Agreed. I said as much in post 23.
My later response was against the implication that we’d go out just like the dinosaurs and our intelligence doesn’t make us special.
In this context, our intelligence does make us a special case, and we can survive (as a species), a much wider range of scenarios.
Neither Chicxulub nor a decrease in atmospheric oxygen (unless we’re talking about magically removing it all in seconds) would do it.
You’re talking about the Chicxulub that set the earth’s atmosphere on fire all the way around the world, and killed every land animal over 20 pounds?
No, I mean the Chicxulub asteroid impact which took place 65 million years ago.
By stockpiling a few years worth of food. It’s really not all that hard.
And Lonesome Polecat, of course diversity is great, but it doesn’t do much good if people aren’t interbreeding. The fact that diversity is good is one of the reasons we should be encouraging interbreeding between different populations.
ROTFLMAO!!!
You GOTTA be fucking KIDDING me!
That would be the one! Are you proposing such an impact is incapable of killing off humans?
Not to make you worried or anything but we have much less than that. In as little as 200 million years things will be uncomfortable and by 400 million years very very uncomfortable.
Depends what you mean by capable.
If every human were to gather at one place on earth, and the asteroid were to hit that place? Sure, we’re toast.
But barring such odd behaviour, yes I will say that the Chicxulub asteroid would not make us extinct.
First of all I dispute this picture of “all of the earth’s atmosphere being on fire”. How did small mammals, birds and amphibeans survive such a conflagration?
Secondly such an object is likely to be moving at much less than lightspeed and will be seen at least months (probably years) in advance of impact. Plenty of time for millions of people, at various sites around the world, to go into deep bunkers with enough fuel and food (or the means to make food) to last centuries.
The majority of the world’s population would perish, of course, but that isn’t the same thing as extinction.
Say what?
Our intelligence gives us a major advantage over any conceivable global catastrophe. Certainly not now, but if extrapolating our technological history is any indication, over the next 500 years (of which the odds of any global catastrophe of the sort of Chicxulub, or even Yellowstone is pretty low), we’ll be wielding power and technology that would’ve made Arthur C. Clarke shit a brick.
And this despite the idea we may one day not keep all our eggs in one basket, and colonize other moons or planets.
I know it’s popular to have a pessimistic outlook on the future of humanity surviving as a species, but it seems to really ignore the fact that humanity is indeed quite special because of our intelligence, especially in regards to our continued survival.
Give us another 150 years or so, and I think we’ll have a good grasp on any threat; even ourselves.
Could we have some cites re the claimed effects of the Chicxulub meteor (setting the atmosphere on fire, precipitous decline in atmospheric oxygen)?
If you could dump the resulting brine into the ocean and dilute it evenly - maybe. But in general the disposition of the brine (concentrate) from the desalination process is problematic and causes environmental problems.
Is that extrapolation reasonable though? Our technological history - at least the rapid bit of it - has been significantly driven by consumption of resources that are finite (fossil fuels). Sure, we might develop workable fusion power, or we might not.
It’s also popular to have a brightly optimistic view of the future of human development based on the notion that the folks in the future will solve any and every problem that they face. They might, or they might not.
The first thing I want to say is that it is a wonderful thing that mankind discovered fossil fuels.
People think of extracting such fuel as “evil” now, but that concentrated source of energy has changed the lives of billions, and what luck that the main waste product is just harmless old CO2.
…of course you can have too much of a good thing, and now, at the point of releasing tens of billions of tons of CO2 per year…we have a problem.
I know which I’d bet on.
There are still people alive today that were born in a time when we had no reason to suspect that atoms had any internal structure, and it was a mystery how the sun had managed to burn for so long.
Since then we’ve had all the discoveries of radiation, subatomic particles, we’ve made nuclear power stations, bombs, cyclotrons… And we’ve already performed nuclear fusion…just not yet in a profitable way.
I think the balance needs to swing more that way though. There are far more people saying “humans think they’re so smart…” and looking at animal extinctions and doing invalid extrapolations.
I’m no fan of humans – I think most of them are jerks 
But a sentient species has all kinds of advantages when it comes to extinction threats, and (as a separate point) there just is no throttle to their progress.
On reading, that was quite an off-topic rant. I’m just used to people being very negative about oil here.
Of course we must rely on it far less going forwards, for a number of reasons.
I don’t think fossil fuels are a bad thing either - my point was just that they’re finite, and we could well run perilously short of them before we’ve worked out an alternative solution. And as we run short, it becomes progressively harder and more expensive to work on the alternative solutions, because all of the research and manufacturing processes are powered by fossil fuels.
Yes, but so what? Just because folks in the past failed to imagine what we can now do, doesn’t mean we’re necessarily making the same mistake now - that argument would probably be a logical fallacy.
It’s possible to desperately need something that is absolutely impossible to have - is the entirety of my point. We may or may not be in that predicament - and I don’t think we should give up trying for a moment, but our success is not inevitable.
That wasn’t my point. My point was, a century is not even the blink of an eye on the kind of timescales between things like major asteroid collisions.
And in that time we’ve gone from not knowing that atoms have internal structure to a wealth of knowledge and harnessing nuclear physics in many ways.
We already know fusion can be done on earth. We already know that fusion can be energetically profitable and done on huge scales.
I find it highly implausible (though I hesitate to call anything impossible) that progress would stop forever at this point.
Anyway, I don’t want to get too sidetracked. The point is, as a sentient species we already have excellent survival chances (as a species) for virtually all plausible phenomena.
And, in the long term, there’s nothing to stop the progress of a sentient species at least ratcheting up, and more likely, accelerating.
I hope you’re right - I think the most likely thing to stop us is, as I say, dwindling resources of current energy technologies.
This leads me to believe you are simply unfamiliar with the literature on the K-T impact extinction event (which is now believed to have been caused by the Chicxulub impact.) The programs I’ve seen on the Science and Discovery Channels don’t come with easy Internet citations, but the suspected reason no animals over 20 pounds survived is believed to be because large animals don’t burrow well. Everything on the surface may have been killed; it’s believed that perahps only burrowing land animals lived. Certainly every LARGE thing died in the impact or in the aftermath, probably because of global famine in the impact winter.
The basic premise is that ejecta from the crater re-entered …“a trillion” projectiles re-heating the atmosphere. That in turn started global wildfires. Years ago, I read that tektites (droplets of volcanic glass) believed to be from Chicxulub have been found at the bottom of the ocean on the other side of the earth from the crater.
I’ve seen estimates that the combination of impactor and re-entry of molten ejecta raised the temperature of the atmosphere by 260 degrees on the low side to 1000 degrees on the high side.
The programs that discussed the event quoted scientists who estimated the surface soil of the earth reached 1500 degrees (I think Fahrenheit) from global wildfires. But only a few inches down, the temperature would have been survivable.
Here are some vaguely-supporting citations:
If you accept “heating the atmosphere with a thermal pulse” as "set the atmosphere on fire, here’s one cite.
Here’s what appears to be a paper from Walter Alvarez, one of the original impact-extinction theorists, describing (if I am summarizing it correctly a second layer of ejecta from a “warm fireball” that followed the original impact and may account for apparent layers suggesting more than one round of burning.)
Yes, thank you for educating us all with your discovery channel knowledge.
Where do I even begin?
Well firstly, you said earlier “[it] set the earth’s atmosphere on fire all the way around the world”.
This is very different from wildfires being started over much (not all) of the earth’s surface, and I would have acknowledged that.
Secondly the burrowing theory is interesting but note that some of the species that survived have no burrowing behaviour.
Finally note that this thread is about human extinction. If burrowing was sufficient to survive this global incineration, then forget the purpose-built bunker; you just need to stay in your basement for a few days (which millions would try of course).
(missed edit window)
I would have acknowledged that the Chicxulub impact caused worldwide wildfires.