How might Humans be the Cause of their Own Extinction?
Ten reasons humans will be extinct in 1,000 years.
10.Gray goo
First popularized by nano tech engineer Kim Eric Drexler in 1989. The gray goo scenario imagined self-replicating nanobots running amok.
This is how the apocalypse plays out. A scientist makes a single man about 1,000 times smaller than a hare with the nanobot has the ability to self-replicate. Once every 1,000 seconds if they continued this exponential replication in just 12 hours there would be eight trillion, and in two days they would weigh more than the earth to us.
This multitude of microscopic robots would seem like an all-consuming gray goo hence the scenarios name this nanotechnology as a field is just starting out but by 2025 it's estimated that the industry will be worth 173 billion dollar,
In 2013 a team successfully made nanobots capable of folding DNA molecules inside a cockroach while the scientific community remains skeptical of the gray goo hypothesis.
If you take 1,000 years, and the fact that it would only require one nano bot to start with it almost seems inevitable.
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9.Solar activity in 1859.
A scientist noticed something strange was going on when northern lights were seen as far as Cuba. A person named Carrington put two and two together and realized that the pretty light show was the result of a particularly powerful solar flare. But if this happened today, it would be a different story.
It would knock out GPS wrecking havoc for aircraft navigation and the financial system was used as satellite clocks Flares can also be followed by coronal mass ejections which send a dose of energetic charged particles directly our way.
A powerful storm would send a power surge through electrical transformers blowing them up, and taking down the power grid. Cities would lose power heating, and water while food, and medicines would gradually be eradicated.
This is all pretty bad. A lot of people would die but it's not exactly an extinction that's because of the earth would be protected from the worst of it by the magnetosphere however, the Earth's magnetic poles periodically switch and when they do, some scientists think that the magnetic shield weakens or even disappears temporarily.
Physicist John P Fla proposed that the extinction of the Neanderthals was due to a weak and magnetosphere given that would do a pole reversal. Now it seems entirely possible that we could be blasted by dangerous particles with no protection in the next 1,000 years.
8.Pandemic history
It is littered with gigantic diseases that swept huge swathes of people off the face of the planet. The Black Death killed up to 60% of Europe and the Spanish flu of 1918 killed up to 100 million.
It's only natural that bird flu or Ebola or something else will mutate to become a human killing machine.
This is even more worrying now that we live in a world connected by technology, and air travel that allows for efficient global transmission but in spite of this, philosopher Nick Bostrom argues that some of the humanity is still likely to survive.
What we may not survive is a man-made pathogen specifically designed to be extra deadly existing viruses could be modified in a laboratory, and accidentally escaped work is already underway in Australia where scientists are morphing mouse books into the deadliest smallpox which has a 95 percent mortality rate.
If left untreated there is the prospect of bio-terrorism. Anyone can buy the genome for Ebola for a few thousand dollars.
It could take just one outbreak of one super virus to put a stop to humanity.
7.Super- Volcano
Super volcanic eruptions coincided with the mass extinction events 250 million, and 66 million years ago.
Here's where you might want to be worried. Immense pressure built up under the Earth's crust creating a giant pool of magma, and when it finally breaks through you get a super volcanic eruption.
Such an explosion propels over 1,000 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere that's about a quarter of the volume of the Grand Canyon.
Such a quantity effectively blocks out the Sun for several years, and causes a so-called volcanic winter that can decrease the global temperature by 10 degrees Celsius with obvious catastrophic consequences for life.
A mild version of this happened in 1816 the year without a summer after the eruption of Mount Tambora.
The Yellowstone Caldera in the USA is unlikely culprit the chances that it will erupt in the next thousand years can be estimated to be one in 730 which is roughly the same as be dealt a full house in poker.
Since we can currently only predict an eruption there are a few weeks in advance. It's not clear how well we can protect our food supply, and ourselves.
6.Gamma-ray bursts
It's not just the more mainstream super volcanoes that get all the mass extinction action.
There are also the less heard of gamma-ray bursts. They're created when a supernova goes supernova itself, and you get to face some hyper-nova.
These explosions of high-energy radiate can contain as much energy is the summer limit in ten billion years, and when they're pointed directly in life the results aren't pretty.
Astronomer Phil Plait describes huge portions of Ozone being obliterated as well as nitrogen in our air being oxidized into smoke that would then fall down as acid rain in the worst case scenario.
He says, model showed that this would result in mass extinctions.
A star called WR 104 are too close for comfort neighbor of ours that also happens to be pointed right at us. We know that it's on the brink of exploding, but we don't know when exactly.
It could be in 1,000 years but it could even be tonight.
5.Artificial intelligence
If Terminator i Robot, and the matrix are anything to go by we might as well come into our future robot overlords.
Right now these stories may currently be the stuff of science fiction but according to some of the world's greatest minds they are a deadly possibility technology is getting better, and better all the time almost exponentially. So this should also hold for artificial intelligence.
There is a point known as the singularity, when a super intelligence is created that is able to create even more advanced technologies than humans can understand leading to runaway progress in such a scenario there is no reason to believe that the super intelligence would be benevolent to us, and in fact they might not even be neutral.
Stephen Hawking is warned that they say I could out-compete humans driving us to extinction, and others have claimed that they could be led to destroy us if they misinterpreted their intended function that is to aid humanity.
4.Nuclear war
14900 that's how many nuclear weapons are thought to exist today, each with the capability of raising an entire city and killing millions of people for reference.
There are just four thousand four hundred cities on earth, so you can already ate the whole planet and have ten thousand spare while you watch firestorms rage in the atmosphere in 70 or so short years.
Since the invention of the bomb, we have already come worryingly close to a nuclear holocaust on numerous occasions from the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis to Norwegian scientists studying the Northern Lights with the rocket various incidents have nearly precipitated the end of man.
The end of man just how many times can we get lucky though while nuclear arsenals are down from no time high of 65,000.
A nuclear-free world seems almost unimaginable to most. A poll of experts gave a one in 100, chance that a nuclear human extinction would happen in the next 100 years with 1000 years hard to imagine.
Some nations and conflicts that could arise do we really believe that no one would ever push the button.
3.Asteroid
Sixty six million years ago a colossal asteroid struck the earth, and it's most likely to have been the cause of the dinosaurs' extinction.
Another asteroid like this will hit earth but when there are of course lumps have rock hurtling through the darkness of space that we don't see.
But one dangerous asteroid we do know about is Bentham, and it's thought that it may collide with earth sometime in the late 22nd century.
Scientists actually launched a probe in 2016 to stake out or adversary, and work out if it could be redirected. So what happens if been who does hit the earth.
It's around 500 meters across, and would impact with the force of around 100 times the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima the result would be a major natural disaster covering an area the size of the US but not one that would wipe humans out.
For that you would need an asteroid that has multiple kilometers across which would turn the sky into a sort of red- hot glowing lava, and while it seems that we have tracked out nearly all the largest asteroids there's always the chance that an undiscovered one could smash into us out of the blue.
2.Global Warming
Ninety- seven percent or more of scientists believe that global warming is happening but how bad can it get well?
The answer is very bad. Temperature rises ice caps melted, water rising, habitats destroyed, animals, and pods extinct, and that's just with most reviews only projecting up to 2100.
So looking at the next 1,000 years is challenging to study so that actually make predictions up to the Year 2300. The sea level rising as much as five meters, and the global average temperature rising more than 12 degrees Celsius this would render over half the Earth's landmass uninhabitable.
The average human body would not be able to cool itself down, and would die of heat exhaustion if enough isn't done to curb greenhouse emissions.
Who knows how much of the planet would be left by the year 3000.
1.Probability and the snowball effect
These are a lot of scary scenarios, but just how likely is it that any of them will happen in the next 1,000 years as it turns out even today, you're around ten times more likely to die as a result of a human extinction event
than a car crash.
So give humanity a millennium. An extinction starts to look like a pretty safe bet. This is partly due to the so- called snowball effect.
If any one of the events happens they create a situation where humans are more exposed to further existential misfortune for if an asteroid hits, and wipes out most of the humanity. Those left will be more susceptible to a pandemic, and ecological collapse.
So here are the numbers, the chances, we will survive the next 100 years:
1.Ninety percent according to estimates by the British government the next 500 years.
2.Fifty to seventy percent according to philosopher john Leslie, and cosmologists sir Martin Rees the next 1000 years unless we escape the earth.
3.Zero percent according to Stephen Hawking.
So those are our 10 reasons humans will be extinct in 1,000 years.
Don't worry though you've still got plenty of time.