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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!
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.
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."
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*
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.
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.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
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
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.
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.
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
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).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What's a statistition? A statistician with a superstition?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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.
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.
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