Introduced genetic quirk that causes us to die off (the Idiocracy option)
Humans render Earth unlivable (resource depletion, pollution, global warming, etc.)
Cosmic crapshoot (asteroid strike, rogue planet pulls Earth out of Sun’s orbit, etc.)
Alien invasion
Death of Sun
Heat death of universe
Other (please specify in comments)
0voters
In honor of my finishing Station Eleven on Max, I thought it might be fun to speculate on The End of Humanity (my definition of fun might be slightly different than yours).
Of course, SE was not about the complete and total end of humanity, it was about the remaining survivors in the aftermath of a global plaque that wiped out civilization. I thought of doing a poll about the end of civilization, but decided against it for two reasons:
No matter the apocalypse, if a large enough population of humans remain to be able to breed and carry on, some form of civilization will eventually be restored. That’s just what we do. So the true end of civilization won’t be until all humans are gone, or there are too few left to support a breeding population and eventually die off.
So, what do we think-- we do it to ourselves, or does a cold, uncaring universe take care of us eventually? We are, after all, just tiny creatures clinging to a rock in the vastness of cold, dead, space. Lucky enough to be close, but not too close, to an enormous, incredibly hot hydrogen fusion reactor. We’re pretty clever and resilient, but we also do stupid things to ourselves and our planet that we should know better not to do.
I think I’ve covered the main bases in the poll, but if you choose ‘other’ please share! Also, for the sake of the poll, ‘evolving into something else’ is not an option-- it’s about not only the end of humanity, but its evolutionary line. So for example, if you’re an optimist who chose ‘heat death of the universe’, that assumes we migrated to other planets before Earth became unlivable, and evolved to fit the environments of those planets. No longer strictly human, but still the human line.
So do we go with a bang or a whimper? No prizes for being correct, other than the satisfaction of knowing you guessed right in your final moments of consciousness, assuming it happens in your lifetime.
I went with humans render the Earth unlivable, at least for humans. I’m surprised that heat death of the universe is in second place. That won’t happen for at least trillions of years, maybe much much longer if protons are unstable, in which case we might be talking something like 10^50 years or even longer. I can’t imagine humans making it that long. I’d have put that in last place. Just for fun, here’s the order I rank them in.
Humans render Earth unlivable.
Nuclear or biological warfare.
I agree it’s odd that it’s in second place right now, albeit a distant second. Either there are a few real optimists here, or smartasses choosing the least likely option just because.
I think I mostly agree with that. Probably the only change I’d make would be to move ‘Cosmic crapshoot’ up at least one, so it’s between ‘plague’ and genetic quirk’. I think that’s a fairly possible way for us to go.
I put down other because it’s pretty hard to totally destroy a population, so even plagues or natural disasters would likely leave a few survivors. I actually think the end of the world as we know it will be when God takes the world. Of course the method used could be some of the items above.
A whimper, I’m guessing. We got a small preview with COVID, but a virus could pop up that is immune from any puny efforts that humans can muster, and that is 100% fatal. That’s a near-term thing in the grand scale of universal time.
I went with “Heat death of the universe”, but it isn’ta sure thing yet. It seems to me that we are at the precipice. If we get some kind of spaceborne industry up and running in the next century or two, I can’t imagine us ever going extinct. The solar system is so rich in resources that there’s no doubt in my mind, if we get out there we will be set. Even if humans go through another phase of exponential growth once we’re out there, trillions of humans could live off the sun’s energy with the resources of the solar system.
I can’t imagine a realistic disaster that would destroy an entire solar system spanning civilization. (The idea is enormously fun - there’s a book series by I think Alastair Reynolds set in a delapidated dyson swarm as a civilization emerges from the ashes for the 13th time in known history, many millions of years after the solar system was disassembled for raw parts). It’s an incredibly creative setting that lets you have a Space Opera story with harder scifi/no ftl. But the idea that a spacefaring civilization falls to barbarism and forgets technology for thousands of years until a remnant rediscovers space travel and spreads back out between habitats always seemed a bit farfetched to me. I can imagine an individual habitat losing communication and reverting to barbarism. But not a whole solar system at once…
Once we are in space, for reasons I’ve gone into earlier, I don’t think travel to other stars will be an issue. If we can live on a space habitat for years, and I have no doubt that’s doable here around our sun, then we can shove a habitat towards another star.
But this assumes we make it off of Earth. If we somehow screw up our civilization, would we have the capability to get back to modernity without easy access to fossil fuels or to bridge the gap between muscle power and nuclear or renewable power? I’m not sure we would.
The idea that we would run out of coal or oil has turned out not to be a problem (in the sense that if we burn fossil fuels long enough to run out we will destroy the environment irrevocably first). But if we lost modern technology, is there enough of the sort of coal and oil you just go out and grab with your bare hands or a pick to redevelop fracking and deep earth mining? What if the period before we redevelop modern tech takes thousands of years, during which low level usage of what easily accessible fossil fuels are left continues?
There’s also the fact that the environment today has been ravaged by millenia of intensive farming and two hundred years of industrialism. Could traditional agricultural techniques actually sustain people in places that were once fertile, or is that fertility gone forever?
On the one hand, it seems like wind or hydro power shouldn’t be too hard to replicate, assuming they remember how to generate electricity. No exotic materials or advanced techniques are needed for simpler examples. Even the Romans had wind and water mills, and these technologies were retained even by medieval Europeans who had lost much of the other technologies they could have inherited from Rome.
Early electricity generation shouldn’t take much more than the ability to craft a medieval windmill, work copper into wire, and knowledge of how to find a magnet. It would be intermittent and weak, but it would work.
Maybe you could augment wind with muscle power - oxen turning a wheel could also generate power; in the novel The Windup Girl which imagines a society where global warming and resource shortages have rendered fossil fuels rare, while advances in genetic engineering allow much of the city’s power generation to come from genetically modified elephants - one could imagine a society that breeds draft animals to optimize them for energy generation).
I think it is possible that this is our only shot at the stars, and that if we miss there aren’t enough easily extractable resources left for us to develop a society advanced enough to have a second go at it. But… that seems farfetched to me. It presumes that the path we took to get to this point is the only possible one, but I don’t know that this is true.
Even if we destroy our civilization, I think we would be hard pressed to destroy humanity. And so long as you don’t wipe us out completely, I think we will eventually come this far again (and I highly doubt it would take nearly as long, unless all memory of our current era is wiped from the Earth).
I think it will be a combo, an escalating cascade rather than a single cause.
Most likely in my opinion: environmental damage leads to ecological deterioration which leads to brutal shortage of resources which leads to desperate wars of survival which causes to collapse of meaningful civilization which leaves us vulnerable to global plague. Something like that. No one factor, just mounting chaos before the final nail in the coffin.
Humans invent an artifical lifeform that takes over the top of the food chain. Humans will still be around but the humanity aspect will be downgraded to just another animal and we will be denied resouces to build things and the need and desire educate our young is dimenished. Maybe we will kept around as pets if we are lucky.
We already have the tech to put permanent colonies on the moon and Mars, we just lack the political will. Getting to the next steps after that, to the moons of the gas giants, seem like a much bigger challenge. And from there to the next solar system seems to me to be a challenge of even several orders of magnitude greater than that.
And all of those would likely fail without support from Earth. Surviving in space is different than becoming independent from Earth.
I went with plague (not plaque as in the OP - jeeze if we all died of that!). Seeing as what COVID-19 was able to do for a while, with economic and social disruption, should a more robust contagion emerge, it could be the end of us. That other thread here around smallpox somehow making a comeback now that we have greatly diminished resistance, etc. With so much division and suspicion about every. little. thing, belief systems, abundant misinformation and uncooperative populations, I am surprised how well we have come out of the latest pandemic - the next one may not be as easy.
A close second is destruction of our environment - this is happening real-time and we can all observe it happening during our lifetimes. But, same problem as with a pandemic - we (collectively) do not have the will to do what’s necessary to steer away from catastrophe - a slow-moving catastrophe (much less a fast-moving one).
Don’t confuse “humans” with “our current culture”. When I say “culture” here, I don’t mean “Americans” or something - I mean it in the sense that Clovis points represent a widespread material culture that spanned a continent and lasted centuries (and undoubtedly included many distinct ethnic and linguistic groups). Our “material culture” includes everyone who’s gone through the Industrial Revolution - basically everyone on Earth aside from the North Sentinelese.
If the question was “how will our material culture end”, I’d probably put “Other (we are supplanted by a new material culture)” followed by a list that looks simillar to yours. But that wasn’t the question - it was what will happen to humanity, and most of these scenarios would be very hard pressed to cause an extinction level event.
I think we could screw the world up badly enough that the current social order (our “material culture” if you will). Basically make things so bad that the current way of doing things is impossible. But I highly doubt we could kill all the humans (not least because if things get bad enough to destroy civilization, our civilization will stop polluting as close to instantly as it possibly can). Even if every country on Earth falls apart and billions die in the chaos, you’re telling me not a single band living a hunter gatherer lifestyle will survive anywhere on the planet? That’s all it takes to be right back here 10,000 years later.
Nuclear, no, I just don’t see it. If a massive nuclear war breaks out, many places will be nuked, and the resulting radioactive waste and ash could cause a nuclear winter that leads to worldwide devestation. But will the radiation be bad enough to sterilize the planet? I highly doubt it. Even if theoretically we have enough nukes to irradiate every square mile of ground on the planet, that won’t be how the nukes are used on that final day - they’d be getting launched at cities and strategic targets in the enemy country. No one is going to be nuking equatorial nations that have nothing to do with the conflict just to prevent survivors of the oncoming ice age from being able to ride things out on the equator.
Biological, maybe. An engineered virus specifically designed to wipe out humanity could theoretically be something someone eventually invents and deploys. But that seems highly unlikely to me.
Nah. A natural plague could be bad, definitely. A natural plague bad enough to destroy civilization is imaginable, though again I think it is VERY unlikely. But one bad enough to wipe out the species? That’s just not how diseases work.
I’m not sure what this one means?
This is the only thing on this list that could realistically wipe us out as a species (other than heat death/death of the sun). A rogue planet the size of Mars could hurtle out of the interstellar void and smack into us tomorrow - we’d never see it coming, and even if we did there’d be nothing we could do about it. The only thing on our side here is statistics. It seems like these sorts of events happen rarely enough that we wouldn’t expect one to wipe us out - the odds that we nearly get to space only to be taken out by a one in a billion years event are astronomically low (pun intended). But it is something that could actually wipe us out.
Spreading into the solar system would be a defense against a rogue planet smashing up Earth, but not against something like a gamma ray burst that takes out the whole solar system. Which is a good argument for eventually spreading out to the stars - once we are an interstellar species, nothing but heat death should be capable of taking us out.
I would put this as the second least likely event. I can imagine a scenario where we are wiped out before we head into space. I cannot imagine a scenario where we survive for billions of years while entirely Earthbound while remaining a technological species. By the time the sun dies, we will either be long gone or we will be spread across the galaxy (and potentially be shipping in hydrogen to keep the sun going).
The only way this scenario makes sense to me is if humab civilization collapses completely and never reforms, but the species survives and evolves into non-technological successors. If we completely trash the ecosystem, then forget about technology entirely, and a billion years from now there’s an entire ecosystem of non intelligent animal species who all descend from human ancestors, then I suppose our descendants could finally have their line ended when the sun dies.
This is, by far, the least likely scenario - lower than “death of the sun”. The only way I could see this happening is if we go the “lose technology and evolve into a whole ecosystem of human-descendant animals” route, and then a billion years from now aliens who evolved halfway across the galaxy reach us when they are the ones to spread across the galaxy.
I think this one is most likely, as I said previously - in my view, if we can build a presence across the solar system, none of the scenarios above could take us out, and I can’t imagine an alternative scenario that could. So really, it’s a question of what is more likely - that we reach space first, or all die first?
I think we are on the cusp of a real presence in space, and I think that even if a disaster did snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, the odds are decent that our species will get at least one more shot at it.
By the criteria of the OP, since “evolving into something else” is not an option as he considers that “something else” to still be “humanity” for the purpose of the question, I assumed that being replaced by robots would just shift the question of survival to how long our robot descendants survive.
That’s a great example of why I think disease will not take us out.
Consider the situation of native Americans circa 1492. They are about to be introduced to not just one plague, but a cocktail of deadly and virulent diseases. They are about to be subjected to what amounts to an alien invasion, completely unforseen foes bearing unimagined technology and riding beasts that haven’t been seen in these lands for 10,000 years.
You could certainly make the argument that the “material culture” of the Native American world was completely destroyed, both by disease and by intentional erasure at European hands. Many of the Native American cultures and tribal groups we are familiar with today are essentially post-apocalyptic constructions, either created by the natives living through these tragedies in order to survive or imposed on them by Europeans. Lots of the societies we think of as nomadic hunter-gatherers adopted that lifestyle after their sedentary farming life was disrupted over the course of only a generation or two.
And yet, Native American people survived, and even managed to preserve some aspects of their culture. Looking at rich and divergent native American cultures today, it is easy to forget that this is only the tip of the iceberg, and that entire cultures disappeared without us learning even so little as what they called themselves.
I simply cannot imagine a situation where our modern society would be facing a plague worse than that. Think of what it took to create these circumstances! Ten thousand years of isolation, with three continents worth of Afroeurasians living alongside herd animals completely alien to the Americas long enough for zoonotic diseases to become endemic to the human population.
How on Earth would a scenario even approaching that level of deadliness arise today? And if that plague couldn’t wipe out the native humans of the Americas, how on Earth would a plague that can arise today wipe out our technological society and all its people?
