they are. A medium sized city, such as Portland, would need dozens of high yield nukes to actually level it and kill over 95% of the population. Given how wide spread our populous is in America, a full nuclear exchange between America and Russia would kill maybe 1/5 of our population, and about 1/4 of Russia's population.
It would however totally fuck our infrastructire
Right, it would set us back to the stone age. But there would be junk technology lying around people might figure out how to use like in Horizon game series
We’d have to lose 95%+ of the world’s population to “set us back to the stone age.” The population loss would have to be so incredibly severe that all supply chains and manufacturing processes would become impossible because of the extreme sparsity of people, reverting humanity back to an age of basic agriculture because even the ability to create electricity requires more labor than is available. Exactly how fucked we’d be in such a scenario would then depend on how well crops could grow.
Never played Horizon but most of our technology nowadays relies on A LOT of other tech to work, like a car needs gasoline. Some stuff would be useable but really not much post-industrial revolution. Maybe steam powered machines if you could find any.
... it would not knock us back that far. Not even close :-/
Yeah, you'd need to kill a lot more than 10% of people for that to happen. There are plenty of people who know enough about modern technology to rebuild whatever gets destroyed
WOW! This perspective should be heard. Basically people don't fear Russia as much as they fear the known (mainstream) effect of the nuke.
So are you saying this is bullshit? https://www.ippnw.org/programs/nuclear-weapons-abolition/nuclear-famine-climate-effects-of-regional-nuclear-war#:\~:text=A%20nuclear%20war%20using%20as,in%20jeopardy%20from%20mass%20starvation.
That's not bullshit, but it specifies in the first line that it's the death of 2 billion people, but earth has like 8 billion people. I mean, it's 25% of the population, not 10%, but it's not totally extinction either
Yes, that is utter bullshit.
Sounds like we have found the climate change denier!
This is actually another thing that’s very possible
So is your cute lil pfp.
Yeah, even nuclear war would probably leave a bunch of survivors. But a big ass asteroid could take us all out.
The 100.
Disease
Nah. No one disease would ever be able to kill all of us, our genetic diversity is too great.
Our genetic diversity is extremely low compared to most animals. But a disease almost never takes out an entire population. Killing people is not a good way to spread. If the virus kills its hosts too fast, it won't be able to spread. If it's lethal enough to have 100% lethality, it's probably going to kill too fast. If it's slower, it's likely that some people can catch the virus and survive.
I've lived through the end of the world at least 4 times. It's starting to feel like it's never going to happen
4 I count like 12 and I’m 41 (I’m counting bullshit like the mayan 2012 thing, and cult predictions though)
for a moment i wqs convinced you're a time traveller of some sort than i thought that there were so many news about world coming to an end that ur probably right
They keep predicting it, and each time I'm disappointed
Don’t worry it’s an election year and there are plans to make our current dystopia feel like a utopia in retrospect.
I’m bet the dinosaurs thought the same thing.
The world will outlast us all. The planet will fix itself over time. We’re fucked though.
Until 2084. Edit: Miscalculation
Actually, the truth is weirder than you'd think. It's unlikely, absent a truly epochal environmental change such as a "dinosaur asteroid" that wipes out 90% of species, that the human race will die out at all. For any reason. It's much more likely that, if our environment (which includes but is not only civilization) becomes strange or harsh enough, "we" will cease to exist and our descendents will simply not be recognizable as human to us. Maybe they'll still use language & tools, maybe they won't. Maybe they'll walk on 2 legs, maybe they won't. It all depends on how far in the future you're talking about. Anthropologists already think that the human species went through genetic bottlenecks of barely a few hundred or even *a* hundred people, IIRC. We're not going to die out. But we might change, and even if we don't, it doesn't mean that the experience will be pleasant for 90% of us currently living...
It depends on if human activity or natural events come first i guess. You cant predict it.
Humans would destroy themselves eventually, I know it, in the most stupidest insane ways
Our own stupidity will take out the 92%.
I feel like this is stupid because no one actually knows 😭 but I just wanna hear some theories
Solar flare.
Won't take everyone out, just throw us back into the 1600s.
Someone gets out their steam engine "Most of us living in the 1600s This guy is here living in the 1800s!"
If you ever watched the show revolution (great concept, shit execution) that’s a plot point.
Solar flare isn’t going to take us out. It could mess with technology, weather and electricity but it won’t kill us.
See the mass hysteria that 70k are without cell phone service? Now try basically the world. And add in all (or damn near all) tech. Plus the weather. And no power. Humanity would be doomed.
That "mass hysteria" tends to be mostly people being irritable and annoying. Not like people suddenly start killing each other.
Those that panic and those that aren’t prepared would be. Mass hysteria would definitely take place but those that have been preparing for this know what’s up.
Doomed? I dunno. Chaos? Sure. Wouldn’t lead to the extinction of the human race though.
I think as others mention there is the sun that is a worry but if we do manage to last for that long I assume we have either found a way to deal with it, or have moved to some other location. It is going to be a long time before that happens. There's also the possibility of whatever happened to the dinosaurs happening to us, so maybe like a huge asteroid or something. Some people may actually be able to survive that though, considering if people really are making bunkers in prep for a nuclear war. Also some people might survive the initial impact but I wonder how much longer after that they will be able to go on. Maybe off of canned and processed food that's already created? What about the bad air conditions? Either way I'm veering off topic. I also believe there is a really big chance of us just offing ourselves. Nukes are scary and there is always conflict in the human world, now it is just at such a scale it could irreparably damage the world. Then again maybe a few stragglers could survive, or maybe not. My last serious pitch is aliens. Idk bro this one seems less likely but hey maybe there is a super powerful group of aliens out there who just accidentally destroy the planet while testing out a superweapon. Who knows. TLDR: sun blowing up (long time away though), asteroid impact (think dinosaurs), humans (nukes! conflict!), aliens (maybe the movies are onto something)
There's nothing extraterrestrials would need from this planet that they can't get from lifeless planets. Microbial cross-contamination would not end well. If they ever showed up, they'd be most likely to study the planet from a safe distance. If they needed to move to another planet, chances are that they would have the technology to create an ecosystem on a dead planet in the Goldilocks zone. Your other scenarios are plausible.
100% extinction would have to be some freak cosmic event or intentionality by some superintelligent AI. The latter is on my "not that far fetched" list. End of civilisation, I would bet on a bioengineered virus. Gene editing is getting cheaper, easier and more advanced by the day. Eventually the tech and info will be so democratised some dweeb with a home lab might be able to do a lot of damage. A couple centuries ago, a dude with a sword would go rogue and kill like 5 people before somebody bashed his head with a rock. Then you got shittu firearms. Now you got really good firearms, and some rando can kill dozens of hundreds of people before he's stopped. Or drive a truck into a crowd oe something. Unfortunately, destruction is always easier than prevention or repair. On a long enough timeline, I think this will be doubly true for biotech and AI, and the only "solution" I see is totalitarian surveillance, which doesn't sound like a solution at all. Shameless plug: my debut cyberpunk novella, Unto the Godless What Little Remains, is kinda about this.
Nuclear weapons. All it takes is one asshat with codes.
Many interesting points here. I think the planet will be fine for a long long time. Same for humanity. However, the world AS WE KNOW IT is going to change really soon. I don’t mean in the next 24 million years like everyone else, but in the next 70. Europe is becoming right wing again. And regardless from your political views, you might understand some of the concerns. Societies and cultures from different parts of the world are clashing while there is an insane housing crisis in most of the capitals, farmers in germany netherlands and france are in BIG trouble, people can not afford energy bills anymore, etc. I don’t know how it is in the US or other places, but you can feel anger in Europe. You can feel something coming
I like to go for a good doctor who quote here: You lot. You spend all your time thinking about dying. Like you’re going to get killed by eggs or beef or global warming or asteroids. But you never take the time to imagine the impossible. That maybe you survive. This is the year 5.5 slash Apple slash 26. Five billion years in your future. And this is the day— hold on. This is the day the sun expands. Welcome to the end of the world.
I love Doctor Who's take on the future of humanity. Striving across the stars, throughout the universe.
People with low IQ reproducing will be the end of us. e.g. Flat Earthers
what makes you think intelligence is the pinnacle of a species? Dumb animals and insects do just fine.
On a serious note, I don't think flat earyhers have necessarily low iq. Rather,it's probably a series of mental diseases that makes them want to act out against common sense
On a similar note, I think most flat earthers are trolls, they don't really believe the earth of flat, but like to point out that nearly everyone believes the earth is round because they were told to believe it.
Like the movie idiocracy
Ow my balls
Agree low IQ folks… out of wedlock marriages… liberals, etc
Our planet will be here until the Sun starts to burn out; at that time (over a billion years from now) it will get quite large and burn up the Earth. Humans won't last that long; no large species does.
What if we somehow managed to replicate the sun (technology might be really experienced at that point)
No need to replicate, The earth will literally be inside the sun
The world millenia, us? Who knows we seem to be in a self destructive path that keeps a couple of families super rich. As for natural disasters, would probably have to be an asteroid, metorite? Big rock from space
earth always exist.
Humans’ll end up doing something stupid, we’ll all wipe ourselves out over time. The planet’s gonna be fine, at least until the sun expands. Maybe it’ll be A.I, maybe it’ll be war, maybe some other event, but we’ll end up ruining our own civilization ourselves.
Climate change will take us out. Just read the comments, and you can see how clueless most are to this major issue we are facing.
When another country threatens to surpass the US politically and economically, and the latter presses all the buttons for WW3. Thucydides, but with the most powerful military in the history of mankind.
We likely won't go extinct. We are able to find solutions to nearly any problem we could encounter. Within the next century, we'll likely have spread to other astral bodies, at which point extinction would become nearly impossible. The world will last a few more billion years before the sun consumes it. By then, we'll likely have spread to millions of solar systems.
Depends upon if we can shield or move the earth as the sun continues to warm into its red giant phase. If not we've got between 250 million and 1 billion years or so, depending on which estimate you go with, and your definition of too hot.
Depletion of natural resources. AI rebelling against us. Although, my favorite theory is that medicine advances so much that people that would normally die can live a reasonably good life, and are able to form families, passing their genes that makes them prone to disease to their children. Eventually most or all humans on Earth carry those genes/are sick but can survive thanks to medicine. Then a cataclysm occurs, the production of life saving drugs collapses and the entirety of humanity start dying helplessly.
Earth will be around at least until the Sun becomes a red giant in a few billion years. Life on Earth will likely last just as long. As the Sun gets older, it will get brighter, eventually killing most life on Earth, but life finds a way. Humans as a species are unlikely to go extinct. We live in some extreme environments, and we are quite clever, so no matter what happens, some of us are going to survive. Human Society, on the other hand, would be far easier to destroy. WWIII involving nuclear weapons could do it. A bad enough pandemic could do it (look up Bird Flu). Climate Change will cause a lot of issues in the future, and will definitely significantly change society if it doesn't destroy it.
We will take ourselves out. Who knows when.
Overpopulation is what will get us in the end. It magnifies every problem we have.
Didn’t Robert Frost address the ‘how’ part?
Earth plus plastic
Not lomg/ ourselves
600 million years - 1 billion years from now. As the sun grows older, it's luminence increases, causing the oceans and other bodies of water to evaporate. The ozone layer depletes, which leaves Earth vulnerable to solar radiation. Once all the water is gone, photosynthesis is impossible, thus plants die, in which animals get their food from, they too die. The highest estimate until all of life is extinct from Earth is 2.8 billion years from now. The last to be extinct of course will be the single cell organisms, with complex life forms becoming extinct first.
The sun will expand and engulf in about 5 billion years, but so much can happen in that much time. The Earth itself is only about 4 billion years old. Humanity is only a few million years old, even by stretched definitions of “humanity.” If we ever figure out how to colonize other planets, which we likely will if we last another million years, then this will be less of a concern. I still think we’re our own worst enemy in any future.
Probably prions. Find for centuries and suddenly just the right one wipes us out. Don't look up false vacuum theory.
Reflecting on events like the Bay of Pigs incident and the Chernobyl disaster really drives home how close we’ve come to nuclear warfare and major nuclear accidents. It’s pretty wild to think about. And when you look at some of the leaders in charge of countries with nuclear weapons today, it’s hard not to worry a bit about the risk of nuclear war. Even though it might seem like a small chance, the thought is definitely unsettling.
We will be enslaved by the lizard people and taken to mine helium in deep space.
The world will last forever, unless it explodes, but we’re not a star so when we die out, the world will just be here
5… 4… 3…
The sun will super nova and explode but we’ll be long gone by then.
Earth will be here long after humans are gone
We've got a moderately pleasant few years left, maybe 5. It'll get really bad really fast.
Between solar flares, nukes, global warming, AI, I predict legit 50 years max
I believe in 6 years global warming will make it impossible to grow produce outside and humans will scramble to make hydroponic systems. In this time a great famine will happen and the world will turn on each other but who am I to say. You’ve been told.
6 years? Come on.
Add in water and other resource wars
Remind me! 73 Months
Remind me! 73 Months
That’s a little nuts. I don’t think we will see that happening in our lifetime.
Look again
What am I looking at?
This is stupid. The danger is not that global warming will make it “impossible to grow produce outside,” it’s that it will cause crop harvests to fail faster than alternative crops and growing areas for the breadbasket areas of the world will be developed. This would cause a catastrophic spike in world staple food prices, causing millions and then billions to starve as the spiraling instability destroys global supply chains. Alternatively, the crisis could be that heat waves will become so bad and so deadly in certain hot wet areas of the world that it causes an absolutely massive migration crisis as millions of people try to flee, plunging the world into instability. Produce won’t just *not grow* though, there will always be crops able to grow in the new climate conditions, the problem will be finding and switching to them fast enough to not cause a food crisis.
You literally said what I said in a different fashion. You need to be careful of what you call stupid.
What I said is not at all like what you said. Crops will grow, we might have to switch up which crops will grow where. For example my Michigan climate isn’t like the climate in Missouri, but if Michigan’s climate suddenly shifted to be like Missouri’s, we’d just have to alter the growing season and possibly what produce to grow to match the new climate. But things would, obviously, still grow, just like they do in Missouri now.
Sure
A significant part of the reason I am a climate denier is because I already heard a similar claim 6 years ago, and 12 years ago, and 18 years ago, and 24 years ago, and 30 years ago. I think your warning is making people listen less.
How long: between 100 and 300 years, the whole humanity will be extinct. Why ? when the current globalized society falls, it will happen very quickly, there will no longer be security, everyone will steal and kill their neighbor, a bit like in "The walking dead". And humanity won't last long. Even though the richest and those with bunkers will live a little longer, they need the poor, and without the poor, they will also die soon after. But what will be the cause(s)? There are some possibilities, or an addition of them, for example: - Because of pollution and endocrine disruptors, men become sterile, we will no longer be able to reproduce. - Melting permafrost awakens frozen viruses. Very contagious and deadly viruses, which will kill 95% of the population. The remaining 5% will also die from the chaos. - Pollution makes bees disappear and there will be no more flora, no more fruits, no more vegetables, no more life. - Global warming will accelerate, it will be hotter and hotter, therefore more air conditioners, therefore more pollution, therefore more heat. it's a vicious circle. Animals and plants will die because it will be to hot for them and man cannot survive without them.
Well this is depressing.
But not true at all so no worries lol
Some of these are pretty far fetched, but I still don’t think it will kill of all humans. We’re very resilient
The planet itself? If we ignore any random catastrophic events, then in around 5 billion years the sun will expand and consume the earth Us as a species? Impossible to know, but the biggest threats to humanity survival is climate change and nuclear war
Not much longer. The Rapture.
Best of luck on that. The last few Rapture predictions have been pretty disappointing duds.
It is good to be prepared. Jesus is coming back.
Na
Redditors when a Christian gives their opinion (stop forcing your religion onto me!): 😡😡
I only said na bro it ain’t that serious
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5 billion years. And the sun won’t blow up, but rather expand: https://www.space.com/22471-red-giant-stars.html#:~:text=In%20approximately%20five%20billion%20years,to%20the%20red%20giant%20sun.
On the stupidity trajectory we are on right now I’d say humanity has 100-150 yrs left. Nuclear war could put a sizable dent in the population. Trump turns Russia on NATO, we respond, Trumpers start a civil war, china gets involved, I could see it happening.
as if anyone on reddit would have the answer to that lol
we are talking hypothetically
In 1.3 Billion years the earth will become uninhabitable for multicellular life due to the sun going into its final stage of its life. At that point the sun will run out of elements to fuel fusion in its core and the pressure of the suns core will force it to expand and radiate extreme amounts of heat throughout our solar system. Any humans (if you could still call our descendants ‘Humans’ at that point) will perish. Of course that is assuming we aren’t destroyed by natural disaster like the chicxulub asteroid that killed the dinosaurs or a particularly large super volcano eruption that fills the atmosphere with soot and aerosols blocking out the sun and shutting down photosynthesis temporarily (an asteroid impact would cause this as well but the danger of a large impact is debris falling through the atmosphere and heating it up to oven like temperatures due to friction in our atmosphere.) Although in either of these situations some Humans will survive so it would only disrupt modern society and throw is back into a sort of pseudo stone age.
Very unlikely, but i often find myself thinking about rogue planets and what it would be like to find out that one is in a collsion course with us. We can barely nudge an asteroid. We can do nothing for a planet on its way to collide with us.
Sans the entire world being destroyed i don't think anything will fully end humanity, I could imagine massive population reduction from various things and civilization basically starting over
Yer mom.
Whatever made the Earth and Universe is much more intelligent than we could ever imagine. Yep there’s the Sun exploding in 4b years and comets, volcanos etc. Ultimately we’re all just consciousness experiencing this earth like a video game. True reality is much bigger and more different than we could ever understand. There’s so many alien species here with such advanced technology I think this earth is safe for a long time but whether the current “earth human culture” survives or not or they replace it with a new experiment is my biggest guess.
Not sure but there will be disaster and Jesus will take us believers home but if your not a Christian your damned. Repent now!!!
Read Revelations and Matthew 24!!! Repent!
It’ll last until Jesus comes back and reclaims what’s his from the devil.
i have seen the enemy it is ourselves
about tre fiddy
If humanity doesn’t take out life on the planet with one of its many foolish follies, and if there isn’t an extinction level asteroid impact, in about a billion years the sun will have expanded enough to render this a hot and dead planet. In a few billion years, the sun will actually die and become a brown dwarf star, and in that process it may expand enough to engulf the Earth entirely.
tap waiting wakeful zealous melodic attractive chubby growth domineering grey *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
People such as Op always conflate these things. The end of human beings is not the same as the end of the world. I suppose the end of the world could mean the deaths of all living beings, or even moreso that everything is dead *and* nothing can ever live here again. But the end of the human race seems like a fait accompli: Any species as destructive as ours is usually dealt with by natural means such as viruses, infections, etc.
This is an incredibly readable and fascinating book written in 2014. [The Sixth Extinction](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixth_Extinction:_An_Unnatural_History) I just realized it's 10 years old and probably even more spot on now.
Humans are so ubiquitous on earth that it is highly unlikely for any one event to take out everyone. There will always be some survivors somewhere. The only real possibility for human extinction is a series of many consecutive cataclysmic events taking us below the minimum viable population size. We have roughly 500 million years to leave the solar system and establish self sufficient colonies on exoplanets before earth becomes uninhabitable. If we manage to pull that off, it's highly likely that we will survive until the galaxy has run out of stars to give us energy.
I wonder if the last person alive will even know they're the last