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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!
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".
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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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.
I don't know the Dick story, but Sean Williams and Shane Dix wrote their Orphans of Earth trilogy about a similar concept.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
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.
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!
They've (science fiction writers, newspaper reporters, even the people building them who should know better) been calling computers "thinking machines" and "electronic brains" since the existance of electronic computers.
Computers still don't think and I don't forsee them thinking; not digital computers, in any case. Thought and feeling are chemical processes, not binary arithemetic with NAND and NOR gates.
If we are controlled by computers, the computers will be controlled by men; the same rich, powerful, and evil men who control us now and who have always controlled us in the past.
The real Matrix will have a human archetecht. The real termnators will be controlled by humans. "Gray goo" is a fanciful concept that came out of someone's pipe, much like Von Daniken's aliens in the '70s.
Note that I'm a cyborg; the device does not control me, I control it.
There is very little that will be able to make us extinct in the next hundred years. We are in less danger of extinction than we ever were (and some fifty to a hundred thousand years ago humans almost did become extinct).
No need to worry about extinction, as the risk is infinitessimal and besides, you won't be around to see it anyway.
I, on the other hand, am certain to become extinct in the next fifty years.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
I thought this was interesting.
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.
"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.
It did; the Eastern Roman Empire a.k.a. the Byzantine Empire didn't come to an end until 1453 when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
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.
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!
"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.
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 ]
Methinks it would be good to RTFA again after checking your browser for the ability to display superscript fonts. That was 10^32 to 10^41 years, not "1032 to 1041" years. In other words, 100 million trillion trillion (give or take an order of magnitude) years at a minimum.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate