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Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction
wiredog sends in a study from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Center For Biosecurity, assessing risks of human extinction and the costs of preventing it. "In this century a number of events could extinguish humanity. The probability of these events may be very low, but the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future human lives."
If we all die off, nobody is going to be around to lament the fact that we're gone.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
As long as we can round up a hardy crew of misfits and renegades and train them to be astronauts, we can handle anything!
With the rise of nanotech, grey goo has always been a popular vision of the end of the world. After recently reading Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep , however, what I'm more scared of is the combination of nanotech and AI that would reduce human beings to mere drones of a hive mind. Is the human race still human if it's subjugated to the will of our future digital overlords?
The general plan is to perform mass-cloning of the populace, and then send out hordes of colonization fleets to find habitable planets elsewhere in the galaxy... If we hit any rough territory, we'll just sing at the problem until it goes away!
Bow-ties are cool.
might actually think that this is a wonderful concept.
To quote George Carlin: "The earth will shrug us off like a bad case of fleas, a surface nuisance".
MP3 Search Engine
Hmmm.... Maybe some other species could make a better go of it! Now who do we hand the baton off to?
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
The high "expected value" is irrelevant. The only reason for trying to maximise the expected value is that under some circumstances it is a reasonable proxy the actual value - in particular, in cases where you repeatedly take the "bet" so that in the long term the law of averages (really the laws of large numbers) applies. That's not the case here.
I hope it does, as then we'd have more motivation to colonize other earths. :D
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
We could all die!!! But we probably won't. At least not right away.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
I honestly don't give two figs if humanity goes extinct (I certainly won't after the event).
Sure, if it happens while I'm alive, there maybe some un-avoidable pain and suffering for myself, but if it happens after I'm dead, well, I'll be dead.
Dead people can't suffer.
Anyway, extinction is a natural part of evolution, adapt or die motherfuckers, adapt and die. Yes, change from or to and is deliberate, because we are all going to die.
---
Anyway, onto the actual scenarios. From the introduction:
None of these things is going to wipe out each and every human, nor even enough humans to make the population enviable. Unless climate change is really, really dramatic (in which case, there is nothing we can do about it anyway). And to talk about flu... Viruses have never killed more than 70% of a given population (number pulled from the air, probably less, Wikipedia says The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population.). Oh, and terrorism. Scary shit that.
Then we get onto astronomical events, comets, solar flares and stuff, and the paper goes on and on.
Basically, we are all going to die, humanity is going to go extinct (if nothing else, the heat death of the universe will get us), and to think about the issue with any great thought is probably a waste of time.
I wank in the shower.
Slashdot readers already know the best disaster recovery policy is to have multiple off-site backups. A human being is just a strand of DNA's mechanism for replicating itself; that DNA needs to figure out how to store copies of itself in enough places so that it is impossible to wipe out all the copies in any possible disaster. In short, we need to stop keeping all our eggs in this one little basket called "Earth".
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This plan should be fine as long as we don't have any incompetent, egotistical, anal-retentiveness cowards who are in charging replacing faulty drive-plates in the ship's engine system. I mean what could go wrong?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
We should prolly start teaching goats how to do all that cloning and stem cell stuff. Or dogs, they go apeshit when you come home - I'm sure they'd be eager to help.
Things like a zombie apocalypse or raptors being resurrected and running amok. We need plans for dealing with those issues too.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
It is inevitable.
I for one, welcome our new Skynet overlords!
Given that the world population shot up by a factor of 4 in the last 100 years, mainly due to fossil fuel usage which won't last even another 100 years, I think some kind of near-term die-off is inevitable. However, I'd suggest that the lower the human population, the less stress as a whole the population is under as more per-capita resource with less competition is available, so complete extinction would become less and less likely as the population drops.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Reminds me of a Phil Dick story in which people send copies of themselves on hazardous space missions. The original person sits safely at home on Earth, while the disposable duplicate with all the same skills and experience goes off and risks life and limb. Wish I could remember the title.
See Stimpson J Cat and the History Eraser Button and/or current Commander in Chief in White House....
Speaking of which, picture Cheney rolling Bush back and forth and saying in the announcer voice "The beautiful, shiny button. The jolly, candy-like button!". Cue cold sweat...
"In this century a number of events could extinguish humanity"
Is one of them CowboyNeal...
Just maybe, some alien race might discover that eating a human prolongs their life, or cures some previously incurable disease...
You'd think we'd be exploring space like crazy with the resources (not money) that we have ... but i guess since there are no indigenous people there to exploit ...
But the longer humanity is confined to this single celestial body we're literally keeping all our eggs in one basket.
*DrugCheese rants*
is the species
humanity itself is its own greatest enemy
in all other species, the idea is optimization of genes expressed for maximum survival. it's a feedback loop that has worked very well for billions of years
however, in humanity, with our brains and our language and our civilization, our biological survival has become of secondary importance to the survival of our memes. we sacrifice for larger ideas. suicide bombers will sacrifice that which genetic imperative considers the ultimate sin: extinguishing of life before reproduction. but from a meme's point of view, if it reinforces an idea's survival, its a good thing. memes are kind of like genes in that they look for maximum expression, but unlike genes in that they don't care if we actually survive
therefore, you could have a meme propogate in civilization that embraces our own extinction. nihilism is an example of a meme which embraces the meaningless of life and pointlessness of survival, for example. just look at the tags on the slashdot summary: "letthemdienews". there are a lot of people out there for whom cynicism and learned helplessness has led to not caring and even actively embrace our extinction
humanity as a biological entity, a growth, if you will, has done remarkably well. 7 billion is a good number in terms of judging success for the large mammals that we are. our brains and our tool use has allowed us to survive in the tundra and in the desert. we've done really good as animals so far
but our memes, a recent development in civilization that has not stood the test of time and has no direct genetic allegory, has no real stake in the survival of the biological organism which creates them with our language
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Sharks, with friggin' lasers on their heads!
Over the next billion years or so. Zero.
There is no doubt that 99.99% of the population could be wiped out by a cataclysm. That's probably worth ... considering. But killing 99.99% of the world's population leaves over 600,000 individuals alive. Individuals of a species so adaptable that it can thrive everywhere from the deserts of the Kalihari to the coast of Greenland.
Humanity is a weed species. In fact, we're the weed species. We thrive relative to other species on disruption. Rats and cockroaches are just hangers on. They are Kato to our OJ, hitching a ride on our exploitation of new niches opened by environmental cataclysm. Every kind of cataclysm that could possibly be prepared for wiould only in a very short time convert the world into a storehouse of underutilized resources for the survivors. Those survivors might not have much fun, at least in the short term, but people are amazingly adaptable. Hell should hold not terrors for humanity, because it won't take anything like an eternity for anything to seem normal to people.
The only way to cause human extinction is to manage to kill everyone at one go. Things like a the Sun going unexpectedly nova, or some kind of unforseen astronomical radiation burst that sterilizes everything. Stuff you couldn't possibly prepare for.
Of the things you can prepare for, things like plague, the reason to prepare for them isn't the survival of the species. It's the survival of society. We have it pretty good, after all, and it wouldn't take much in those cases to take out a significant amount of insurance for our way of life.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Depending on how you want to define complexity, it took between one and two billion years to go from complex multicellular life to an intelligent species. Even if we assume you need a fairly high power metabolism for it, there have certainly been plenty of candidates for technological intelligence over the last 300 million years, but only one species actually managed it. Given that we've got about 500 million years of useful life left in this planet, the chances of another civilisation rising on Earth before the sun swells up and kills us is pretty slim.
All the statistitions and the fear mongers on 'B' ark, please.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
That's easy enough to work around. Just use an engine that doesn't require drive-plates. ;)
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Humanity will likely kill itself off because they can't agree who gets to shower first in the morning. We've fought wars over one city taking a girl from another city (Troy, and nobody cared that she wanted to leave), we fight over liquid dinosaur guts, over patches of barren desert. We've even fought over things that are completely intangible -- fascism versus communism versus capitalism versus god only knows what else. And we're constantly creating ways to kill ever greater numbers of people. During WWII, the Germans were stuffing people into giant incinerators, when they weren't busy leveling entire cities with fire bombs (and vice versa), and the war ended because the Americans came up with a better way to kill people -- a nuclear bomb. Well, what's going to come after the nuclear bomb? Trust me when I say, there are scientists right now in a laboratory somewhere thinking to themselves -- will my children ever forgive me? Not that any of this is really necessary; the survivors will quite happily keep throwing rocks at each other in the post-apocalypse. Our only hope of salvation will be figuring out why humanity abjectly fails to evolve better methods of conflict resolution and then putting us on the path to doing so. It doesn't help that men who stomp around tearing up grass and biting the heads of their enemies off somehow leads to reproductive success. I'm told it's because they're attractive when they do that. -_-
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
OK. Let's assume that everything that's been worked on for 50 years and still doesn't work isn't going to work. This includes fusion and space travel.
Industrial civilization is only about 200 years old. It's convenient to start at 1808, the first year somebody bought a train ticket. That was when the industrial revolution started affecting large numbers of people. Does industrial civilization have another 200 years left?
We're running out of oil. The optimistic position is that peak oil is 20 years away. The pessimistic position is that peak oil was two years ago. Few think there's 50 years of oil left. There's really nothing on the energy horizon big enough to replace oil. All the alternatives are considerably more expensive, and have a lower return on energy invested vs. energy out.
We're running out of some other minerals. There are substitutes, and recycling, but using a substitute is usually more energy intensive.
It's quite possible that industrial civilization will just run down. This has already happened in a number of Third World countries. A few countries, such as Argentina, have already gone from rich to poor. The usual pattern is devolution into rich central cities surrounded by an ocean of poverty. Mexico City and Rio are classic examples.
That may be the future.
I don't know why but the term "go apeshit" always makes me laugh...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Farther out in time are risks from technologies that remain theoretical but might be developed in the next century or centuries. For instance, self-replicating nanotechnologies could destroy the ecosystem; and cognitive enhancements or recursively self-improving computers could exceed normal human ingenuity to create uniquely powerful weapons (Bostrom, 2002; Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2007; Ikle, 2006; Joy, 2000; Leslie, 1996; Posner, 2004; Rees, 2003).
Farther out in time, I thought Judgement day was 8/29/1997.
This plan should be fine as long as we don't have any incompetent, egotistical, anal-retentiveness cowards who are in charging replacing faulty drive-plates in the ship's engine system. I mean what could go wrong?
Even that would be OK if we made sure that coward had a partner to look over his shoulder. Of course, if that partner were to somehow get himself tossed into stasis for a ship infraction leaving the incompetent coward to do the job himself, who knows where it would lead? The only hope then would be self-insemination of the last surviving human or reassembly of the dead by nano-bots. And that would just be silly.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
If only that partner had a cat. Preferably a pregnant cat.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
it's all very simple, if we just follow Leto's golden path.
Chaos is Divine *
some animal species that are about to go extinct might actually think that this is a wonderful concept.
Well then, they should have invented their own firearms and started "deurbanizing" our habitats to make way for their own purposes!
Not worth the cost.
Not worth the trouble.
Not worth the worry.
Planet's better off without 'em.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
We could go POOF from nuclear weapons or an asteroid strike, but then, so would a number of other species. Like my cats - little fuckers would starve if I didn't feed them... fat little bastards.
I see it this way: we either go extinct WITH issue (i.e., we evolve into another species) or we go extinct WITHOUT issue (nukes / asteroids / 100% deadly plague / solar flare / nano goo).
It's much like the coming de-population process. We can get rid of 5 or 6 billion people in two very different ways, and it has to do with how YOU want to die:
at a young(er) age of starvation / exposure / thirst in some transit camp in eastern oregon or in food riots in some over populated rat hole of a city, OR peacefully at home surrounded by friends and family.
We all have to go - so it's just a question of HOW not IF, and WHEN not IF.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I thought this was interesting.
Yeah, and the Romans thought the Empire would last a thousand years. Greater than 99.99% of all species have gone extinct, most of them lasting no more than a few million years, some far less than that. No species is so tough to live through their food getting wiped out or dropping below the minimum population to maintain genetic diversity.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
#1 Find a new fuel instead of oil and fossil fuels.
#2 Get rid of hatred and bigotry and racism.
#3 Invest in Fringe Science to create future technology and not let some asshole scientists holding up progress with flawed theories that they cherrypicked data or did fraud like Piltdown man that prevent us from having rapid progress in improving our technology for cleaning up the environment (Terraforming) space travel (Earth will be crowded we need to make a few colonies)
#4 Creating floating cities and under water cities to help with population growth.
#5 Until we can replace oil, why are polar bears more important than human beings? We either can save the polar bears and make humans extinct or drill for oil and natural gas in the Alaskan wilderness to get enough oil until we can invent a replacement for it. Save the Polar Bear DNA so when he invent cloning we can recreate the polar bears and the Dodo and other extinct animals.
#6 Fight terrorism by following the money trails and bank accounts they use to pay off members to do suicide bombings. Make it an International law to shut down any bank account that pays terrorists and prosecute the owners. The same for donating to fake Islamic charities that fund terrorism by giving money to Sheiks and Clerics that launder it for terrorist networks. Terrorist networks work like a business, so just shut off their bank accounts and money and they won't afford to be in business any more.
#7 Learn ancient skills like pottery, black smithing, leather working, wood working, etc so in case civilization collapses we can have experts to help rebuild it using ancient technologies that don't need oil or electricity. Study the Amish and other groups that do this so in case the rest of us can survive an economic collapse and post-oil world with no alternative to oil.
#8 Set up more charities that help poor people and people with disabilities and mental illnesses and drug and alcohol addictions. Teach them how to be responsible and sober and think clearly and be able to go back into the work force or start up their own small businesses to help stimulate the economy.
#9 Get governments to stick to a budget by cutting pork spending and useless programs, leave the taxes alone, but control spending, end useless wars and stop trying to protect people from their own bad decisions and bad behavior and bad actions, and let them learn from the consequences of them, so they can avoid them in the future, Tough love, but if they spent $50,000 in credit cards for useless crap and then could not afford a house payment, they are too stupid to bail out. The same for banks who didn't verify that they made what they claimed they made they claimed $45,000 a year but only earned $15,000 a year, and banks that gave them loans and mortgages are too stupid to allow to stay in business. Let them fail and eat their own mistakes. Why should the rest of us, responsible people, pay more taxes and lower the currency value to bail out stupid people so they can rip us off again 5 to 10 years later with the same "scam"? The bailouts are a Ponzi scheme that ruins the stock market and economy and ruin the US dollar's value and cause inflation and unemployment to rise, stop them!
#10 Find a better way to rehabilitate criminals, most of them are repeat offenders. Learn from Europe and Australia and other nations that do not have the crime repeat offender rates the USA has.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
APES! We should give the planet to apes!
Now we just need to figure out what to call the new planted. I suggest Ape World.
Does one risk prevention involve standing on a hill with a baseball bat?
sacrificing biologically for a good meme is absolutely valid
but all those good memes won't mean a thing if a bad meme is also allowed to propagate
i'm not aruging against the idea of sacrificing for a meme, i'm arguing against the idea of sacrificing for a bad meme
where "bad meme" is any that could result in our extinction
such as religious extremism, or nihilism. both armageddeon and the meaningless of life are ideas that are self-fulfilling prophecies
and whereas genetic has a pretty good track record of weeding out bad genes, civilization's existence is too short to fully understand if it has the mechanisms for weeding out bad ideas, or fatal ideas
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
For my part, I am thrilled. No one is pushing the message that we need to stop filling the world with babies. It goes against human nature, but it's going to have to be done if we want to continue to exist.
The big question is: will we evolve quickly enough to achieve this or will we rush over the precipice like lemmings holding our legions of babies as we crash to our inevitable doom?
Bottom line: Gents, go for the big 'V' and adopt. Ladies, have one and one only to satisfy your maternal cravings, then get a tubal ligation.
*** Don't be dull.***
the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future human lives.
Cuts right to the chase, don't it? The value of all future human lives, indeed. Expressed as what, wish units? The projected value of all future human lives is precisely nil. Or the universe of possible value. Or both at the same time. Far more productive to spend the money on remedial large number training and statistics/reality differentiation.
illegitimii non ingravare
"Hello there ladies. Would any of you be interested in participating in my scientific experiment to reduce the risk of human extinction?"
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Extinction is not the same thing as a mass die out where we lose our technology. To think that any of these events are going to kill ALL humans and not just a high percent is insane. Even 99.99% of humans gone is NOT extinction. We can repopulate.
Since humans are smart I would even give us a higher chance of surviving these events compared to other animals who have been surviving this list of possible events for much longer than humans have even existed.
I think that humans as we know them can easily become extinct, like this article says, but not the actual biology of a human.
Long term we are fucked though.
Well, you know, we have these forest fires because we haven't been cutting down the trees....
Earth is a finite size so surely we run out of everything eventually? Or at least, we get to the situation where accessing valuable resources costs so much that the vast majority of humanity has to do without them?
Maybe we get lucky and all have limitless wealth and live in great big houses with personal rockets and acres of lush gardens once we've discovered pocket nuclear power stations or whatever but alas I worry it's more like a lesser developed country global model ahead - a few very wealthy people living well, maintained by security who get some benefits from keeping them in that state, and many, many people in a dirt poor marginal existence.
Here's hoping for that glorious space civilisation a lot of us dreamed of rather than the polluted dystyopian "Make Room, Make Room" future we fear...
It's the only way to be sure.
Where is the "andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag now?
Shhhh... There are enough people that can't grasp that dogs are not human equivalents as it is. Don't start feeding their psychosis.
It's not. And I'm not one of those ZPG loons either. I just think we're done here and if we were all wiped off the face of the earth it wouldn't be a tragedy. Personally I'm hoping for a massive comet, at least it would be entertaining and WE DO have a black President.......
Getting yourself a dog would be less trouble ;)
Time and time again I've sat in traffic saying "Come on asteroid! Where are you!?"
I think if all humans died out another there is plenty of time for rats to evolve into a space faring race, it only took 65million the last time. Let alone another set of monkey's.
What's the cost of preventing total human extinction for the next, oh, 50 years or so? That ought to be sufficient.
On a more serious note, Cui bono? Our inventiveness and cleverness has made a very comfortable existence for ourselves. And I'm selfish enough to say that that's good. And I suppose those of us who have children have a natural instinctive desire to see that the world is at least as good for them as it was for us. But is the universe itself a better place for having us here?
René Descartes: "Cogito ergo sum."
The Universe: "So what?"
sits in his own pew
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It is highly unlikely humanity (or transhumans) can survive more than 1e15 years, nothing will survive more than 1e80 or so (proton decay).
Makes you think about where your hope is!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1. People discover they can destroy themselves.
2. Scientists discuss the probabilities of destruction.
3. People inadvertently destroy themselves.
4. Extra-terrestrial intelligence continues its search, wondering why no one responds to their SETI signals.
I think I played a computer game like this years ago.
I think it was called Master of Orion.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
I am Zermox, insect spokesdrone. Please interrupt your self congratulations because YOU HUMANS AREN'T EVEN A BLIP ON THE RADAR YET. You number under 10 billion individuals. Your total biomass is negligible. Your environmental adaptations are fragile and we mock them, hizz hizz. You have made quite a fetid stink in the last few millenia but we are not yet concerned. In short, the hangers on are you.
We will bury you. Then, we will eat you. That is, we will continue to eat you. I am Zermox, I have spoken.
Hail the queen!
Secy. Zermox OUT
"Hello there ladies. Would any of you be interested in participating in my scientific experiment to reduce the risk of human extinction?"
Hah! That's great! I can just imagine how this would all go down... You'd tell the ladies how you're conducting a program to reduce the risk of human extinction and "preserve favorable genetic traits"... You'd, like, buy 'em a drink, take 'em back to the lab with you, then take a genetic sample, put it in the freezer and send 'em on their way...
Bow-ties are cool.
Some people want to INCREASE the odds of human extinction.
In fact, they're rather "VeHEMenT" about it!
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
I got nothing. I can't think of a name for a Planet Of The Apes.
The article mentions that even if we moved out of the solar system, we couldn't escape nuclear decay of matter that happens in 1032 to 1041 years. Can someone tell me what is projected to happen in 3040 that will cause this?
Sing at it until it either goes away, or the wave motion cannons finish blasting it.
we must not allow a mineshaft gap!
Well, sure. But nobody, I trust, is talking about preparing for events 10^15 years in the future. I chose 10^9 as a nice round number.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Carbon based life has little use for the silicon in dirt. Silicon based goo can convert it into solar panels...
The "grey goo" apocalypse presumes exactly what it name stands for : that the surface of earth will be covered with an amorphous mass comprising an almost infinite number of the same nano machine.
What you advocate instead, requires specialisation, organisation, etc...
Basically, you're just re-inventing evolution, but this time with silicon-based life forms organising into a complete eco-system (including plant-like solar-pannel-nanobots whose purpose is to serve as energy entry point for the rest of the food chain including the carnivore-like nanobots which lack access to light).
It's not extinction by grey goo, it will be extinction by grey life instead.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I like to think that a smaller blackhole of ma'b 500 million suns gets sling-shotted at earth near the speed of light be a large blackhole. Then we never knew we died. should be near instant. or the "slow roast" death of the sun swelling after a few billion years.
More sex. Populate the earth with so many people that there's bound to be survivors no matter what the catastrophe is.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
but say that the sum total of our potential to go completely extinct is rate {X}
if we colonize mars, or venus, that rate goes to {X}/100
simply because you remove off the table a huge range of threats: asteroids, megalomaniacs who unleash nuclear armageddeon, grey goo, etc
then, if we colonize a planet around another sun, that rate goes to {X}/1,000,000
because we remove a whole host of other factors, including the various threats posed by our sun doing something nasty
of course, that other planet in another star system will still be close by, so if something goes bad in the stellar neighborhood, we can still all go, but you get my drift:
colonizing at least one other planet in the solar sytem dramatically increases our survival rate, and colonizing at least one other planet outside our solar system takes our survival rate to yet another dramatic orders of magnitude increase
so we must do at least these two things before we can relax
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Under a cost-benefit analysis, there's exponential profit to be made by a powerful few in taking humanity to brink of extinction, far more than there is profit in saving it, leaving only the profiteers to survive, albeit briefly.
"Can the stock market survive a thermonuclear exchange? Yes, says our next guest, and he will tell us what stocks to buy and what to sell in the event of a nuclear attack, right after these messages."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I agree, but what is important to me is that we have achieved so much. If we are reduced to 600,000 people scattered across the world I fear we would revert to tribal pre civilisation ways and all the science and technology of the current era would be lost. I know of no evidence that this has not already happened in the past.
I would like to see something about the survival of our culture and knowledge in a cataclysm. How can you preserve what we have now so that if it was discovered in 500 years by tribals that they would benefit from it?
Damned Dirty Ape Land?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It's a brilliant strategy. Take creatures that consumes more energy in food than it they produce in work, and use them for energy production.
Sure, you'll have to feed those creatures with plants, which do produce more energy than they use, and sure, you could just use the plants as fuel.
But as far as we can tell, plants don't suffer. So it wouldn't be evil enough to use them. And we all know how much robots love doing evil.
[Strangelove's plan for post-nuclear war survival involves living underground with a 10:1 female-to-male ratio]
General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
Now just say it happy and manic, and you could apply to be the 11th regeneration or whatever he's at now.
-FL
that how many different scenarios we prepare for the thing that finally is our undoing is going to be the one thing we haven't thought of.
LISTEN TO MY SONG!
It depends how bad the disaster is. For a more optimistic example, you could say that if the human race had become extinct two million years ago then not much would have changed because Neanderthals would have taken our place almost seamlessly.
I don't think it's as simple as you think it is. VHEMT.org
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
From the web site:
Sounds great. I'm already doing my part--are you?
Whenever I think about the prospect of the end of civilization, via a plague or climate change or what have you (and I agree, the population has increased too rapidly for the Earth to support -- something has to break), I'm always a bit torn. On the one hand, as many other posters have said, "Good riddance." There are too many people, who cares if they go away? On the other hand, think about how terrible it would be if you or someone you loved were affected -- either your whole way of life changes, or you suffer terribly before you die. Either way it's no fun. So, not having RTFA, I'd rather see someone look at mitigating the effects for individuals rather than trying to prevent some cataclysmic occurrence. Or maybe just happy drugs -- or euthanasia drugs -- for everybody.
religion must end. We are on the brink of being able to prevent our own extinction by any means. Religious zealots are preventing mankind from progressing forward.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Where does the half billion years of useful life figure come from? I'm just curious.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Only 50 GNeurons. No wireless. Lame...
That is all.
Depending on the problem, losing either all men or all women is enough for the species to go extinct.
Anyway, what may make humans disappear in the long term is medical progress. Once we're all stuffed with chemical products to cure any disease, we will not grow any immunitary defenses anymore, and the first virus, bacteria or prion not caught by all the crap we eat will get rid of us in a few weeks. Have you noticed how many people are constantly ill in cities, compared to country ? There's already a problem and it is not going to go away. I hope we'll live long enough to see how it ends ;-)
Like lichens? There are lots of monocellular organisms that are lithotropic. The only reason they don't do better is because you don't get *much* energy when you convert complex rocks into simpler oxides, so it takes a long time to do a good job of it and in the meantime an animal comes along and eats you. But where I live, all the rocks are covered in lichens and they're slowly digesting them.
Lichens are a fungus and a photosynthetic organism working together. The fungus provides support and a bit of protection to the photosyntetic parts. The photosynthetic parts FEEDS the fungus.
The Lichen gets zero energy from the rock.
Typically they SPEND energy to dissolve the rock to create a foothold and a little for trace minerals. Lichens no more eat rocks than acid rain does.
The only LIKELY reason humans could die off is because of Transhumans - and by definition, that's an outcome we should all get behind.
Look, within fifty to 75 years, there will be a "di-morphic split" between humans and Transhumans. From this, there are only three possible outcomes:
1) Humans try to destroy Transhumans and are themselves exterminated.
2) Transhumans transmogrify humans into Transhumans - and nobody will complain once that's done.
3) Transhumans ignore humans and go off and do their own thing in space or other worlds. leaving the chimps to extermiante themselves via one of the listed "disasters". Bottom line for Transhumans: who cares?
The most likely outcome is the fourth: some humans get exterminated, some get transmogrified, some get ignored.
The probability of that outcome approaches unity, compared to all the other "disasters".
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
If you believe in evolution then what is the point in trying to stop this from happening? Something else will evolve into the next "humans" and our existence is irrelevant. No more important than the daisy in your yard. Here today... gone tomorrow.
It has been hypothesized that Brownian motion could be the power source for the type of nanotechnology that could create a gray goo scenario.
Subject: PLEASE help save young, vulnerable lives with this volunteer effort {NO $$$ asked}~ SUICIDE VACCINE works for peace [so does "Race relations & prejudice", on the major web sites below] SV saved many lives of the refugees of Hurricane's Katrina/Rita/Wilma~ * This is for ALL you know......please help me spread this to save lives......this is NOT "religion", this is Reality, objective reality! S.O.S.MayDay "Suicidal thoughts, up since Katrina, PTSD survey says" WASHINGTON (AP)"Using anti-depressants Increases the risk of Suicidal thoughts and behavior among young people" Suicide rate among girls skyrockets 76%, says Centers for Disease Control & Prevention" *AP: Half of 2005 gun deaths were suicides {CDC-gov-July 2008} Please help me save young [ & old] lives, now NEEDLESSLY lost! Help spread these volunteer sites [NO $$$ asked] planet-wide and express real empathy!~~~Impulsive Depression/Suicide is Endable! SUICIDE VACCINE [It works, which is the only point, Eh?!] http://churchcapt.proboards42.com/ http://captchurch.proboards98.com/ http://s2.excoboard.com/exco/index.php?boardid=24582 http://s2.excoboard.com/exco/index.php?boardid=15311 http://b4.boards2go.com/boards/board.cgi?user=ChurchCaptain *Wisdom for Teens* http://groups.google.com/group/TeenAnswers http://communities.righthealth.com/group/sosmayday http://groups.google.com/group/answers-for-teens [All groups:::5 permanent monographs & no chat, like, "Who are YOU?!?" , "The useless War of the Sexes" and "LOVE is the Real Thing".] http://www.bev.net/users/homepages/JamesSorrell [My first web page-2003] Jim Sorrell [CaptainChurch] Be a Good Neighbor "Love your neighbour as yourself."means, see to it that your neighbour has it just as good as you do, self-lessly!~~~ "Who is my neighbour?" EveryOne on the planet! All humans born are @ least 33rd or 34th cousins [from Noah's 3 sons: we are All related family!] http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/CaptainChurch http://groups.google.com/group/TeenAnswers http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/SOS_MayDay http://groups.google.com/group/answers-for-teens http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ThisFatherKnowsBest http://blogs.albawaba.com/captainchurch James Sorrell [CaptainChurch] Arcata, CA james.sorrell@yahoo.com or CaptainChurch@gmail.com
Whether or not we should care is irrelevant. I don't care if anyone cares or not. All that matters is whether or not we are AWARE that we're all doomed. If we're aware that we're going to oblivion and revert back to our pre-birth state of non-existence, then we'll be more inclined to make the most of the three score years and ten that we've got to make a positive difference for our fellow man. There are a lot of people who are not aware of our mortality though (they're called religious people), and they have a disturbing knack for getting into positions of power.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Vague guesswork and wikipedia backed up with a previous knowledge of the right order of magnitude. The article on the sun claims that within one billion years Earth will be too hot for liquid water to exist on the surface. I am assuming that halfway there is going to be too hot for current slow evolving macroscopic life to do anything exciting like learning tool use.
It'll hapen. Finally.
Itâ(TM)s dangerous to be alive and risks are everywhere. Luckily, not all risks are equally serious. For present purposes we can use three dimensions to describe the magnitude of a risk: scope, intensity, and probability. DUI Blog
I'm a biology major, and let me say that I am as shocked to learn that there are bacteria still living as I am to learn that there are people who can't recognize sarcasm.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
From TFA:
"During the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. President
Kennedy estimated the probability of a nuclear holocaust as somewhere between one out of three and even"
Of *course* JFK put the odds that high. Per someone I knew who was on the spot, JFK had his finger on the trigger and was all gung-ho to nuke the Soviets; he had to be "talked down" by cooler heads.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The article's author suggests that we must take into account the value of all future potential life that is being "killed" with our extinction. Using this logic, every act of coitus interruptus should be punishable as a multi-homocide.
You'd use the 12 gauge on the human, and the 20 gauge on the dino. Despite what Mr. Crichton would have you believe, Velociraptors were only about 40 pounds - my dog's bigger. Now, some Deinonychus would approach 150 - but with a very small skull, a 20 gauge is still more than sufficient to cause immediate death when applied directly to the forehead.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Tardigrades or waterbears
That quote merely sounds good. It has personification; it has allusion; it has simile. But it is false.
The earth is nothing but rocks we can blow apart.
I highly recommend Apocalypse 2012: An Optimist Investigates The End of Civilization. The author, a science journalist, goes through a number of end-of-times scenarios. The difference between this book and many others is that he actually visits Scientists in the field, and travels to the relevant spots - from Guatemala to Russia. The prose is very interesting, and even though he rants far off the rails later in the book in the section on Armageddon (which is, as he writes, the most disappointing of all possible end-of-times scenarios, because it would be entirely of our making), it's still a very good read.
...am a proponent of space colonization. We must migrate into space, all ye whose souls are bound by gravity, in order to reach the next stage of human evolution!
If we die off, then some other species will rise to the top, and learn from our mistakes. You'll see Walmarts and K-Marts and law firms run by super intelligent orangutans in snazzy new uniforms...
It's called the free market people. The sooner we learn to accept it, the sooner we can give way to our new furry overlords.
! Human Extinction?! We need a plan. Where is Shampoo...
We can discount getting hit by astroids and
having epidemics wiping out humanity as too
unlikely. The main scenario is that the population
explosion will wipe us out. We are already
consuming more of earths resources than the
earth can replenish - several times more.
We will continue to bring speices to extinction.
We will use up all pristine land for food
production and urban settlement. When there are
no wild mammals, no wild birds or large fish
people will fight one another for the remaining
food and energy resources. There will not be
enough to go around. This will topple civilization
and due to the brittleness of the logistic
system in an overpopulated world, it may cause
the death of all humanity.
When this will happen, I don't know, but as
long as the earths population keeps growing, it
will happen. At the current rate of growth
I give it 50-100 years. At 0 growth we have longer
but if we are to support all people on this earth
at the current standard of the western world, we
shouldn't be more than 500 million people. Maybe
not even that.
I believe the real question is whether or not our extinction is of any significance whatsoever.
"there have certainly been plenty of candidates for technological intelligence over the last 300 million years, "
care to clarify a bit?
What do you mean technological intelligence?
And there could ahve been intelligent tool using species when "The Dinosaurs roamed the earth"tm
Or even before then.
In any case we would never no.
If all the humans vanished right now, there would hardly be any evidence in 100 years, much less a million+ years.
There are some species which are canidates to evolve a similiar level of tool using that we have. Of course, that would depend on pressures and mutations.
add to that, any competitive life would have been eliminated.
Look at the Neanderthals. There different and arose pretty close to the same time.
In short, you don't know jack.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Dr. Zaius's happy magic land.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You're wrong to attach any grand meaning to it.
What have we really accomplished? Take us away and the earth would hardly miss us.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
the 4 horses (means) of the apocalypse. (guns being a euphamism for Machines for Destroying Lives)
Haven't you seen the card-carrying "Kill 'em all: let God sort 'em out" militia types waiting?
the whole "better to die king of hell, than to permit others to live in their own religion's peace" religion?
You may not have noticed how the normal evolutionary pressures get deformed when WE are the subjects of 'em.
As for near-term die-off, we've already been in the midst of it, for all the planet's ecology EXCEPT us, which makes our die-off more and more likely with each passing year.
Tantrum, pogrom, "crusade", "holy" war, economic collapse, crop failure due to poisoning the soil our crops grow in, sea level rise that costs us our ports, it's coming: humanity won't allow it to not be.
Remember how WWI couldn't happen? then WWII?
Remember how a few thousand years ago those in Uruk (now Iraq) made believe that their ecology COULDN'T break?
(but now it's desert)
Same story, again and again, just stronger tech, is all, stronger leverage against ecology, life
"The probability of these events may be very low"
Isn't there some collary to Murphy's Law that says that if a series of events can go wrong, they will do so in the worst possible order? (Also, at the worst possible time)
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Grey life that's going to have to outcompete "green" life, which has been in development for 3.5 billion years. It's pretty efficient, competitive stuff.
Specially, taking into account that green life has already evolved forms which are efficient at eating rocks*, whereas, no matter how much you believe in The Matrix, grey goo has yet to invent a way to eat carbon.
I think, if this actually happen, it could be an interesting race metaphorically symbolising intelligent design (grey) versus naturally evolved (green).
Put my bets on green, any way.
---
* note that extremophile are already extinction-proof to several other dangers mentioned in TFA's list, including gamma ray bursts, etc.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If this was a reference, i didn't get it. Care to explain?
Maybe some other species could make a better go of it!
Raccoons. They already have binocular vision (although color-blind), five fingers (although no opposable thumb) and are very intelligent. They are highly adaptable to many environments.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Your conclusion does not follow from your premises. Even if it were true that alternative energy sources were more expensive and had a lower EROEI, that does not mean they cannot effectively replace oil. At $60/bbl, world spending on oil is about $1.8T/yr, or about 3% of world GDP, meaning that there's a great deal of scope for an alternative to get "more expensive" before it actually gets too expensive.
More importantly, though, your premises aren't correct.
Wind power has an EROEI of about 25:1, comparable to oil, and costs about $2500/kWp (including pumped storage), or about $1/kWh/yr. By contrast, a barrel of oil contains 1,700kWh; at $60/bbl, that's about $0.035/kWh, or a net present value of about $0.50/kWh/yr. However, oil provides heat energy, which is of lower quality than electrical energy, in the sense that it can provide less useful work (lower exergy). The discount factor varies; a common one is about 3:1 (e.g., heat pump for heating your home), but perhaps the most relevant one here is the 8:1 factor between cars with electric drivetrains and cars with internal combustion ones.
And that's not even considering externalities. Taking everything into account, oil simply isn't a cheap wonder-fuel. Since it isn't, it'll be replaceable.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of work to do to replace it. Almost all of that work is in retooling infrastructure, though (electrified rail, hybrid/electric cars, heat pumps, etc.); the challenge of replacing the actual useful work delivered by oil is relatively minor (30Gb/yr x 1700kWh/bbl = 50T kWh/yr / 8:1 exergy ratio = 6T kWh/yr / 2500 productive hrs/yr = 2.5B kW/hr wind = 2.5TWp * $2.5T/TWp = $6.5T = 10% of world GDP, or about 4 months of world manufacturing capacity).
oo! oo! We could call it:
Planet of the Apes
sorry, I had to...
Damn you, Crichton! Oh, wait...
"the expected value of preventing them could be high"
Aye, there's the rub. It could also be a massive waste of resources. HEY! Idea. Let's NOT try to prevent all future doomsday scenarios we can dream up! Think of how much money we'll save. Besides, I don't want to contribute anything to YOUR survival.