Simple question - How will humans become extinct? Google becoming Skynet Virus / Disease that kills everyone Earthly Nartural Disaster - Earthquakes, Hurricanes, Droughts, etc. Unearthly Natural Disaster - Asteroid, Sun exploding, etc. Kill each other off with wars, bombs, etc. Running out of water, land, oil, etc Aliens invading and seizing control of the planet The ending prophesied in my preferred religion (Jesus fire bombs, etc) Something supernatural but nonreligious - magic, dragons, etc. Other Had this debate with my wife yesterday. I said Skynet.
It's a sad commentary on the human condition that out of the 10 choices, 3 or 4 of them (and the most likely ones, to boot) are largely or entirely self-inflicted (though I suppose Skynet / super bug / doomsday virus / etc. can also be viewed as a form of evolution). Has there been another notable species that's managed to wipe itself out?
Super Herpes. Its real people. You better start covering your toilet seat with 4 layers of TP before you sit down in public restrooms. I need to build a bunker.
Google is already preparing for the singularity and how we will be able to extend human life infinitely by becoming one with machines. The ultimate goal is to not create a super intelligence that will overtake us, but to create a superior intelligence that will become a part of our very bodies. This is already happening with DNA hacking, nanobots and other methods of humanity starting to become one with technology. We have an inherent understanding that technology evolves at a much higher rate than humanity and therefore we must either become one with it or be destroyed by it. The main question will be how long can this technology be kept out of the hands of evil, and how quickly will the wrong hands be able to destroy what is left of us?
Expecting a random asteroid to blind side us and Bruce Willis will be too old to do anything about it
I'm pretty sure George W Bush has had all of this figured out for a long time already. Look to him for answers.
Not sure if that would be supernatural or other, but I understand that the manbearpig problem is super serial. I've read and seen enough scifi to know that this will only work until the super intelligence "wakes up" and realizes it is better off without any part of us.
We'll all be sterile from the chemical stew we dump in our water, land and air. Or maybe that'll take too long and other species dies off and turns this planet into a last man standing affair where we rely on soylent green to feed each other. I think people are resilient enough to miss a billion or two people, but I'm more doubtful of the promise an increased quality of life with every successive generation.
Much like cockroaches I don't think any of those things would actually end human life, disease, resources, a nuclear incident etc. would probably leave isolated pockets of humanity somewhere. So, I checked un Earthly event thinking it would probably be some kind of a cosmic ray event coming from a super nova a little too close. But the time frame and proximity for that kind of event really makes it pretty remote on the human scale, like a billion years +or-. I think the actual most likely cause for the end of Homo Sapiens is that we will evolve ourselves out of existence. We think of evolution as a purely biological process but humankind is on the brink of a new evolution, engineered evolution. The advances in bionic engineering and artificial intelligence are going to become exponentially faster and in ways we can't envision yet. It's pretty easy to see that already human beings are making themselves obsolete, we don't need large populations for farming now and manufacturing in the near future. Once machines start designing and making themselves the role for large populations of people will be done. If machines are ensuring that people can weather old age without having multiple children, the world population will start to drop. You might end up with something like only 1 billion people or so on the planet. From there it will probably be the people themselves that start changing, to become more machine like, less vulnerable to their environment, longer living, even immortal. I think the driving force behind it will be space travel. Right now, the human body is just too fragile and demanding to hold up under the rigors,and requirements of interstellar travel. And since preservation of the species would always eventually require leaving this solar system, our purpose in science will be in that direction. I read an article this week (but can't remember how to find it now) about how many generations it took man to go from the wheel to the car to the moon but of course it decreases exponentially so think about how we have come in the last 1000 years and apply that to the next 1000 years by a factor of 1000 or so. We will look like monkeys with a jaw bone to them.
Global conflict over diminishing resources. You ever see that game of Civ 2 that went on forever? Something like that.
Asteroid gonna knock the species back to the stone age, then the sun gonna asplode an it's GG universe.
There would most likely be a revolution or two for a technological singularity to happen. Advances like augmentation or gene manipulation will only be accessible to an extreme minority. Once that happens, the group generally becomes more exclusive than inclusive. I for one can't imagine 7 billion, let alone 1 billion people 10 times stronger and smarter than the above average person. Would we have 2 classes or several layers to duke it out? Probably the latter, a la Brave New World As for Skynet, I'm in IT consultancy and my co-worker once quipped with the garbage code and bugs we see in our clients, we're far far off from a technocracy...
We will eventually destroy the environment enough to where aliens will come to save the planet by killing us off.
Well I only could put 10 options. My next was going to be: "McHale takes out Lin for Harden while Rockets are on defense with 3 seconds left in game 7 of the Finals with Rockets up by 1, even though Lin had been playing solid defense. Harden ball watches and his man catches the in-bounds pass at the basket and lays it in to win the game and championship. LOFs explode."
