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."

Comments

Why bother?

[Hatta]

If we all die off, nobody is going to be around to lament the fact that we're gone.

Re:Why bother?

[ZarathustraDK]

That's like the evil twin of the anthropic principle. Good one.

some animal species that are about to go extinct

[jacquesm]

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".

Old news

[Locke2005]

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".

Overshoot

[lobiusmoop]

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.

Re:Overshoot

[Anonymous Coward]

>Given a quick look at reality, I suggest that you rethink your theory a bit.

Instead of a linear function, picture a bell curve.

You were the one to take the idea to a ridiculous extreme, but the OP has a pretty good point.
If the cause of population drop is resource starvation, there are probably local equilibrium ranges that can be reached on the way down.

Re:Overshoot

[skeeto]

(or ever: we will reduce our usage, and prices will increase, but we can still synthesize fossil fuels from just about anything with carbon in it).

Excuse me, the first law of thermodynamics said he would like to have a talk with you.

Maybe

[DrugCheese]

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.

Re:Grey goo

[Chyeld]

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?

More to the point, does it matter?

Is there a point to clinging to what we are now, beyond the same sense of nogstalgia that we feel when we hear of some historical location being renovated/removed to make way for something better?

I may not be a Transhumanist but I'm also not entirely certain trying to keep us as we are today is all that beneficial. Or that the ultimate end of the journey will be made with our footsteps.

Re:Grey goo

[Gat0r30y]

human beings to mere drones of a hive mind.

Would that really be much different from the way things are now? I'm not trying to be a dick, but in my view we tend to deny the fact that while we are individuals, the greater whole of humanity tends to behave quite like a hive. Look at a busy intersection for a while - we are social and quite hive-like.
I would say that we are a pretty successful mostly hairless ape - but we most likely aren't gonna make it. Something might make it, but I doubt it will be us (it might be related, but I don't think we would recognize it). In any case - this planet belongs to the bacteria and it always will, I'm just thankful they have let us hang around for this long.

the greatest threat to the species

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:the greatest threat to the species

[Red Flayer]

Just wanted to point out that there are a few small holes in what you're saying:

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

In all other species, the idea is don't die before you procreate. That's it. Maximum survival has nothing to do with it -- maximum reproductive viability of your offspring is where it's at. For some species, this means living a long time and caring for your family members (apes, elephants, etc). For others, this means having lots of offspring and maximizing the chance of procreation of some of the offspring (praying mantises, where one or two young will devour the rest of the hatchlings as they emege). For some, this means a shotgun approach -- having a ton of offspring, since this maximizes the chance some will survive to procreate.

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

I disagree. Look at the Birds of Paradise in New Guinea. Their ridiculous mating dances and plumage are just like our memes... especially the mating dances. And the parallel is far wider in scope... due to lack of predators and plenty of food, their plumage and dances have evolved due to preferential mate selection. Predator evasion and food gathering are low on the list in a land of plenty. This is an allegory to the human race, IMO. In re: suicide bombers, I also disagree. Sacrificing oneslef so that those most genetically like you survive and procreate? That occurs in lots of cooperative species.

And as for "memes" being new to civilisation, I think there's some hubris involved in your opinion. Memes are as old as civilisation itself, they are what civilisation is based upon.

One other thing... overpopulation results in competition for scarce resources. Whether or not that competition is expressed as competition for food, water, oil, or whatever, overpopulation results in conflict. Conflict that results in casualties helps solve the overpopulation problem. From a tribal standpoint, it makes sense to wage war on the other, so that your relatives' genes can be passed on. Look at central Africa...

There is zero chance of extinction

[hey!]

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.

Re:There is zero chance of extinction

[hey!]

You raise an worthwhile point, but I would say that it is highly likely that 60,000 survivors could repopulate the planet.

True, if we assume they are evenly spread across the planet surface, many, perhaps most of them would perish before finding another human being. But that's a very, very stringent condition, isn't it? It seems almost certain that in such a scenario, people will tend survive in geographic clumps. Places the plague never reached, or where the post comet strike climate changes were survivable.

Given this, I'd be fairly confident at pushing the decimal point one more place, down to 6000 survivors. Maybe even lower. A bit over a hundred years ago, there were only 30 elephant seals in the world, now there are hundreds of thousands. Genetic analysis shows that there were probably fewer than seven total cheetahs in the world at some point around ten thousand years ago. Subsequently populations peaked in the 1950s at the forty thousand mark.

Both these animals are far, far less adaptable and fecund than human beings.

I'd go so far as to say that a single population of a dozen or so healthy breeding individuals, with access to minimal forage and game supplies, would have a far better than even chance of repopulating the world. Given 60,000 survivors or even 6,000 survivors globally, there is likely to be at least one such group if not several.

Re:There is zero chance of extinction

[demi]

The actual evidence we have is that, as a rule, for organisms on Earth, extinction is the norm rather than an exceptional event. The history of life on Earth is one of repeated mass extinctions, and continuous extinctions otherwise.

The idea that humans are "special", that in some way the rules of life on Earth do not apply to them, is attractive, and it probably has some merit. But in order to counter the actual evidence of Earth's history, all you really have is a sort of narrative about what humans are like and would do. It's as related to the real probability of human extinction as verbal arguments about "what you would do in a fight" are to actual combat.

A billion years is a very long time, and it's easy to imagine scenarios which, however unlikely, cause human extinction. A genetic disease which disrupts reproduction, that we all already have and so cannot isolate. The astronomical cataclysms you mention. Heck, our understanding of the structure of matter is pretty basic and dates to within the last 100 years--do you think that perhaps there are possible material instabilities that we don't yet understand that could somehow result in such a cataclysm?

We humans have exterminated many other species. Other forms of life we encounter may return the favor, for their own inscrutable reasons.

It even remains to be seen whether human beings can live in a self-sustaining way on planets that are not inherently habitable. When we have a thriving population on Venus, you can make the argument that something that makes Earth uninhabitable (for example, an atmospheric revolution by novel organisms, as has already happened in the planet's history) won't cause human extinction. But until then, you just can't say. And "I don't know" is a lot different than "I know it can't happen."

Re:There is zero chance of extinction

[rmadmin]

Like the natives that were undiscovered until just this year? I can't find the link, but I thought it was epic that these guys survived till 2008 without being noticed by the rest of the world. I'm hoping there are more of them out there.

Re:On the other hand, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I always encounter this sentiment (or lack thereof), and I can only rationalize it as some sort of perverted self-loathing of the human race.

Life is a suicide mission. You just keep going and going until you croak.

But we do it anyway.

We survive. We thrive. We are compelled to persevere, even when nature does everything in its power to destroy us.

Why? Because we must.

Because if we don't, then everything we have accomplished will be for nothing.

It may sound altruistic, but I do care about the future of the human race. Because if no one else did before us, we would never live today.

We didn't crawl out of a pond so you could throw it all away.

Extinction

[girlintraining]

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. -_-

Re:Grey goo

[FooAtWFU]

Nanotech grey goo is doomed to impossibility. Why? Power. You can't extract energy from your environment by chewing up concrete and dirt and stuff. Notice how you don't see very many organisms eating dirt and rock? If you want real energy from the environment around you, you're stuck competing with bacteria, algae, fungi, plants, and what-not.

Real nanotech dangers are like "a bunch of small particles get in the environment and it's like some hybrid of mercury and asbestos" (in terms of accumulation of mercury and the damaging properties of asbestos).

Re:some animal species that are about to go extinc

[philspear]

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!

Re:Anyone who read the Dune Chronicles knows...

[xstonedogx]

Frankly, if Leto's Golden Path leads to any more Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson Dune novels I say we just go along with our extinction.

Re:There is non-zero finite chance of extinction

[hey!]

Leaving aside the points others have made about the example you give, it really proves my point.

The collapse of the Roman empire in the West did not entail the extinction of H. sapiens in Europe. People adapt to changing circumstances. The contiguity of population also means that the cultural collapse of Rome was never complete, even if the political collapse was total. We must not confuse the collapse of civilization with extinction. When they mesoamerican city states like Copan fell and dissolved into the jungle, the people didn't disappear, they just changed their way of life.

With respect to the 99.99% of all species going extinct, that is not a counter argument to my assertion that humans are uniquely adaptable. In point of fact, we aren't necessarily the dominant species on the planet. Ranked by biomass there is more krill on the planet than humanity. There is more termites, both as individuals and by weight. Humans, however, have colonized the greatest variety of geography.

Name another species that is humanity's equal in adaptability and fecundity, and you carry your argument. Otherwise, the 99.99% figure is irrelevant. Humans are far more adaptable than 99.99% or even 99.999% of species that ever lived.

Re:We can build three arks

[TeknoHog]

What's a statistition? A statistician with a superstition?

Approaching 100% as t -> oo

[eabrek]

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!

Re:Not with a bang, but with a whimper

[Jason Levine]

There's really nothing on the energy horizon big enough to replace oil.

No one technology, maybe, but perhaps the future is multiple technologies working together. You could have Solar plants in the south-western US, wind turbines in the plains states, some geo-thermal plants, nuclear, clean-coal, etc. You might even toss some oil powered facilities in the mix also. All of those plants would convert their respective fuel sources to electricity which would be shared across a giant electrical grid. Need to power your electric car? Just plug it in. You don't need to think about the fact that you are getting 23% of your power from solar cells in Arizona, 31% from a Nuclear plant in New York, 18% from a clean coal plant in Tennessee, and 28% from a wind turbine facility in Illinois.*

* NOTE: State names picked at random, so please no replies telling me why Facility A would never, ever be built in State B.

simple

[DragonTHC]

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.

Re:Don't rationalise it

[ChrisMaple]

The earth is not a thing with a mind. Saying it would hardly miss us is gibberish.

The statement "life is what you make it" is more profound than most people think. It is people, individuals and groups, who give life meaning. It should not be trivialized.