There are other responses than going crazy with selfishness and violence. Quite a few.
If we need to reduce the population by 90% or more to survive, which you seem to be implying, then the only two options are fighting to survive or meekly accepting being culled.
I reject the ludicrous premise, but if accepted, there is only one conclusion.
Since you all are getting rid of just a portion of the population, I want to get rid of 10% of gravity.
Now we can all jump really high!
The killing off of megafauna by early humans, which began around 50,000 years ago, is a sad but not catastrophic event. The Holocene/Anthropocene mass extinction didn’t really get going in earnest until after the last ice age, some 11,700 years ago, and it didn’t become severe and accelerate until the Industrial Revolution. Had the Industrial Revolution not occurred and if human population had still been stabilized at a pre-industrial level, I don’t believe that we put the current potentially catastrophic damage on the biosphere.
One of the most significant differences between this and the previous five mass extinctions is that this one, being man-made, is progressing at a rapid rate—much faster than the biosphere has the capacity to recover from. At least not a recovery to our liking. Perhaps we’d re-emerge into the Age of Insects. Yuck!
Naturally, the K-T extinction, save for the immediate effect of the impact, was an event played out over hundreds of thousands of years. Some scientists now propose that as many as 50% of the species on Earth today could be extinct by the end of the century. At this rate, the effects could cascade, and the biosphere may not recover.
The OP did specify a “magical” elimination. So, I opt for all the murderers, rapists, thieves (not shoplifting kids, but chronic thieves and fraudsters), and major polluters to have never been born. That may get us close to pre-industrial population levels, with a not-so-terrible carbon footprint and make for a much more pleasant civilization to boot.
Mind if I steal this idea and stick it in Factual Questions?
Be my guest.
All of you guys that want to kill off billions of people because you deem them unworthy; have you ever considered that maybe it’s just you?
Autoimmune diseases in general, with particular emphasis on Inclusion Body Myositis (father) and Crohn’s Disease (daughter). Selfish of me, I know.
I don’t deem them unworthy, just too many. And I would of course be one of them.
I’m just saying that if you think billions of people should die to solve a problem, it may your own pessimistic view suggesting that solution rather than a realistic appraisal of the problem.
Okay, let’s take it as a given that the world is overcrowded and resource depletion is becoming a crisis. Why solve the problem by killing everyone? We’re being offered magic here. Why not seek a solution where the amount of resources is increased and everyone gets to live?
Because the title of this thread has the word “eliminate”, and not “create”?
Then eliminate resource scarcity.
To someone who is very misanthropic, this may sound like a doctor telling a patient, “You have cancer, but instead of getting rid of the cancer, we’re going to try to increase the number of healthy cells in your body.”
It’s probably not just that some folks want a billion people dead, but that they want a billion people of certain types/categories dead.
That makes it much, much worse.
Because I don’t think there is one. And I think people who imagine there is one are fools. Resources don’t ‘increase’, it is only that we find new ways to suck more and different things out of the earth and turn them into garbage and desert.
This is highly debated- certainly it occured in places like New Zealand, but now scientists think it was only one of several factors in North America. The "overkill hypothesis " has been proven wrong and outdated, based upon a coincidence that we know know didnt happen (humans arrived long before 10K years ago in the Americas)
Glad you posted this. Humans were not the extinction-engines they became. On islands populated by large animals with few defenses, yes, but not typically.
We’re talking about Eurasia, too.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43426-5
And all across Eurasia.
Humans are an enormously successful species that spread across the whole planet and irrevocably changed it. Much like grass, or pollinating insects, or flowering plants. And, just like grass and pollinators, they left a trail of devastated ecosystems in their path.
But you can’t turn back the clock and get rid of grasses, or of humans.
Eurasia? Possible, but it was very long term, that abstract is not a smoking gun-
The worldwide extinction of megafauna during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene is evident from the fossil record, with dominant theories suggesting a climate, human or combined impact cause. Consequently, two disparate scenarios are possible for the surviving megafauna during this time period - they could have declined due to similar pressures, or increased in population size due to reductions in competition or other biotic pressures. We therefore infer population histories of 139 extant megafauna species using genomic data which reveal population declines in 91% of species throughout the Quaternary period, with larger species experiencing the strongest decreases. Declines become ubiquitous 32–76 kya across all landmasses, a pattern better explained by worldwide Homo sapiens expansion than by changes in climate. We estimate that, in consequence, total megafauna abundance, biomass, and energy turnover decreased by 92–95% over the past 50,000 years, implying major human-driven ecosystem restructuring at a global scale.
It was done by statistical analysis, and there- the numbers that go in- make the numbers that go out anything you want. And most other studies were based upon solid fossil evidence. They even linked to no less than 15 such studies.
But I am not ruling it out. Humans can & do make species go extinct- but they mostly do so by changing the forests thru burning and especially by bringing along introduced species. But they dont seem to do so by hunting so much.
What is odd, that since the invention of useful guns, humans have not managed to make extinct a single megafaunal land species. Mind you- they certainly tried with the Bison.
That is very true. And we bring rats, and pigs, and diseases.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had on this board. We were reminiscing about independent bookstores and how so many of them had gone out of business. Somebody blamed Barnes and Noble for killing off the independents and said they wished Barnes and Noble bookstores would all close.
I pointed out that while it might be true that Barnes and Noble had killed off most independent bookstores, killing off Barnes and Noble bookstores in turn would not bring those independent bookstores back. It would just mean there weren’t any bookstores at all.
As you note, ecosystems work the same way. Humans killed off a lot of species. But killing off humans would not bring those species back.
In fact, it would probably have an opposite effect. The ecosystem we have today is based on widespread human existence. Other species that exist are those which have adapted to our existence. If humans disappeared, many of those species would go extinct.