I watched a program on the History International the other night about dire predictions from some wellknown “thinkers”. How the world might end quicker than you think because. . . One theory was that we’d run out of water. As we speak an oil pipeline is in the process of being built from Canada to Texas. (Across one of the countries largest water aquifers) One “oops” and mid America as we know it would be virtually unihabitable for generations. If oil contamination weren’t an issue, why do owners of gas stations (at least here in Nebraska) have to have a million dollars worth of liability on their underground tanks? Wouldn’t a terrorist (as in 911) attack on said pipeline rank a little larger than a single underground gas tank and induce further DEBATE on the subject of whether or not we should build the pipeline, and or where?? My second point is that if the same pipeline WERE to leak (for any reason) wouldn’t it make growing crops (you know, the foods that we all take for granted) more difficult, or even impossible? How long do humans exist on ONE meal a day? With half the water their bodies require? Instead of thinking for ourselves, providing for ourselves, Nafta made us beholden to other countries for much of our food suppiles. (made it cheaper to bring food in from other countries than to protect our own natural resources) What happens if those other countries have a drought or any other disaster? Get off the couch and start searching the internet on the above pipeline. Get involved. Do. .something. .anything. .or maybe humans WILL BE the next endangered species.
Just how freakin’ big do you think a pipeline is, or how much it COULD spill before all out efforts to stop it?
Please - even if the thing was ruptured the damage would be localized. It certainly wouldn’t wipe out the entire aquifer, it wouldn’t stop agriculture. There have been gushing oil wells, broken pipelines, and spills before. Yes, they’re bad. They leave a serious mess. But the world hasn’t ended and the human race isn’t endangered by them.
If “we” run out or water, everything is dead, not just humans. But we’re not going to “run out of water”. It’s ideas like that that impede discussing the real issue of just how much water we will need and how we will get it to where it is needed.
Of course not, there are billions of us. The majority of human beings on the planet could die, and we still wouldn’t be an endangered species.
The issue you seem to want to debate is whether or not a specific oil pipeline should be built. I’m not sure that a leaking oil pipeline would have any chance of causing the preposterously disastrous environmental conditions that would make growing crops in the entire American Midwest impossible. Do keep in mind that there are quite a few oil pipelines in the world, and so far they haven’t made growing crops impossible. Also keep in mind that it would be impossible to harvest and transport that food without petroleum. And that you personally use petroleum products all the time.
Also note that humans do live in places other than the United States, although the best person ever does live in the United States.
P.S. I love how NAFTA is thrown in there randomly. Let me guess, you’re a farmer or a trucker?
We are the principal endangerers these days. We do endanger ourselves, but we’re likely to kill everything but cockroaches before we go.
We are not going to run out of water. The world is mostly water, and if it keeps getting warmer there is going to be even more. What might be a problem is running out of cheap water, which is a completely different and vastly more manageable problem.
There will be a lot of species dead before humans are. We are certainly not the next endangered species.
And by gum, if we go we’re gonna take plenty of others with us!
Even if every H bomb in the world goes off tomorrow, there will be hundreds of millions of healthy people left. A few species would go extinct, mostly those already limited to zoos.
The most plausible scenario for humans going extinct is that birth control becomes so easy and reliable that the fertility rate stays below replacement for centuries. But then what happens when there are just a few hundred thousand people left? Most likely, the birth control pills, the condom factories, and even the medical infrastructure, go bust. So it is pretty hard for me to imagine how our species comes to be in true endangered species territory.
Barring a comet strike (in which case we’d merely be one of numerous species to rapidly go extinct) or some especially virulent disease… no.
I heard theres a way to boil sea water into drinkable water, sounds like witchcraft, but it’d be worth a try before the last of us die out.
Humanity is not endangered as a species but many of its ethnicities (especially those of Europe and East Asia) are.
I hope so. If we all move around and interbreed and blend or eliminate all our visibly obvious ethnic distinction, we will be the better for it. We won’t have a visibly different “other” to hate.
Though I imagine we’re a long way (perhaps forever) from doing so.
Ok, I think it would take very strategic placement of the world’s nuclear arsenal to wipe us all out, and I can’t see anyone doing the job right. So I agree nuclear weapons aren’t going to make us go extinct. And as you noticed, birth control isn’t going to wipe us out (and it already is easy and reliable) as long as there are enough fertile people left.
But we could be killing ourselves with global warming right now. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but it is possible that the earth will become too hot or too cold to support significant human life, even if unlikely. Disease might be the biggest threat now. The next pandemic might be the big one. There’s no reason to assume we’ve encountered the worst kind of diseases already. Everybody could already be infected with the bug that will kill us in the next year. And that’s just some of today’s problems. The future could hold out of control killer nanobots, plastic eating bacteria, genetically engineered vatican assasins, and who knows what else.
If people were simply becoming assimilated there would be no problem-but rather the population is declining. In addition for reasons of aesthetics and genetic diversity it may be in all of humanity’s interest to keep genetically diverse types of humanity while encouraging new ethnicities.
Very, very unlikely, given the range of climates that prehistoric humans were able to survive in. Not to mention, if global warming somehow (how??) wiped out 90% of the human race, the remaining 10% would no longer be pumping carbon into the atmosphere, and levels would start decreasing after a generation or two.
Nah: the human race will survive, here on planet Earth. Even if we nuke ourselves back to the Stone Age, enough people will survive the holocaust and subsequent radiation poisoning to keep the species alive while the world starts to heal itself. When it comes to basic survival, we’re almost as tough to wipe out as cockroaches.
The human race-that is homo sapiens sapiens will not disappear from the face of the Earth until the End of Days in which case humanity will still exist in Heaven and perhaps Hell.
I’ll bet you a LOT of money that Homo sapiens ends up extinct before the Earth is destroyed…we’re barely a couple hundred thousand years old as a species, and we’ve got 5 billion years to go before the sun expands into our orbit and vaporizes the planet. That’s an awful lot of time, and there aren’t ANY multicellular species that have been around that long yet. By the law of averages, we’re probably due for a catastrophic extinction event in the next couple million years.
Oh, honestly. Now we’re going to have to dunk you in boiled out seawater to determine if you’re a witch.
Also, in terms of food, we’re a net exporter. We feeds millions of tons to livestock, and still much more rots on the shelf uneaten. We make the majority of the food we eat, and a lot for everyone else.
Plus we’re not going to run out of water. Transport is the main issue, and even if it did become scarce on land, we could use desalinization plants (which some countries already use for their main water source) for centuries and barely make a dent in the oceans.
Meh. Even with the atmosphere completely gone or filled with sun-blocking dust turning the world into a ball of ice, we’d still have our precious mineshaft space. Grow mushrooms in the dark and we’re good for another brave millenium !