# How could most humans be eliminated with minimal collateral damage to other species? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 22, 2014, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-most-humans-be-eliminated-with-minimal-collateral-damage-to-other-species/696249 "2014-08-22T22:59:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2014, 8:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-most-humans-be-eliminated-with-minimal-collateral-damage-to-other-species/696249/21 "2014-08-23T08:19:11Z")
Hunter-killer robots, a few billion of them sprung on us all at once. “Nanotech gone wrong” is going to affect other things in the ecosystem, I’m sure. You need something macroscale with AI, if your goal is only to eliminate humans. Bonus is that you can then repurpose those same robots towards cleaning up after us e.g. decommissioning nuclear plants etc. ---
**Author:** ![Namkcalb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/c89c15/32.png) [@Namkcalb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Namkcalb)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2014, 8:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-most-humans-be-eliminated-with-minimal-collateral-damage-to-other-species/696249/22 "2014-08-23T08:59:04Z")
I thought Rogue Al [Gore] was a former next President. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2014, 11:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-most-humans-be-eliminated-with-minimal-collateral-damage-to-other-species/696249/23 "2014-08-23T11:50:12Z")
> [@rbroome](#): > > 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. I hate to break this to you, but ebola _is_ in the general population. And in an area that’s ideally suited for the spread of plague due to the low quality of health care available there. It’s been there for about 6 months and so far, official figures are around 1500 deaths and about twice that many infected. Even if you allow for those being severe undercounts, this is not the superplague that’s going to wipe out humanity. What’s needed for a superplague is a disease that’s nearly 100% fatal, yet has a very long incubation period during which carriers are asymptomatic yet still contageous. Kind of like AIDS, only it has to be transmitted more easily. And because there’s always going to be at least a few people immune to just about any disease, I agree that multiple diseases would be necessary to get everyone. Three of them at minimum. Some isolated people may be impossible to get, but because they’re isolated, they will have difficulty connecting with the other survivors, even if they want to. ---
**Author:** ![Claverhouse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/13edae/32.png) [@Claverhouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Claverhouse)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2014, 11:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-most-humans-be-eliminated-with-minimal-collateral-damage-to-other-species/696249/24 "2014-08-23T11:58:23Z")
Despair. Could be chemically induced, or a death-cult, or completely persuading people that life has no meaning beyond their very finite lives. As the great Thorne Smith put it [roughly], ‘every one would stand in line whilst the person behind shot the one in front, until only one man remained, whereby he, with a gallant quixotry that almost defies belief, shoots himself.’ See also **The Purple Cloud,** by M. P. Shiel. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2014, 12:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-most-humans-be-eliminated-with-minimal-collateral-damage-to-other-species/696249/25 "2014-08-23T12:02:49Z")
There’s a difference between a disease that kills nearly 100% of humanity and one that kills all of us. Killing 99.99% won’t exterminate humanity; at worse, we’ll lie fallow for a few millenia before recovering our current population levels. In fact, we’ll probably go through that cycle any number of times, crawling from caves to the skies and back again. 100 million years from now, our descendants will still be living on this planet. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2014, 1:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-most-humans-be-eliminated-with-minimal-collateral-damage-to-other-species/696249/26 "2014-08-23T13:05:30Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > In fact, we’ll probably go through that cycle any number of times, crawling from caves to the skies and back again. 100 million years from now, our descendants will still be living on this planet. This seems very unlikely too. In any Mad Max scenario, they’ll find the world littered with millions of artefacts that give them a substantial headstart in pretty much every area of science and engineering. “Nuked back to the dark ages” is pure fantasy. Either you incinerate the outer couple kilometres of the earth’s crust (in which case no more humans), or we survive and so does lots of our (really helpful) junk. I reckon even with the complete end of civilization, we’d be back to skyscrapers and internet shopping within a couple centuries. Virtually the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. Oh, also there has never been a period where the majority of humans, or any of our genus, lived in caves. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2014, 1:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-most-humans-be-eliminated-with-minimal-collateral-damage-to-other-species/696249/27 "2014-08-23T13:41:36Z")
I was being poetic. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2014, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-most-humans-be-eliminated-with-minimal-collateral-damage-to-other-species/696249/28 "2014-08-23T16:29:44Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > I was being poetic. Ah. Well, it’s a commonly-held position anyway, so it was worth addressing it. ---
**Author:** ![Reply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/reply/32/15952_2.png) [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2014, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-most-humans-be-eliminated-with-minimal-collateral-damage-to-other-species/696249/29 "2014-08-23T18:43:29Z")
What about breeding some sort of supermosquito that specifically targets hominids, transmitting horrible diseases on purpose? Do we have the technology/bioengineering skill to do that yet? ---
**Author:** ![DeptfordX](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e68b1a/32.png) [@DeptfordX](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DeptfordX)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2014, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-most-humans-be-eliminated-with-minimal-collateral-damage-to-other-species/696249/30 "2014-08-23T23:06:09Z")
Since the goal is to wipe out humanity with a minimum of collateral damage. What happens to all the nuclear power plants, chemical factories etc when super-ebola wipes us all out and no one is around to manage these things. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2014, 11:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-most-humans-be-eliminated-with-minimal-collateral-damage-to-other-species/696249/31 "2014-08-23T23:20:14Z")
> [@Construct](#): > > 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. You seem to assume that there’s something magical about “subsistence farming” that would not be affected by dramatic negative impacts on most of the world’s food crops. Yet it’s happening _ **already** _ in places like Africa. There may be temporary positive impacts from warmer temperatures and CO2 fertilization in the northern latitudes, but the overall impacts are projected to be negative everywhere, and your subsistence farmers are not immune. Sea level increases are relatively gradual and in that sense potentially manageable, though their effects on sudden storm surges resulting from catastrophic storms are not. But my point is that it’s really naive to think that all you need to survive climate change is a plot of farmland away from the coast, two cows, some chickens and a goat. The ecosystem is far more complex and interdependent than that. > [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Unlikely. The worst we are likely to manage to do to ourselves that way is destroy industrial civilization. That would certainly be the first stage. However it could get a lot worse than that from second-order effects, many of which are very hard to predict. For instance, the possibility that unchecked proliferation of invasive species could create major new disease vectors. ---
**Author:** ![AtomicDog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ac91a4/32.png) [@AtomicDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AtomicDog)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2014, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-most-humans-be-eliminated-with-minimal-collateral-damage-to-other-species/696249/32 "2014-08-24T05:24:17Z")
Zombies. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-most-humans-be-eliminated-with-minimal-collateral-damage-to-other-species/696249.md?page=1)