New Eco-Friendly Cigarettes Kill Destructive Human Beings Over Time. Oh, The Onion, is there nothing you can’t do?
From what I’ve read about if nuclear war had broken out between the USSR and the USA, one problem would be that in a hideous sense the bombs wouldn’t kill enough people: half the country might still be alive a month after the exchange, only to be doomed because the infrastructure that made it possible to feed millions of people would be gone.
And in so many works of post-apocalyptic fiction you see a band of survivors struggling mostly on their own, usually with at worst some bands of brigands to cope with. The single most deadly thing in a post-apocalyptic scenerio would be the remnants of government and civilzation trying at all costs to perpetuate themselves, at the expense of those who might have survived if they’d only been left alone. That was what impressed me about the short-lived TV series Jericho: the inhabitants of said town found themselves caught between rival governments each claiming to be what was left of the United States.
There are astronomic events which would eliminate the physical body upon which we live as a solid object.
There are other astronomic events which could increase cosmic ray density a thousand fold, or a million fold, for ten to a hundred thousand years. (there is one going on right now, in fact, and it could possibly start to have an effect on the earth in the next few centuries.)
Extinction of species doesn’t always require the absence of adaptive capability. If the stuff you eat no longer survives, you die. Kill the phytoplankton, and everything that requires air, or complex hydrocarbons to survive becomes extinct.
Or, no disaster for the world at all. Suppose some new form of life evolves that simply makes more efficient use of the biomass available. Humans have never had competition for food other than other humans. But, if all the phosphorus gets used up by neothingies, we die. The stuff which can harvest and digest neothingies will survive, and evolve with it. That might not be humans. We cannot build enough to feed ourselves enough if there isn’t enough biomass available to us.
The natural world didn’t have humans in it until very recently. Snowball Earth, any of the perhaps four ages of millions of years in length, could end human life. There have been events since the beginning of our planet’s existence that liquefied the crust. One vaporized it, and a fair portion of the mantle. There was an age of bombardment that left the moon looking like a swiss cheese. The period on earth is called the Hadean. Like Hades.
There are candidate stars for type 1a supernovae that are close enough to earth to sterilize it with light, then re-sterilize it with particulate bombardment centuries later. Weeks of notice, if things go well, for the first event, none at all for the second, which will last at least years, if not millennia.
People who think mankind can survive anything have very stunted imaginations. Hell, we might find out that we meet the Galactic Council’s definition of “tasty delicacy”. We all know how well legal protection of us as an endangered species works.
Tris
[QUOTE= I maintain that the Iocaine Powder virus that’s transmitted by air, water, and physical contact, which remains completely inert for one month while spreading to everyone you get near and then dropping you stone cold dead on day 31, that would kill all humanity. Even Madagascar, unless nobody travels to there for the two weeks prior.
[/QUOTE]
Ahhh, but I have spent years building up an immunity to deadly Iocaine Powder! 
P.s I apologize for the sloppy quote job…one of you said it, and I appreciated the reference:)
Do I think humans will ever be wiped off the face of the earth, even given multiple, global scale blows? No. Shit, I can’t even get rid of all the ANTS in my bathroom! :dubious:
Not all of us/them. Not until the sun goes supernova, by which time, if we aren’t already off-planet and moving on, serves our sorry asses right.
Now, we will, I agree, most likely look and be quite different in 100,000 yrs than we do/are now (the dinosaurs did NOT go extinct…they turned into birds ;)) but I suspect our DNA will survive long enough to seed new forms better adapted to whatever emerging situations exist.
But humans are resiliant, intelligent, genetically diverse, and eternally horny (even more so than ants!) Even after the worst blow possible, rest assured there will still be a handfull of us/them rattling around in the can, and getting busy (finding ways to survive and making more of themselves;)).
Barring something cataclysmic like a texas sized asteroid, we’re not going away for a long, long time. The human animal is far too successful of a model for that sort of nonsense.
Consider.
Scientists theorize that something like 75000 years ago there were 10,000 humans, due to an extinction event or something of the sort.
Then, we bounced back, and in the next 60,000 years or so, covered the globe. With nothing but sharp stones on sticks and the skins of animals, living everywhere from well inside the arctic circle to deep in deserts. The dinosaurs may have lived everywhere on the planet, but they were a multitude of species. We, humans, did that by ourselves, adapting to widely variable environments with nothing but our wits.
Our intelligence, our ability to make and use tools, our language capabilities… These are evolutionary home runs. The majority of the population could be wiped out, sure, but anything other than complete annihilation would see humanity repopulate again, in a fairly short time frame.
Civiliation could go, absolutely, but the human animal isn’t.
That ten thousand humans thing may be an artifact of observation. It is calculated from DNA in modern humans, and modeled on the most likely number of ancestors at distant times to produce the allele distribution observed in modern humans. The fact is that all humans who are alive today are descendants of 10,000 individuals some time between 70 and 90 thousand years ago. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean that all the other humans died. It only means that the genes of only ten thousand individuals then alive survived to the present day. All the silk worms alive today are descended from a very few wild worms only three thousand years ago. But the wild worm from which they were bred still survive. The are not very much related, though.
Something might have made that ten thousand individuals better able to survive, and produce heirs. And in a few tens of thousands of years, the less favored lines of inheritance could become extinct, and be replaced, generation by generation by the more successful lines. There is very little geological evidence for a worldwide extinction of hominids at that time.
But, the fact that humans did survive even the putative disaster you extrapolate does not mean that no disaster could cause human extinction. Nor does it mean that planetary disasters must happen only as individual events. A broken up cometary object could cause multiple meteoric bombardments of massive size over and over again, on every orbit, like the Perseid shower on a grand scale. Your ten thousand survivors might find fifteen year cycles of massive tidal waves, and continental sized fires an impediment to regaining their hunter/gatherer culture.
Tris
Yes i know. We can be wiped out if something happens. Just like I can wash all the dirt of a plate if I use the right crap to clean it off and do it long or hard enough with apowerful chemical.
But I don’t care about that. That’s stupid.
And dinosaurs coudln’t do anythign to modify their environment. And whoever said that about humans depending on nature is right, but that doesn’t mean we don’t manipulate nature to do our bidding. We do it all the time, that’s the point of science adn technology. Thats more starightforward than anything. Dinosaurs couldnt do that, so they friggin died. No they couldn’t hide underground. Because they didn’t have years of civilization and tehcnology backed by the opposable thumb.
But here we are in our present state, and it looks like we’re always going to find a way out of anything. We may not be happy but well live and reproduce etc…
Then if your saying the crap about great calamities wiping out the human race. Then i don’t care about that. That answers the question is it possible that life on earth will cease to exists. Yes it’s possible.
But I wasn’t clear in my question so it’s my fault. So what I’m really wondering, are we capable of surviving anything as a race. Circumstances may overwhelm our immunity as a species, but is alway possible for us to win, and in a likely manner
Dinosaurs weren’t because they had limited capabilities.
A sufficiently large catastrophe to eliminate pretty much all land species, such as a Moon-sized asteroid hit causing the entire surface of the planet to become molten would pretty much wipe the species out unless we’re able to get space colonies going.
Short of that, I think it would be pretty nearly impossible to wipe homo sapiens out. Civilization, on the other hand, I think is very fragile. It’s entirely possible that a combination of global climate change and an uprising of the currently miserable peoples of the world could combine to wipe out modern civilization even in the next hundred years.
But then, there’s New Zealand. Although New Zealand is economically at the lower end of standards of living for developed nations, it still has pretty much the full technological suite available to this point. It is too mountainous to be eliminated by rising seas. It is too remote to be overrun by starving hordes. It is currently a net agricultural exporter, and, if necessary, economically self-sufficient (Note: sufficient climate change might mess things up too badly for agriculture to thrive, but climates vary widely in NZ, and I think agriculture can survive there sufficient to sustain its population through almost anything). Mineral resources, including petroleum, might be a problem, but I think civilization in New Zealand will survive if any place can.
However, if Taupo then erupts, even NZ is dead meat. Or, rather, ash and cinders.