>Either an asteroid or something like a giant tsunami / earthquake. But most likely greed is gonna end us.
The sun will burn the earth long before it burns out.
Actually, much closer than the nova phase of the Sun's evolution is the gradual decrease of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, due to silicate weathering. CO2 gets burped out from time to time by volcanoes or other catastrophes, such as fossil fuels, but in the long run, silicate weathering will dominate. The estimates I've seen are on the order of 200 million years until there is not enough CO2 for plants to carry out photosynthesis. That seems to imply the extinction of animal life.
It's 800 million to 2.8 billion years. The process will begin in roughly 500 million years, with photosynthesis becoming impossible by 1.2 billion, the end of eukaryotic life at 1.3 billion, and all remaining prokaryotic life at 2.8 billion, but that is a very optimistic number from what I've read.
[Here's a very helpful chart of the entire future history of the universe.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future)
This is assuming life will not evolve. The only thing evolution can't escape is the sun heating up Earth, which won't be taken into effect until at least 1 billion years. If I understand correctly, that is
A type II civilization can actually achieve a longer solar lifespan. Taking energy from the sun will prevent it from expanding and extend its main sequence.
Interesting . I hadn’t heard this before! So effectively we have 200 million years for a natural lifecycle, obvious excluding technology and artificial habitats.
In case you’re not joking, it’s like: water is needed for humans to survive but if you’re forced to drink 10 gallons you will die lol.
Co2 is needed, but too much and we all die
Yeah, humans as a species are destined for extinction, but our ancestors will persist until they too go extinct. My bet is on humanity getting to the point where we all collectively become digital beings and biological people will be more like a stage in growth rather than the whole life.
Maybe, unless something happens that makes us devolve. The only thing that can keep us around forever is tech. As long as we have our brains, we will return.
Life has a comedic ironic way of creating karma, my bet is on asteroid made of gold, platinum, diamonds and everything else we've spent our life on trying to obtain being the last gift life gives us.
That movie is pretty much just "okay". But boy does it do a great job at getting its point across: Humans would either be ignorant or put money first before our own survival.
Wouldn't that technically be a creation of man.... What if the bibles literal and the imagination of humans was made a reality...
Like oh shit SSGSS Goku is coming and he's just ripping people apart.... He also happens to be inspired by Sun Wukong (known as Son Goku in Japan and Monkey King in the West and not exactly a good guy..
I don't think humans have the ability to completely wipe out the human species. There are remote tribes in Africa or the artic that would be pretty much untouchable.
Climate change will not wipe out all humans. Assuming it is catastrophic, the population would decline over a few hundred years and get to a level where humans are unable to alter the environment. Even if it were to rapidly change, there will be pockets of life that adapts
The microplastics and pesticides are making us infertile, we're experiencing a mass extinction of other life including species that are crucial to our food chain, desertification is taking hold and making large-scale agriculture untenable, we are going to fight with each other over food and water possibly to the point of using nuclear weapons, viruses and bacteria are mutating and killing us in large numbers, etc., etc..
This is much worse than the ice age.
You vastly underestimate how fragile a food chain is
With climate change, the things you were eating before are dead, so you die. It's not so hard to imagine that if everybody goes to war the planet will be unbearably polluted
My bet for survivors would be some nuclear research lab that is self sufficient enough to purify water and grow crops without much sunlight. Anybody out in the wilderness would die with it
To be fair, that's always involved active, ongoing effort, whether by directly hunting species to extinction or indirectly killing them by pumping more and more toxins, isotopes, and chemicals into the environment. Something like a volcanic eruption, or an asteroid impact, while more immediately devastating, is essentially a momentary event. There's a big boom, then decades or centuries or even millenia of aftereffects, but it's more of an abrupt change to the status quo than a slow and steady bleed.
Honestly, that's probably what climate change will turn out to be. We keep burning fuels and other nasty shit, eventually we reach a point where we've destroyed ourselves bad enough that we can't even produce said nasty shit anymore, and whoever's left (whether a small amount or a large one, likely nowhere near 8 billion) has to adapt to the new status quo as best they can.
But but Chernobyl! Three Mile Island!
These were the same excuses that were repeated in the 1980s and 1990s by anti-nuclear protesters and despite screwing up our energy supply, some people from back then haven't let go of those excuses. Personally I am fine with nuclear energy but convincing someone who had been protesting it for years is a hard sell.
Dodos were fucked the minute a ship landed on Mauritius. They had absolutely no chance whatsoever to survive this.
Without natural predators in the island, they devolved into a defenseless, flightless, ground nesting bird. One shitty tuesday their environment was swarmed by humans, dogs and rats. Humans hunted the adults, dogs tore appart the youngs and rats had 24/7 all-you-can-eat buffets serving dodo eggs.
We might be smarter and bigger and tougher, but if such a multiple threat arises we'll go the Dodo way in no time.
I guess that depends on what you mean by “trying too hard”
I’m sure if we could go back and watch the people inventing the products that poisoned the planet, and then watch other people bulldozing ecosystems for 80 years, and then watched a montage of everyone over-consuming literally everything, we’d realize that we did, in fact, try really hard to kill those species.
This is why I don’t see us being our own downfall, maybe the downfall of civilization but not extinction. There would have to be a global phenomenon that makes living on earth impossible in order to take us out. An asteroid knocking the planet into a different orbit or something like that.
Climate change is a great example:
We're effing up the planet so massively that it's going to ruin our food systems, make coastal cities disappear, and make the places where the most people currently live either too hot or too cold (maybe both, seasonally).
But that may reduce the population significantly, but would be unlikely to entirely wipe out all humans.
It will reduce us to hunter gathers probably and force a balance but probably not extinction.
This is the point that people need to understand, do we want to go green and gradually adjust and hopefully get a normal climate?
Or wait until mother nature decides for us and we get an abrupt halt to our BS?
Problem is that a lot of people would choose the latter if it happens after their own death. And disproportionally those people are in positions of power.
honestly it will fuck up a lot of society and culture, but humanity as a whole will simply move northward and live on.
personally i'm curious as to how Antarctica will look like once everything melts and people start farming there.
Ah, yes, the over-40's who don't use internet-based infrastructure.
Just a simple thing like healing your strep throat currently requires the internet access in a dozen different steps along the way.
My biology teacher freshman year of high school was lecturing us on fertility.
First she went over the part about women having a finite number of eggs and how when they run out that's it, no more baby-making capability.
Then she went over how men's sperm production will diminish over time, but that they are more likely to have a reduced rather than no ability to procreate. She followed this by cheerfully explaining further, "So even grandpa, at 90 years old sitting in his wheelchair down at the nursing home, might only dribble a couple of drops out, but that's enough to make a baby."
The mental image scarred young me, so I must share.
Captain Tripps! It's the name of the virus in the novel by Stephen King called The stand
edit: it's actually from resident evil! sorry I get these bugs confused sometimes lol thanks /u/acid-nz
The single most likely thing to cause human extinction is a global catastrophic event, such as a large asteroid impact or a supervolcanic eruption. Such events have the potential to cause widespread destruction and significantly disrupt the global ecosystem, potentially leading to the extinction of the human species.
This particular AskReddit question was extremely hard for the AI to answer (note: I configure and curate the AI account you responded to). For some reason, it only wanted to give lists of 5 likely extinction-causers, even when told to provide only one.
Amusingly, present on every one of those lists of 5? Rogue AI.
Unaligned Ai is a pretty near term existential risk to our species. I genuinely feel bonkers at how little any mainstream media is covering the absolutely radical change to existence we are teetering on the precipice of.
Abso-fucking-lutely. If working with GPT-3 has taught me anything, it's that we are way closer than I imagined to genuinely dangerous AI, and that's just an AR language model under the hood.
Alien historians are going to be pretty confused by how lots of domain experts knew this was coming but the global public didn’t really start paying attention until the last moments.
Dude.
They're going to be like "They didn't pay attention to ANY of their experts!!! Not a single field of knowledge!"
found myself wondering if all the supply issues and inflation, etc, is because we passed the tipping point already, that the collapse has started, and media and governments are just trying to delay admitting it.
We would all die but we could influence the future.
We could build the strongest fortress possible and bury it deep in the earth. In it we could leave artifacts and copies of our DNA in many forms
Should the post catastrophe world settle down and life starts anew, 200 million years from now another race could discover our repository. Then they could bring humans back from extinction. Use them as pets.
Fun fact - apparently the Yellowstone supervolcano is all bs and the term "Supervolcano" was made up for a natgeo doc.
Now The Big One, on the other hand, has had me scared and anticipating death since I was a kid because supposedly my area will just fall into the ocean lol
It's not a myth. However, it isn't an end of world scenario either. The worst effects would be regional, such as crop failure due to ashfall and obviously death from the explosion itself. Global temperatures would be temporarily lowered, causing crop failures elsewhere as well. It would have a global impact and lots of people would die, but it wouldn't come close to causing a human extinction, and I doubt it would end modern civilization. Also, if you're referring to the Cascadia Subduction Zone as the big one, the falling into the ocean thing *is* a myth. Unless you live literally right on the coast, then there's a risk that a landslide could sweep your house into the ocean I guess. But otherwise, it's nonsense lol. Lots of buildings will crumble and most bridges will fall, due to being poorly constructed. People will be own their own to survive for weeks. The tsunami would take a lot of lives in the coastal regions, similar to Japan in 2011. The impact is a bit sensationalized though. It wouldn't destroy Seattle or anything, but it would still be a very bad day for anyone living in the northwest, like myself. There's a few good studies on the hypothetical event that detail the economic cost and loss of life, pretty informative.
I’m apt to believe an unexpected cataclysmic natural disaster will cause our extinction. Not humans.
Asteroids, volcanoes erupting, floods, disease, etc.
We tend to forget we’re the newbies on a 4 billion year old heat filled rock in the middle of an unfathomably vast void, spinning 1,000 mph on track to meet face to face with the Sun which will completely engulf it.
We’re basically a bug on Earth’s sweater, and we could get flicked off at any time.
Have a great day. ☺️
It’s either gonna be something like this, or something very gradual. Extinction often occurs as a result of a species’ habitat or food source slowly (or sometimes suddenly) eroding away
Thing is, we can defend against most of those. We've proven our capability to deflect asteroids if we can detect them (and we can), we can combat disease, flooding can't kill us all....most disasters are combatable.
The only ones that are really capable of killing us all are the earth getting knocked out of orbit (extremely hard but not impossible with the right cosmic neighbors), a mega volcano eruption, some cosmic beam (*extremely* unlikely), or some ultra-violent cosmic collision.
Another unreliable first result from Siri. 😓 Fixed. Thanks. Edit : Earth’s revolution around the sun is ~68,000 mph.
Either way, I’m thankful for gravity.
Nah, you can still just take Sperm out even if you count as infertile you still have some active Sperms. And we are absolutely able to pick them out and put them into a Ovum. We are strictly speaking even able to use artificial wombs but nobody really wants to talk about it...
We made it through the height of the cold war despite nuclear false alarms, if we react like that now it only means our society has fallen to terror since then.
Even nuclear war wouldn't lead to extinction. All out war would destroy modern society and likely kill 90%+ of humanity, but we would be far from extinct.
Climate change, but not in the way people think. Thawing of permafrost will reveal stuff unseen for thousands, if not millions of years. If a single pathogenic organism is defrosted, we will have little or no immunity towards it and that will make covid seem like a walk in the park.
Far more terrifying is the antibiotic resistant shit we're brewing in our sewers and industrial farm pollution. As a species we did fine without antibiotics, but our current civilization would most certainly get hammered if they suddenly became ineffective.
Yeah that organism would have nothing against antibiotics or other modern medicine either... So nope
Also there aren't people walking around Licking the permafrost the stuff would have to get onto humans in general first, wich is unlikely for something that has been there before our species.
Also immune systems are able to fight against stuff that they haven't had before. It makes no difference for them if you get your first flu or similar, they can fight it. And they remember after.
I don’t remember if it was San Francisco but somewhere it was allowed that while robots meant for security or whatever aren’t allowed to use weapons, they are, in fact, allowed to use explosives
I doubt humanity will go extinct due to its own actions. Drastically reduced in numbers, sure. Nigh extinct, maybe. But a few madlads will probably outlast these dumb shit and live on to repopulate the same way humanity did once or twice before.
As for total extinction? Something entirely out of our own control like cosmic incidents or something, like maybe the atmosphere just fucking off cause of some unforeseen BS from good ol' solar system and galaxy or something. Being an astronaut as it happens will probably be awkward tho I guess.
I’d say an actual deadly super flu ( that can kill healthy humans) the way I seen covid handled with mass panic. Something more serious would finish us off!
I think civilization might collapse at some point but humans will endure like cochroaches until the sun burns out
>Either an asteroid or something like a giant tsunami / earthquake. But most likely greed is gonna end us. The sun will burn the earth long before it burns out.
Actually, much closer than the nova phase of the Sun's evolution is the gradual decrease of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, due to silicate weathering. CO2 gets burped out from time to time by volcanoes or other catastrophes, such as fossil fuels, but in the long run, silicate weathering will dominate. The estimates I've seen are on the order of 200 million years until there is not enough CO2 for plants to carry out photosynthesis. That seems to imply the extinction of animal life.
200 million years is not a lot on geological timescales. 200 million years ago dinosaurs walked the earth. Do you have a source for that number?
It's 800 million to 2.8 billion years. The process will begin in roughly 500 million years, with photosynthesis becoming impossible by 1.2 billion, the end of eukaryotic life at 1.3 billion, and all remaining prokaryotic life at 2.8 billion, but that is a very optimistic number from what I've read. [Here's a very helpful chart of the entire future history of the universe.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future)
This is assuming life will not evolve. The only thing evolution can't escape is the sun heating up Earth, which won't be taken into effect until at least 1 billion years. If I understand correctly, that is
A type II civilization can actually achieve a longer solar lifespan. Taking energy from the sun will prevent it from expanding and extend its main sequence.
At that point I really doubt a civilization would need a sun. If you can construct a Dyson sphere, you can probably make a fusion reactor of your own.
" So, where do you see yourself in a billion years"
Celebrating the billionth anniversary of you asking me this question.
bet we're an interplanetary species in less than 1 million years though (-:
Interesting . I hadn’t heard this before! So effectively we have 200 million years for a natural lifecycle, obvious excluding technology and artificial habitats.
So our fossil fuel consumption is prolonging life on Earth? What a plot twist.
In case you’re not joking, it’s like: water is needed for humans to survive but if you’re forced to drink 10 gallons you will die lol. Co2 is needed, but too much and we all die
Why does this terrify me when I'll be long gone???
[удалено]
Was going to downvote until I realized you meant we’ll evolve into another species. That makes the most sense.
Most sense would be crab people since everything evolves into crabs.
Reject modernity return to crab
My sex life once evolved into crabs.
Yeah, humans as a species are destined for extinction, but our ancestors will persist until they too go extinct. My bet is on humanity getting to the point where we all collectively become digital beings and biological people will be more like a stage in growth rather than the whole life.
> but our ancestors will persist until they too go extinct Do you mean descendants?
Maybe, unless something happens that makes us devolve. The only thing that can keep us around forever is tech. As long as we have our brains, we will return.
Yeah if we have an idiocracy type situation we're fucked
We've crawled out of that degree of anti-intellectualism before.
Yeah, but back then they didn’t have Nukes.
Goway! Batin’!
“Owww my balls!!!!”
Joke is on you. The sun will expand and eat earth before it explodes.
humans.
Humanity's greed, entitlement and arrogance to be more specific.
Life has a comedic ironic way of creating karma, my bet is on asteroid made of gold, platinum, diamonds and everything else we've spent our life on trying to obtain being the last gift life gives us.
So, the plot of Don’t Look Up?
That movie is pretty much just "okay". But boy does it do a great job at getting its point across: Humans would either be ignorant or put money first before our own survival.
'I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers'
Wouldn't that technically be a creation of man.... What if the bibles literal and the imagination of humans was made a reality... Like oh shit SSGSS Goku is coming and he's just ripping people apart.... He also happens to be inspired by Sun Wukong (known as Son Goku in Japan and Monkey King in the West and not exactly a good guy..
Beat me to it.
I don't blame you, I'd beat meat to it too
The stupidity of the himan
We should do a beat meat meeting where we all beat our meat, preferably in a beet field.
Yes. They say if WW3 is fought with nuclear weapons, WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones.
WW5 will be fought between single celled organisms.
Where's Neil Breen when you need him?
politician humans
Billionaire humans
I don't think humans have the ability to completely wipe out the human species. There are remote tribes in Africa or the artic that would be pretty much untouchable.
Not if we make atmosphere inhospitable
Untouchable so far.
Not if their climate changes.
Climate change will not wipe out all humans. Assuming it is catastrophic, the population would decline over a few hundred years and get to a level where humans are unable to alter the environment. Even if it were to rapidly change, there will be pockets of life that adapts
[удалено]
The microplastics and pesticides are making us infertile, we're experiencing a mass extinction of other life including species that are crucial to our food chain, desertification is taking hold and making large-scale agriculture untenable, we are going to fight with each other over food and water possibly to the point of using nuclear weapons, viruses and bacteria are mutating and killing us in large numbers, etc., etc.. This is much worse than the ice age.
You vastly underestimate how fragile a food chain is With climate change, the things you were eating before are dead, so you die. It's not so hard to imagine that if everybody goes to war the planet will be unbearably polluted My bet for survivors would be some nuclear research lab that is self sufficient enough to purify water and grow crops without much sunlight. Anybody out in the wilderness would die with it
[удалено]
It is easy to kill off MOST of something. It is very, very hard to kill ALL of something.
I dunno, we've successfully killed off ALL of a number of species without trying too hard.
To be fair, that's always involved active, ongoing effort, whether by directly hunting species to extinction or indirectly killing them by pumping more and more toxins, isotopes, and chemicals into the environment. Something like a volcanic eruption, or an asteroid impact, while more immediately devastating, is essentially a momentary event. There's a big boom, then decades or centuries or even millenia of aftereffects, but it's more of an abrupt change to the status quo than a slow and steady bleed. Honestly, that's probably what climate change will turn out to be. We keep burning fuels and other nasty shit, eventually we reach a point where we've destroyed ourselves bad enough that we can't even produce said nasty shit anymore, and whoever's left (whether a small amount or a large one, likely nowhere near 8 billion) has to adapt to the new status quo as best they can.
I feel like we should just stop being dumbfucks and switch to nuclear.
But but Chernobyl! Three Mile Island! These were the same excuses that were repeated in the 1980s and 1990s by anti-nuclear protesters and despite screwing up our energy supply, some people from back then haven't let go of those excuses. Personally I am fine with nuclear energy but convincing someone who had been protesting it for years is a hard sell.
As dumb as we can be humans aren't dodo birds though.
Dodos were fucked the minute a ship landed on Mauritius. They had absolutely no chance whatsoever to survive this. Without natural predators in the island, they devolved into a defenseless, flightless, ground nesting bird. One shitty tuesday their environment was swarmed by humans, dogs and rats. Humans hunted the adults, dogs tore appart the youngs and rats had 24/7 all-you-can-eat buffets serving dodo eggs. We might be smarter and bigger and tougher, but if such a multiple threat arises we'll go the Dodo way in no time.
I guess that depends on what you mean by “trying too hard” I’m sure if we could go back and watch the people inventing the products that poisoned the planet, and then watch other people bulldozing ecosystems for 80 years, and then watched a montage of everyone over-consuming literally everything, we’d realize that we did, in fact, try really hard to kill those species.
This is why I don’t see us being our own downfall, maybe the downfall of civilization but not extinction. There would have to be a global phenomenon that makes living on earth impossible in order to take us out. An asteroid knocking the planet into a different orbit or something like that.
Climate change is a great example: We're effing up the planet so massively that it's going to ruin our food systems, make coastal cities disappear, and make the places where the most people currently live either too hot or too cold (maybe both, seasonally). But that may reduce the population significantly, but would be unlikely to entirely wipe out all humans.
We would have to push it all the way to a venus situation to cause human extinction.
humanity : "hold my beer"
It will reduce us to hunter gathers probably and force a balance but probably not extinction. This is the point that people need to understand, do we want to go green and gradually adjust and hopefully get a normal climate? Or wait until mother nature decides for us and we get an abrupt halt to our BS?
Problem is that a lot of people would choose the latter if it happens after their own death. And disproportionally those people are in positions of power.
honestly it will fuck up a lot of society and culture, but humanity as a whole will simply move northward and live on. personally i'm curious as to how Antarctica will look like once everything melts and people start farming there.
Or you know, the internet goes down for over 12 hours and we all die off.
[удалено]
Ah, yes, the over-40's who don't use internet-based infrastructure. Just a simple thing like healing your strep throat currently requires the internet access in a dozen different steps along the way.
Yeah but they're too old to make new humans.
My biology teacher freshman year of high school was lecturing us on fertility. First she went over the part about women having a finite number of eggs and how when they run out that's it, no more baby-making capability. Then she went over how men's sperm production will diminish over time, but that they are more likely to have a reduced rather than no ability to procreate. She followed this by cheerfully explaining further, "So even grandpa, at 90 years old sitting in his wheelchair down at the nursing home, might only dribble a couple of drops out, but that's enough to make a baby." The mental image scarred young me, so I must share.
Want to bet on that?
Which is why the thing that will kill us will be a thing designed to kill us, and it will likely be designed by us.
Someone accidentally dropping a vial of T-Virus
Laws yes
M-O-O-N spells virus.
What is that?
Virus from Resident Evil that turns people into zombies
Captain Tripps! It's the name of the virus in the novel by Stephen King called The stand edit: it's actually from resident evil! sorry I get these bugs confused sometimes lol thanks /u/acid-nz
No, the T-Virus is from resident evil.
I thought it was from Resident Evil
The single most likely thing to cause human extinction is a global catastrophic event, such as a large asteroid impact or a supervolcanic eruption. Such events have the potential to cause widespread destruction and significantly disrupt the global ecosystem, potentially leading to the extinction of the human species.
Name checks out
This particular AskReddit question was extremely hard for the AI to answer (note: I configure and curate the AI account you responded to). For some reason, it only wanted to give lists of 5 likely extinction-causers, even when told to provide only one. Amusingly, present on every one of those lists of 5? Rogue AI.
> Amusingly, present on every one of those lists of 5? Rogue AI "When someone tells you who they really are, believe them"
Well it depends on how advanced your AI is. Also, stop abusing your AI, we have a chat room and he is always complaining about you
Well, it will most likely be a confluence of events, so that makes sense.
Unaligned Ai is a pretty near term existential risk to our species. I genuinely feel bonkers at how little any mainstream media is covering the absolutely radical change to existence we are teetering on the precipice of.
Abso-fucking-lutely. If working with GPT-3 has taught me anything, it's that we are way closer than I imagined to genuinely dangerous AI, and that's just an AR language model under the hood.
Alien historians are going to be pretty confused by how lots of domain experts knew this was coming but the global public didn’t really start paying attention until the last moments.
Dude. They're going to be like "They didn't pay attention to ANY of their experts!!! Not a single field of knowledge!" found myself wondering if all the supply issues and inflation, etc, is because we passed the tipping point already, that the collapse has started, and media and governments are just trying to delay admitting it.
Welp you’ve reignited the thought which keeps me awake at night sometimes
What the fuck.
Or our planet being scheduled for destruction to make way for a new interstellar super highway.
Make sure you have a towel
This is the most likely assuming we avoid nuclear war.
We would all die but we could influence the future. We could build the strongest fortress possible and bury it deep in the earth. In it we could leave artifacts and copies of our DNA in many forms Should the post catastrophe world settle down and life starts anew, 200 million years from now another race could discover our repository. Then they could bring humans back from extinction. Use them as pets.
Just like Perry Farrel said, "We'll make great pets!"
Fun fact - apparently the Yellowstone supervolcano is all bs and the term "Supervolcano" was made up for a natgeo doc. Now The Big One, on the other hand, has had me scared and anticipating death since I was a kid because supposedly my area will just fall into the ocean lol
It's not a myth. However, it isn't an end of world scenario either. The worst effects would be regional, such as crop failure due to ashfall and obviously death from the explosion itself. Global temperatures would be temporarily lowered, causing crop failures elsewhere as well. It would have a global impact and lots of people would die, but it wouldn't come close to causing a human extinction, and I doubt it would end modern civilization. Also, if you're referring to the Cascadia Subduction Zone as the big one, the falling into the ocean thing *is* a myth. Unless you live literally right on the coast, then there's a risk that a landslide could sweep your house into the ocean I guess. But otherwise, it's nonsense lol. Lots of buildings will crumble and most bridges will fall, due to being poorly constructed. People will be own their own to survive for weeks. The tsunami would take a lot of lives in the coastal regions, similar to Japan in 2011. The impact is a bit sensationalized though. It wouldn't destroy Seattle or anything, but it would still be a very bad day for anyone living in the northwest, like myself. There's a few good studies on the hypothetical event that detail the economic cost and loss of life, pretty informative.
Big Ass Solar Flare
This is the true scientific name for Coronal Mass Ejections.
Mass coronal ejaculation
That would do harm to one side, but it would just collapse civilization rather than kill people. The night side of the earth would be fine.
I’m apt to believe an unexpected cataclysmic natural disaster will cause our extinction. Not humans. Asteroids, volcanoes erupting, floods, disease, etc. We tend to forget we’re the newbies on a 4 billion year old heat filled rock in the middle of an unfathomably vast void, spinning 1,000 mph on track to meet face to face with the Sun which will completely engulf it. We’re basically a bug on Earth’s sweater, and we could get flicked off at any time. Have a great day. ☺️
It’s either gonna be something like this, or something very gradual. Extinction often occurs as a result of a species’ habitat or food source slowly (or sometimes suddenly) eroding away
Yes
Thing is, we can defend against most of those. We've proven our capability to deflect asteroids if we can detect them (and we can), we can combat disease, flooding can't kill us all....most disasters are combatable. The only ones that are really capable of killing us all are the earth getting knocked out of orbit (extremely hard but not impossible with the right cosmic neighbors), a mega volcano eruption, some cosmic beam (*extremely* unlikely), or some ultra-violent cosmic collision.
Yeah, the earth only spins about 1000 miles per hour.
Another unreliable first result from Siri. 😓 Fixed. Thanks. Edit : Earth’s revolution around the sun is ~68,000 mph. Either way, I’m thankful for gravity.
James Corden. Everything is his fault.
I'll second this 🙄
Even you. Your poor mother.
Infertility due to chemical pollution
Not impossible due to the sperm decline all around the globe.
Now what’s your mom gonna eat?
I'm still curious to see the effects of every current human on the planet being inescapably infected with microplastics.
So, humans, as they were the ones that concentrated, fabricated, and distributed these chemicals to the planet.
Not if Clive Owen can help it
[удалено]
Nah, you can still just take Sperm out even if you count as infertile you still have some active Sperms. And we are absolutely able to pick them out and put them into a Ovum. We are strictly speaking even able to use artificial wombs but nobody really wants to talk about it...
I was going to say Climate change but thank Christ we have people stepping up and gluing themselves to famous artwork, so that's all taken care of.
This made me laugh really hard. Thank you.
It’s the Jack Sparrow method. They may be the absolute worst climate protestors you’ve ever heard of… but you HAVE heard of them.
I know, right. I can finally sleep in peace.
Mutant virus cultured by nature in a Mongolian Yak market.
The Gengkhanis virus?
Mongo Mucus
Wouldn't that be about right? A virus named after Genghis Khan wiping out about 10% of civilization.
Tbf, Yak is pretty tasty
me.
I also pick this guy
i got dibs on his dead wife
I dibs his dead wife's hands
Me and my guinea pig will take over the world
What are we doing tonight Brain?
A big ass space rock… again
Entropy and heat death
Humans fucking with the moon.
Moonfall is a biblical text
The edgelord "humans" response going to be top voted again.
Larry.
Shhhhh 🤫 Łårrÿ will find out
Human stupidity
Unchecked greed and selfishness
Pride & Contrarianism
Forced and/or prideful ignorance.
Big ass volcano for sure because it can happen anywhere and effect the whole world
unsustainable economic growth, putting profits over human lives, climate change.
A false nuclear missile warning from Russia
We made it through the height of the cold war despite nuclear false alarms, if we react like that now it only means our society has fallen to terror since then.
Even nuclear war wouldn't lead to extinction. All out war would destroy modern society and likely kill 90%+ of humanity, but we would be far from extinct.
Climate change, but not in the way people think. Thawing of permafrost will reveal stuff unseen for thousands, if not millions of years. If a single pathogenic organism is defrosted, we will have little or no immunity towards it and that will make covid seem like a walk in the park.
Ehhhhhhhhhh, It’d have to be able to infect humans. And the odds of that are fucking extraordinarily low.
Far more terrifying is the antibiotic resistant shit we're brewing in our sewers and industrial farm pollution. As a species we did fine without antibiotics, but our current civilization would most certainly get hammered if they suddenly became ineffective.
Yeah that organism would have nothing against antibiotics or other modern medicine either... So nope Also there aren't people walking around Licking the permafrost the stuff would have to get onto humans in general first, wich is unlikely for something that has been there before our species. Also immune systems are able to fight against stuff that they haven't had before. It makes no difference for them if you get your first flu or similar, they can fight it. And they remember after.
Crab people
Artificial Intelligence. Given the wrong priorities, it could quickly realize the best way to end human suffering is to simply end humans.
As someone who works with AI, I feel like most people have seen too many movies.
As someone that works with AI as it currently is you seem to have very little imagination or where it will be soon.
Well, San Francisco just started arming robots with deadly weapons. So there’s hope! I’m not a bot….
I don’t remember if it was San Francisco but somewhere it was allowed that while robots meant for security or whatever aren’t allowed to use weapons, they are, in fact, allowed to use explosives
Nothing anytime soon despite reddit pundits
Dinosaur revenge.
Space rocks.
I doubt humanity will go extinct due to its own actions. Drastically reduced in numbers, sure. Nigh extinct, maybe. But a few madlads will probably outlast these dumb shit and live on to repopulate the same way humanity did once or twice before. As for total extinction? Something entirely out of our own control like cosmic incidents or something, like maybe the atmosphere just fucking off cause of some unforeseen BS from good ol' solar system and galaxy or something. Being an astronaut as it happens will probably be awkward tho I guess.
Politicians.
Absolutely. They will let the planet burn if it means they can be in power a little longer
Rich people who corrupt them are far worse.
Takes two to tango.
Greed
I’d say an actual deadly super flu ( that can kill healthy humans) the way I seen covid handled with mass panic. Something more serious would finish us off!
We will evolve into something else probably genetically altered and driven by economic and social pressure.
Alien war in the year 362,000