Astronaut: 'Single-Planet Species Don't Last'

An anonymous reader writes "Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle astronaut John Young, due to retire in two weeks, says that the human species is in danger of becoming extinct: 'The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455. How does that relate? You're 10 times more likely to get wiped out by a civilization-ending event in the next 100 years than you are getting killed in a commercial airline crash.' He says that the technologies needed to colonize the solar system will help people survive through disasters on Earth. Young has written about this topic before in an essay called 'The Big Picture'." In related news, the Shuttle overhaul program is on track for a May 2005 launch.

Comments

Prove it

[stecoop]

What other higher order specie that has multi planet colonization did he do his evaluation against? What was the success rate of the multi planet effort - would it have been better to spend those resources maintaining quality on one planet?

So he writes about volcanic activity, planetoid impacts and solar disasters. What if we spent all our resources on keeping the planet safe? We could drill out pressure of volcanoes and build super bombs for planetoids. If our sun goes all bets are off though we need to find another solar system but I bet we could figure out something in 4.5 billion years.

But all in all he is correct I am just point out a con; however, I don't think that ~5 billion people could be wiped out by any single event that left the planet habitable afterwards.

Re:Prove it

[I don't want to spen]

... I don't think that ~5 billion people could be wiped out by any single event that left the planet habitable afterwards...
You don't work in the PR department for the dinosaur government do you?

Re:Prove it

[Anonymous Struct]

I agree, we definitely could go a long way to defending the planet from these types of events, and it's certainly not a bad idea to pursue that. But in the end, it comes back to all of our eggs being in one basket. It's hard to comprehend, much less respond to every potential threat that might come along and wipe out the planet. As Mr. Miyagi says, 'best defense - no be there'.

I'd also go so far as to say that colonizing other planets is now the most important thing mankind can achieve. Purely from the perspective of preserving our species, it's the next critical step. If you consider how susceptible we are not only to external threats (meteors, epidemics, space locusts, etc), but also just the day-to-day concerns that we might accidentally annihilate ourselves with the war-de-jour, the best way to increase our chances for survival is to spread out a little bit and prevent an accident like that from doing us all in at once. Bottom line is, if you're all about doing something great for mankind, this is a really important problem to solve.

Re:Prove it

[Cade144]

So, if we colonize one or two other planets, that just gives us a few more baskets. What we need are hundreds or thousands of baskets.

In fact, we should probably abandon planets altogether.

There are tons and tons of nice organics and water waiting for us in the Kupier Belt. Sitting at the bottom of a gravity well, dependent on one biosphere for all your free oxygen is just asking for trouble.

All we need to do is:

• Develop fusion technology
• invent entire engineering disciplines based on zero-gravity industry/construction/living technologies
• Move a substantial representation of our gene- and meme- pools up out of Earth's gravity well
• Live for a few centuries in the Kupier Belt and Oort Clouds
• Spread to other solar systems like a fungus, possibly using Von Neuman Machines to soften up / improve target planetary systems
• Exist!

Re:Prove it

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that the real threat to the species is the species itself.

I've been of this thought for a long time. Anybody who passed high school biology should realize that the human race is already in serious shape. Think about it:

• Starvation - In nature populations are kept in check by starvation. Starvation is running rampant in third world countries. The world population is growing so rapidly that it's becoming more and more difficult to adequately feed everybody.
  
• Disease - In nature populations are thinned out by disease. Mankind has managed to effectively fight disease for decades and thereby help increase the population. The flu used to kill hundreds of thousands of people but now it's more of an inconvenience. Smallpox is all but gone. Nature responds to this by introducing AIDS, SARS, Ebola, etc. If the avian flu manages to jump into the human species (not unlikely) then new flu outbreaks could kill millions.
  
• Fertility - The fertility levels in many species drop when they become overpopulated. Mankind has done a good job of creating fertility drugs, etc. to allow continued growth of the population. Mankind seems to think it's a right to have offspring, despite what nature may be telling them.
  
• Homosexuality - There are theories that nature uses homosexuality to help control population sizes. The basic theory is that when a population reaches a size that can no longer be naturally supported by the environment that homosexual tendencies become more prevelant. Of course it could just be that the percentage of gay people hasn't changed, it's just that there are more now since the overall population is growing.
  

IMHO these are all signs that the human population is reaching a breaking point. It may not happen in the next 50 years but it wouldn't surprise me at all if within the next 200 years or so there's some major population-thinning event like a pandemic, massive starvation, etc.

Re:Prove it

[B'Trey]

Dinosaur's were huge and highly specialized for their environment. They were vulnerable to any serious alteration to their habitat. Humans are the ultimate in generalists. We can survive in anything from tropical jungles to frozen tundra. Starvation due to huge decreases in the amount of food available would sharply reduce our population, but if anything more advanced than insects and grasses survive, there's every reason to believe we will too. Philosophers are divided on whether or not this is a good thing.

Re:Prove it

[Kombat]

I'd also go so far as to say that colonizing other planets is now the most important thing mankind can achieve. Purely from the perspective of preserving our species, it's the next critical step.

While I believe you are correct, I don't think mankind is there yet. Look at it in perspective. What we're talking about here would take global cooperation of the scale never seen before. We can't even wipe out AIDS or world hunger or war, how are we going to work together to colonize another planet?

I'm reminded of Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot," and the profound wisdom of his words:

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds."

How do you convince a culture like that to put aside the generations of bigotry and hatred, and to work together for something truly noble? Think about your target audience. You have 10th generation racists, anti-gay bigots, xenophobic taxpayers who all demand that their way be the way because "I pay taxes, dammit!"

In one sense, you can look back through history and believe that mankind has come a great distance, but when you consider things on a cosmic scale, you realize we've barely advanced at all. We still have war, racism, hatred, disease, even though eliminating all of those things has been without our reach for several decades now.

In the end, it will not be the asteroid that dooms us. The asteroid is merely a statistical inevitability. They've hit before and they'll hit again. What will really doom us is our self-absorbed inability to recognize the inevitability of our impending doom, and act on it. Our own selfish need to be "on top" of this rock will prevent us from conceiving of an existance beyond this rock. We will continue going on, pretending that maybe that last asteroid was really the last one, and the next 4.5 billion years will be smooth sailing. Could we really be that naive? I believe, "yes."

Re:Prove it

[hostyle]

Starvation - In nature populations are kept in check by starvation. Starvation is running rampant in third world countries. The world population is growing so rapidly that it's becoming more and more difficult to adequately feed everybody.

The world has more than enough food to feed everyone on it many times over - food doesn't just run out, its a highly renewable resource. The problem is greed - human, corporate and government greed. "Its our food, if you want it pay us for it" attitudes. There are food surplus "mountains" in every first world country, doing nothing but rotting. Other problems are war - take Sudan for instance, where lots of relief food arrives, but bever reaches those who need it. Its stolen or destroyed by the warlords.

Re:Prove it

[Cro Magnon]

Yeah, and I hate getting those dinosaur droppings on my clean car!

Re:Prove it

[B'Trey]

Funny, you seem to be arguing with me but you also seem to be repeating everything I said.

Suppose a large meteor did take out he US. Our population is a little under 300 million. That only leaves about 6 billion other people to try an muddle through without us.

A sufficiently severe catastrophe, whether an asteroid hit or something else, could take out 99% of the human population and still leave some 63 million people.

Americans, Europeans and many others are certainly dependent on technology. Most of us wouldn't know which end of a seed to plant in the ground. But there are huge populations of the world who still live fairly primitively.

The question wasn't whether we'd just shrug it off and continue like nothing happened. The question was whether the human race would go extinct. You know, every last member of the species dead? That kind of extinct?

About the only thing which would kill us without completely destroying the world would be some sort of super flu or other bug which was universally fatal to us but not to other species. (Another possibility would be one which was not fatal but caused universal sterility.) The odds of that are extremely tiny - there seems to always be some fraction of the population that are somehow immune to any specific disease.

Saying that we won't be driven to extinction doesn't rule out the possibility of any of a plethora of catastrophes. It just says that, as a species, we'll almost certainly survive anything short of complete destruction of the planet. Our civilization may not, but we will.

Re:Prove it

[EvilAlien]

No, he was saying that homosexuality, which will tend towards pair bonds not producing offspring, may emerge as a way of maintaining species population at a somewhat sustainable level. There was no mention of fear, nor any value judgement in the parent post. Please set mode -troll.

Homosexuality was also not put forth as a danger to the human race. It was listed as an example of emergent issues that help keep populations in check. Political correctness does not trumpt science, reality, or reason. It is possible to think about and try to understand why successful species (i.e., species that survive and reproduce) have sub-populations that pair bond in ways that will tend away from reproducing. There is nothing homophobic, biased, or discriminatory in try to understand how and why this happens.

Another issue to factor in to our understanding of these emergent homeostatic mechanisms is why heterosexual pair bonds who are naturally equiped (and actively engaging in the requisit behavior) to reproduce choose not to.

Re:Prove it

[Fareq]

Correct. Food is not a production problem.

It's a distribution problem. Recall U.S. efforts to "feed the hungry" in a bunch of third-world countries... local warlords take all the food, the people end up no better off...

Great!

[October_30th]

I'm glad to see that the unmanned-space-exploration-mafia has not been able to completely silence the drive for manned space exploration - yet. I have no doubt that if nothing changes drastically, that will happen eventually. There're just too many "good political reasons" to kill the expensive and risky (PR-wise) manned space program. After all, taking the fall for dead astronauts could kill anybody's career...

Yes. Manned missions are risky and expensive. Unmanned and remotely controlled probes are just fine and dandy and they yield plenty of useful information about the conditions in space and on other planets, but what's that information good for if we're never going to leave our planet and/or when we're going to get hit by an extinction level event?

As a species we have definitely become too concerned about safety in exploration. Can't shoot people up to space because they might get killed? Well, duh? What if the explorers like Magellan or Vasco da Game had thought about it like that?

The saddest comment I once got was: "we'll never be able to colonize other planets because the conditions are so fundamentally hostile, so let's not waste any funds/effort on manned space flights." What the hell happened to the human will to explore and survive? What's the point in sending out probes if the information gained will certainly be lost in the (near) future when the big one hits the earth?

1 in 455?

[WPIDalamar]

Just cause some retired guy in an interview says it, doesn't make it true.

Re:1 in 455?

[ViolentGreen]

Seriously... Why the human race be more likely to be destroyed by a geological or cosmological event in the next 100 years than in the past 3000 or so of recorded history?

Re:1 in 455?

[fireboy1919]

He's neglected to mention some things from the first figure.

First of all, it's a 1 in 455 chance of being wiped out by asteroids, volcanic activity, comets, vampires, dark elves, zombies, or McDonald's, but he seemed to convenienly leave off the end of the list.

Secondly, he forgot to mention that this takes into account the fact that all humans who have not broken the code of the Greblor (roughly 96.3%) will be delivered by the benevolent lizard Godzilla back unto our home planet - a place of safety and prosperity in another dimension. Only the evil, self-destructive humans will remain.

Further, it is predicted that 97.1% of those who stay will be delivered in the second coming of Godzilla after having repented of their evil ways.

So as you can see, most of us have nothing to worry about. They neglected to mention the other parts of the report, which actually explain why the numbers are obviously true.

Re:1 in 455?

[sholden]

Maybe you should learn some statistics...

The probability is not 100% it is in fact 20%.

Chance of no event in a 455 year period: 454/455 = 99.8%

Chance of no event in 100 such periods: (454/455)^100 = 80.3%

Hence chance of an event in 100 such periods: 19.7%

Using your whacked out mathematics I guess in 100000 years the probability of at least one event is 200%?!?

Re:1 in 455?

[kaleco]

Because you don't have to worry about geological or comological events in the past killing you.

Airline Crash

[zerosignal]

So there's a 1 in 4550 chance of me dying in an airline crash? That figure sounds suspiciously high.

Re:Airline Crash

[doowy]

civilization-ending event: if one occurs, you will die. (and he claims one occuring in the next 100 years is 1 in 455)

Your mistake is not realizing an average person takes many, many, many more than 1 flight in their lifetimes.

According to the National Safety Council, your odds of dying are actually slightly worse. Your odds of dying due to injury in a plane crash are about 1 in 4,023 (see this table).

If you rarely fly, then your at a favorible statistical end of the spectrum with respect to fatalities due to injury by air travel - but remember, some people bank several flights each and every week for years.

How'd they get 1 in 455?

[mopslik]

The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455

Dare I ask how that number was dervied? It seems awfully arbitrary, and full of doom-and-gloom.

Re:How'd they get 1 in 455?

[aziraphale]

Not quite how it works.

In fact, a 1 in 455 chance of humanity being wiped out in each successive 100 year block gives us a 454 in 455 chance of surviving that 100 year block.

Our odds of surviving 200 years is the odds of us surviving the first block (454 in 455) times the odds of us surviving the second (another 454 in 455) - about 99.5%

In other words, the odds of us surviving 100n years is (454/455) ^ n. The odds of us making it through the next millennium, then, is (454/455) ^ 10; that equates to about 44 in 45, or a one in 45 chance of our species being wiped out before we see the next millennium bug.

The odds at 10000 years (n=100) diminish to about one in five that we'll all have been wiped out - that is, four in five that we're still here.

Around the 30 000 year mark, the chances we're wiped out are pretty much even. That would mean we'd tend to expect mass extinction events about once every 60000 years, on average. you could consider that as a kind of indicator as to the validity of the original statistic.

Beyond that point, it becomes easier to quote the odds we're still here than that we're not.

After 100 000 years, we get down to about a one in ten chance of still existing. In other words, out of all the possible ways the next 100 millennia could go, only one in ten of them finish with us still existing.

In other words, the number predicts survival is unlikely, but it's not impossible, and the odds keep dropping, but they don't reach zero.

Whether the 1 in 455 number is right or not is open to question, of course, but just because we've been around more than 45500 years is no reason to dismiss it completely.

Re:Odds are off

[doi]

Can't say I've heard of any civilization-ending events in my lifetime.

Well, duh.

and...

[WormholeFiend]

"On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
- Jack, Fight Club

Sometime you hear people talk like they're going to live forever. Well I got news for you.

NOT!

Hyperspace

[Schezar]

For anyone interested in this sort of thing, I recommend Hyperspace by Michio Kaku

One of the discussions in the book touches on objective "levels" of civilization and species.

IIRC, it can be broken down something like this:

Level 0: What humans are now.
Level 1: Mastery of the entire energy capacity of a single planet
Level 2: Mastery of the entire energy capacity of a single solar system
Level 3: etc...

He supposed that Level 2 and beyond was the point at which a civilization was effectively permanent, able to survive anything less than the total heat death of the universe.

Neat stuff.

Re:Hyperspace

[fireboy1919]

Level 3: Master of the entire energy capacity of a single galaxy
Level 4: masters of the universe
Level 5: All power put in one place and given to one man for justice - He-man.

Level 2 is only permanent if you don't piss off any of the higher leveled species so much that they wipe you out.

In A World Where...

[American AC in Paris]

The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455

...oh, come now. Sure, he says "wiped out", but we all know that's just a teaser.

What he really meant to say is this:

The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact would be 1 in 455--were it not for the heroic actions of one man, his wise-cracking, non-WASP sidekick, and a plucky band of researcher/rock star/mercenaries...

I agree

[Bryan Bytehead]

I've always said, "The meek shall inherit the Earth. The rest of us are getting the hell off this rock!"

One Planet ...

[Lodragandraoidh]

From the article: It's not the point that we should move (to another planet). It's the point that the technologies that we need to live and work in other places in the solar system will help us survive on Earth when these bad things happen.

Hello - the title of this /. article is misleading...

Re:One Planet ...

[stewby18]

Hello - the title of this /. article is misleading...

You must be new here.

Old quote, but good:

[sahonen]

"Dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a space program."

Says everything, really.

Re:Old quote, but good:

[Croaker]

"Dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a space program."

Oh yeah? How do we know that the impact off of the Yucatan that wiped out the dinosaurs wasn't due to the crash of some attempt to launch a crew of brontosaurs into orbit? Do you know how much energy a rocket full of brontos would pack? The Truth That They Don't Want You To Know (this week) is that the dinosaurs went extinct because they had a space program!

Look for my amazing new book on this subject "Really Friggin' Ancient Astronauts: T Minus for T-Rex" at a bookstore near you, soon.

What about one-star species?

[pla]

While I agree with the overall idea (we need to get stable off-planet colonies ASAP), we need more than just the moon or Mars.

Most of the possible "civilization-ending" events will actually leave quite a few humans alive, certainly enough to reestablish civilization over a few centuries. The "really big" problems involve our primary, the Sun. If that stops behaving in a very calm, consistant manner, we all die, no recovery possible.

At the very least, we need a colony beyond the asteroid belt. Sadly, no large rocky planets exist out there (though perhaps one of Jupiter's big-4 moons would suffice). Better yet, a truly extrasolar colony, but that would require information we don't quite have yet (such as a likely Earth-like planet around another star).

'Single-Planet Species Don't Last'

[warpSpeed]

Tell that to the cockroaches...

Re:Odds are off

[Chirs]

Lets think about the stats for a bit to see why your statement doesn't logically imply anything.

Consider that the number of people involved in any particular crash is quite low compared to the number of people on the planet. Thus, while there may be multiple crashes in any given period, the chances of *you* being killed in that crash are quite low.

On the other hand, if you have a single civilization-ending event, by definition the chances of it affecting you are quite high.

So to estimate the impact on *you* in particular, you need to compare

(number of people killed in plane crashes)/(total number of people on earth)*(chance of a plane crashing)

vs

(number of people affected by civilization-ending event)/(total number of people on earch) * (chance of civilization-ending event)

Super volcanoes exist.

[phillymjs]

The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 belched enough ash into the atmosphere to block out some sunlight and temporarily alter the global climate, which negatively affected the harvest that year. It was effectively a relatively mild, non-nuclear 'nuclear winter.'

I don't know if Krakatoa qualifies as a super volcano because of that, but there is a currently-dormant volcano that apparently is considered "super" in Yellowstone National Park.

~Philly

To all the naysayers....

[realitybath1]

whining how we would have been wiped out long ago in the past if his numbers are right:

Statistics were only recently discovered, hence they didn't apply back then.

Stupids.