Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/24/humanity-isnt-likely-to-exti.html
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If humans have managed to survive the Arctic and the desert before we can do so again. It will suck but we are a stubborn species.
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It’s not the extinction of humanity I’m worried about. We’ll survive at all costs, even if it means being reduced to cannibalism or eating some lab-grown nutrient gruel. It’s the disappearance of other living things I worry about. And also the collapse of civilization and the necessary infrastructure to keep people from dying of impacted teeth or infected toenails.
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SETI folks are such optimists.
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Our current level of human infestation of the Earth is an anomaly.
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Quote: "although lethal, nearby gamma-ray bursts are also very rare. We might never see such an event in all the future history of humankind. "
This is a ridiculous statement because if there ever were a Gama Ray burst in the future history of mankind it would be the end of human history, and so the statement is meaningless as written.
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You know how I think we’ll go: when we start watering our crops with Branwdo and there aren’t any cryogenically preserved individuals to help us 
Seriously, though. Weren’t we down to about 1,000 individuals after Toba in 70,000 BC?
Another note: Seveneves by Stephenson is a great read.
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I was about to say.
Seveneves is a somewhat bizarre novel, in that the precipitating Event is never explained, and also in that a lot of really spectacularly dumb evil-ness is involved in reducing the human race down to seven genomes available. The combination of those, especially, felt contrived.
But Stephenson uses the contrivance to lean hard into one claim: that even THAT level of threat would still see us come back, changed but strong, and indeed be able to use our smarts to rebuild whole species and biomes.
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Given what I’ve seen in the past few years, I’m starting to think you can just say “human-ness”.
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Earth’s to do list:
- Get rid of all nuclear weapons.
- Stop dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
- Preserve and protect the earth’s biosphere.
- Educate the human population towards a more logical and benevolent trajectory.
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I thought Seveneves was a really interesting mix in that the ideas and set pieces Stephenson was exploring were pretty interesting, but his handle on how actual human beings act seems to be almost completely absent.
spoilers
The notion that humans would remain in seven distinct genetic groups after thousands of years living together in space stations does not exactly square with what we know about how humans work, but it does square with an unfortunate tendency to write people as racial archetypes rather than people. A lot of the story wouldn’t read any differently if the characters had their names replace by “Icy Russian,” “Asian Woman,” White Tech Entrepreneur."
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That. Human extinction is unlikely, unless we really do manage to trigger runaway warming that turns Earth into Venus (climate models suggest this is really hard to achieve). But civilization is very fragile. Somewhere around the region of +2°C of global average warming, the food (and water) riots will be so bad governments will fall, and the ensuing waves of refugees will start a cascade that brings down one government after another.
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Obviously we are going to live through climate change. Nuclear war, though? I get that the nuclear stockpile isn’t enough to literally incinerate the entire face of the earth, but the article doesn’t seem to deal with fallout. I’d like to get some sense of just how heavily irradiated the planet would be, and whether continuing to live in such conditions was actually plausible.
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How so? If the human race goes extinct before one happens, we will never see one. If not, we will, although it will be the last thing we see.
Right?
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