Suppose a mad dictator/rogue AI/ecoterrorist/the next US pres wanted to destroy humanity but preserve the rest of the planet’s life as much as possible. How could this be done?
Nuclear holocaust would be pretty catastrophic for many other forms of life, I imagine. Designer viruses could mutate and affect other primates. Technological warfare would mostly affect developed countries. Conventional bombs still wouldn’t get most people in rural areas.
Don’t need answer all that fast.
Plague of some sort is still your best shot. You might get some drift via mutation but a well-designed bio attack should eliminate the target population before much shift can happen. See Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six for a reasonably bad approach to just that question.
Infect a dozen people with small pox. Send 'em to Times Square, Kennedy Airport (international departures), the 42nd Street shuttle, Disney World, etc.
Small pox isn’t 100% fatal, but it’s a good start.
Best specific answer, as already suggested: probably a rapidly mutating lethal virus.
General answer: we just need to keep on keepin’ on. Just keep doing what we’re doing – in terms of population growth and destruction of the environment and of natural diversity, and breeding new diseases in consequence. It doesn’t really meet the OP criteria because massive extinctions will indeed accompany this – we’ll take down many other species before we finally take down ourselves, but life will eventually recover. It always has, in all previous mass extinctions. But we’ll be gone. Done. Perhaps, as Arthur C. Clarke speculated, the long war between man and insects will finally be over, and it is not man who will be the victor.
Have an empty weekend looming, eh?
Humans may be soft, pink and clawless, but we have to ability to shape our environment and create what we need, and that makes us pretty resilient. A superbug may very well take out +90% of life; but you’ve still got people millions of people living isolated lives in the wildness, people with bunkers filled with guns and ammo etc. There are ships at sea, soldiers with NBC suits, and researchers in sealed labs. There’s no way you could get everyone.
My guess is that nothing less than cobalt bombs would do the trick, and that would pretty much wipe out most all wildlife.
I wonder if it would be possible to beef up something that is already out there, that can lead to major fertility issues, and is sexually transmitted. Chlamidya, perhaps? It would be a decline in human population over a long term, mind you
Yes, any vulnerabilities we have are shared by other creatures in the tree of life.
It does, with certain assumptions about the availability of necessary resources. We may appear to have impressive (to us) abilities to control some aspects of the environment, but we are also utterly dependent on it. What if we lose those essential resources? With the loss of biodiversity, the loss of major agricultural resources and feedstocks and habitable lands, we can easily become pretty helpless. Not saying this will necessarily happen, but it could, and well may. Excessive hubris about the capabilities of our technology has failed us before, in relatively small ways, and it may fail us in a very major way in the future. Our ability to control this planet’s ecosystem is very, very limited indeed.
I would imagine something like a “cocktail” of carefully engineered viruses would be your best bet. Viruses could be made pretty species-specific–chimpanzees might get it, but such bioweapons probably wouldn’t wipe out all life on Earth (or even all the warm-blooded life). Get as many human-specific lethal viruses as you can–preferably ones from different families and with different mechanisms of action–tinker with them to crank up the lethality and infectiousness–and then let them go. If you could get a couple dozen different plagues going all at once, each of which is capable of killing off half the human race, statistically that should probably do it.
Even if your super-germ mutates and infects some other primates, the total non-human primate population might still rise – humans no longer competing for their habitat. Would that be acceptable?
How advanced is your viral engineering? Could you design one specific to large-amygdala hosts?
The multiple plagues idea is good, but it’s important to make sure that they are distributed widely to get them off to a good start.
It would also help if a nuclear war could be somehow instigated after there’s been some time for the plagues to spread. A nuclear war won’t actually do that much damage to other species; the damage is intense, but localized in human population centers. And wrecking worldwide medical infrastructure will make the plagues more effective. Probably the best timing would be right after the plagues get bad enough that everyone starts shutting down travel; that removes the biggest advantage modern technology gives disease, so the plagues won’t need it anymore.
Unlikely. The worst we are likely to manage to do to ourselves that way is destroy industrial civilization.
Agree with Der Trihs. Some remnant will remain. Unlikely to be industrialized. A few centuries of peace and quiet.
Looking for light reading suggestions?
Fellow sapient beings, we’re ignoring the ‘collateral damage’ part of the hypothetical. If Humans start dying off quickly, all manner of ancillary damage will take place: fires, chemical spills, and so on, to say nothing of the vast litter of Human cities and transport systems that will remain once the Humans are gone.
It is not enough to simply eliminate Humans. We need to eliminate the Humans’ mess as well. While a full-scale restoration of the ecosystem may be a bit of a scope creep on this project, minimizing further damage is not.
How do we eliminate the Human population and safely shut down and remove all their systems?
Cel-phones with plutonium batterys?
Sure, western civilization, and urban life in particular, would be in trouble. But people in rural areas are significantly more self sufficient, people out in the sticks more so, and people in the third world even more so. Most people don’t live like Americans.
Well, no. This assumes that every human is exposed to every plague, and that every plague affects people equally. In reality, plagues overwhelmingly affect the very young, the very old, and the already infirm. So you’d see diminishing marginal returns with each new plague you add, because the victims have probably already expired from some other plague. You could add an influenza that causes an cytokine storm (an immune system overreaction, basically) and take out some of the young and healthy,but you’d still run into the same problem. Plagues have basically the same set of victims. Besides, there are plenty of people who may not be exposed to anything at all.
Perhaps the best chance is a pathogen with a very long incubation period, a high rate of contagion and a high rate of lethality. Thus many more people could be infected before SHTF and everyone bunkers down. Maybe such a weapon could be made, but I’m still not sure it would get everyone.
Oh, and two dozen plagues with a lethality of 50%, total infection, and completely random deaths would still result in over 400 survivors. You’d need at least 26 plagues to get below a minimum viable population.
You are totally missing the point and posting complete bullshit on the erroneous assumption that climate patterns will be “business as usual”. The fact that this is not the case is one of the most fundamental findings about climate behavior under the influence of external forcings. “People in rural areas” will hardly be better off if their hitherto fertile lands are under 20 feet of water or have become arid deserts – both of which are demonstrated possibilities as unusual regional climates regimes establish themselves due to global circulation changes. And people in the third world are even more vulnerable, because both their environments and their economic capabilities have even less tolerance. It’s already happening in Africa.
How the **** did you infer “business as usual” from “western civilization … will be in trouble”???
Climate change is a substantial problem and it makes sense to tackle it now, before it grows in scale. But it’s not some catastrophic, humanity-killing ill like biological warfare or nukes. It could substantially reduce quality of life, result in large losses in economic growth and lead to the deaths of millions. But it’s not going to lead to the extinction of mankind.
People in urban areas are at greater risk because cities are almost invariably built near bodies of water and are thus more vulnerable to rising sea levels. Subsistence farmers are not dependent on mechanized agriculture or complex supply lines and are therefore less susceptible.
release ebola into the general population would be one way. That would take care of 1/2 the population. Marburg might be able to get most of the rest.
Actually it would be very hard to kill all humans even without the constraint about saving the rest of the fauna.
Humans are the most adaptable species, and there are 7 billion of us now spread around the world. So while there are no shortage of events that could decimate world population, that’s very different from bringing humans to near extinction.
I think only sci-fi scenarios could do what the OP asks: nanotech gone wrong, or ETs (again, I don’t think it makes any sense for ETs to be hostile, but if they were they wouldn’t faff about like in the movies, it would be game over).