In this article, we are going to discuss ten unsettling ways humans could go extinct.
Number 10. Not Enough Population Growth
Overpopulation is always advanced as a problem for human civilization because we could go through a population correction. From Malthus's writing in the late 18th century to scholars today, it’s been predicted that there is a limit to what earth can handle and provide for. This may be a bit alarmist. Malthus’s prediction of population corrections was a bit spotty. Today, we can build space colonies and expand out to take advantage of the solar system's resources. Still, population ultimately does present challenges in any environment. But maybe in a way that wasn’t widely foreseen.
Our advancing civilizations are that in the most developed countries, as development occurs, birth rates seem to drop. Assuming that will also be the case for currently developing nations, then there could come a time when people voluntarily reproduce below replacement levels. If the entire planet reproduces at the rate of countries currently exhibiting the lowest levels of population growth, it’s possible that the human species could go extinct in a matter of centuries simply from a global desire to have fewer children.
Number 9. Too much population growth
On the other hand, nothing says that global birth rates won’t instead start to rise in the future. There may already be some indicators that the populations of some developed nations are starting to rise again. If the population drops in some countries during the 20th century were an anomaly, the overall population would continue to rise. And rise it has, in 1800, the earth had about a billion people living on it. It took more than a century for that to double. But since the 1930s, it’s risen at increasingly higher rates to the current level of roughly 7.5 billion. This means increasing resource use to support all those people, and just how high of a population can be sustained without becoming multiple-planet species is ultimately unknown but thought to be around 12 billion people at current technological levels. But, increasingly advanced technology can extend this. But could this trend cause our extinction?
Not directly, but there would be population corrections. But the problems inherent with feeding and keeping people alive on a truly overpopulated planet with no more resources to provide does introduce drivers for things like nuclear wars breaking out over resources, or out of control climate change brought on by such high population numbers, or greater chances for pandemic diseases, all of which could cause extinction.
Number 8. Post-Humanism
Jellyfish are odd creatures. They don’t really have things like eyes, or ears, or even brains, at least as we define them. So what happens if you take a jellyfish and you augment it with laser weaponry, armor, a brain custom-built for battle, teach it to master martial arts and shuriken throwing stars, and then unleash it on unsuspecting humanity? At what point will scientists no longer consider it to be a jellyfish? That works for us too. Humans are moving in the direction of technological advancement, and this has and will continue to change our very existence. Things like connectivity through the internet have revolutionized humanity in a short time. We have literally addicted ourselves to brain prosthetics over the course of my lifetime, the cellphones. Now medical science looks to advanced prosthetics and even direct brain interfaces to solve humanity’s medical problems.
But at some point, there comes a time when technology becomes better than what evolution originally gave us. In principle, prosthetic limbs eventually could outperform biological ones. This is the cyborg problem. Do we augment ourselves with technology that is superior to biology? That is a question that’s quickly coming at us. But say for a moment we go with widespread augmentation, such as we did with tattoos. That’s a body modification, and they are currently ubiquitous and have been since ancient times. Say technological augmentation goes that route, and everyone becomes cyborgs. At what point are we no longer biological? When will scientists declare homo sapiens extinct?
Number 7. The Silent Death
One of the major mysteries of the history of life on earth exactly happened to this planet about 450 million years ago during the Ordovician-Silurian extinction events. This one was weird and stood apart in the fossil record from most other extinction events in this world. In this case, deep water marine life wasn’t that badly affected compared to shallow water dwellers, who were hit extremely hard. In the case of the deepwater animals, they tend to have more restricted habitats, which usually disfavors a species during an extinction event.
Possibilities include a nearby gamma-ray burst or an uncharacteristically powerful solar flare. A weaker version of this may have happened around the year 775 that did not appear to have catastrophic effects on life on earth. Records from England recount the appearance of a red crucifix in the sky, which sounds suspiciously like an aurora borealis. But tree ring data from this period record a spike in carbon 14, likely caused by a massive solar flare. These mysteries may never be solved, but whatever the cause, the point is that it could happen again if it happened once.
Number 6. Natural Climate Change
Climate change is something we hear a lot about, but usually in the sense of anthropogenic climate change. Climate change is also something that, atleast locally, can happen very rapidly in nature. But earth’s climate has always changed, going from warm periods to ice ages, and possibly even the planet almost entirely freezing over at one point. Even Antarctica has in the past been host to steamy temperatures and even palm trees and dinosaurs as the continents drifted. But if earth once almost completely froze over in a snowball earth event, then could that happen again and force the extinction of humanity?
Thankfully, such a process would be slow, and one thing human technology can do is create greenhouse gases, in which case excess atmospheric carbon dioxide would then be useful. And in fact, there may already be enough heat-trapping gases being put into the atmosphere to prevent the next ice age, which is predicted to otherwise occur in about 50,000 years. But, at some point, too much is too much.
Number 5. Supervolcanoes
Earth is no stranger to volcanism. It’s with us today and has been with us since this planet’s crust cooled. Most of the time, it’s a natural disaster that, while it can cost huge amounts of lives and property damage, they aren’t usually something that can end our civilization. Usually, on occasion, Earth’s volcanism has gone completely wild and produced eruption events, such as the Siberian Traps, that were so severe that they caused mass extinctions. Today, we still face the possibility of a supervolcanic eruption, such as the Toba supervolcano, that may once have almost caused our extinction.
Today, the threat of supervolcanos exists in several areas of the world, including Yellowstone in the US. While it’s statistically unlikely to happen on any given day, it’s a risk over time. If and when such an eruption does occur, it could be so severe that it could constitute a mass extinction event of humans.
Number 4. Interstellar Impactors
This is a relatively new variant on the asteroid impact possibility, but with a further spooky technological possibility attached. The idea of an asteroid impact ending human civilization is nothing new. But that’s something that until now has been confined to our solar system in scope. Something disturbs objects in the outer solar system, and then they come into the inner solar system, and occasionally, one hits earth and causes a mass extinction. But the outer solar system isn’t the only place these objects could come from. As the passage of the first known interstellar object through the solar system became evident last year, and it passed fairly close to the earth, it’s being realized that objects moving at very high speed coming from elsewhere in the galaxy can enter the solar system, and potentially hit the earth and end human civilization.
The thing is, a small one may have recently hit us. A paper by Avi Loeb and Amir Siraj of Harvard detail that a meteorite that entered the earth’s atmosphere in 2014 was of interstellar origin. Using data from a catalog of detected meteorite falls compiled by the Center for Near-Earth Object studies using US government sensors, they found a meteorite that entered the earth’s atmosphere on a hyperbolic trajectory, suggesting that it came from outside the solar system. And it did so at some great speed, about 134,200 miles per hour. The object is estimated only to have been about 3 feet in diameter and posed no threat to human civilization. It does open up the possibility that interstellar rocks might be found here on earth in the form of meteorites, which is certainly tantalizing from the point of view that we could analyze something here on earth that originated from across the galaxy, but it does raise a point. What if much larger interstellar objects hit earth? These objects, if they prove common, are potentially even scarier than solar system asteroids.
They could hit earth at much higher speeds and greater energy, meaning that relatively small objects are still hazardous. Thankfully, they probably don’t hit the earth that often, though we don’t know that for sure. But what if someone intentionally targeted one at us? There are now speculative methods where a malicious alien civilization could toss a rock, or even a planet, at us at relativistic speed and not just end human civilization but blow the planet into smithereens. This kind of weapon may or may not be practical over great distances, this is very new stuff on the speculative table, but it’s food for thought.
Number 3. Nicoll-Dyson Destruction
It’s been said that one of the reasons we don’t see type III civilizations encasing an entire galaxy’s stars in Dyson Spheresis that they are so dangerous that they should be galactically declared illegal. This is because, as with many technologies, it doesn’t just have to be a method of peaceful energy generation. It can also be easily weaponized. And it represents one of the most potent weapons possible in the universe, enough to destroy vast swaths of a galaxy.
The idea is simple. Build a Dyson sphere or swarm around a star, modified with a hole to direct the star’s energy, focus it on a planet, and that planet will be destroyed. Anyone on that planet wouldn’t know a thing about it until the beam hit, and in principle, could be used at great distances. Any civilization possessing such an array could effectively hold the rest of the galaxy hostage, including us. In short, it would effectively be a planetary extinction device.
Number 2. Solar Flares and the Technology Trap
The sun is incredibly stable. It provides life on earth with energy and has done so for billions of years and will continue to do so long into the future, but not permanently. However, over very long periods of time, the sun does change. It is growing in luminosity very slowly, but there will come the point where it will cook earth and cause the extinction of not only humans if we’re still around, but the extinction of all life on earth. Thankfully, that’s a long way off, but the sun can do something that would profoundly disrupt human civilization right now, and if the wrong things happen here on earth, it could also contribute to or cause our extinction. These are solar flares. Most of the sun’s flares are directed harmlessly into space.
Even if one hits us, we’re protected by our magnetosphere, and life itself is not usually affected by the flares. Indeed if one hit us head-on tomorrow, the animals wouldn’t know anything happened, and in the past, humans didn’t know about them when they hit other than maybe observing bright auroras. But our technology is very vulnerable, and that’s bad news for human civilization. Imagine if everything suddenly stopped working. Your cellphone, car, refrigerator, or ability to pay for goods with a debit card. The food transport would be halted in its tracks, meaning that the only food supply you have is what you have on hand or what you can loot. Most people in the US, for example, typically keep less than three days worth of food on hand. Most of us are at all times mere days from the beginning of starvation. It’s unlikely that we could get everything back up and running in such a doomsday scenario in time to prevent massive amounts of death. The skills that allow for industrial food production, for example, the tractors, the equipment, the fertilizers, and so on, aren’t viable anymore.
This means we go back to methods of farming that most people have no longer have any idea how to do. In other words, this wasn’t a problem a century ago, but now being dependent on technological methods of farming, we would have a severe problem. Add in the social upheaval that would undoubtedly follow the solar flare and the failure of most technology, and it could be that some event could come along concurrent with the aftermath that triggers extinction. Indeed it seems likely that the one piece of technology that’s probably well hardened against events like solar flares are the nuclear weapons.
But if nothing like that happens in the aftermath, it could be that we’ll see a huge population contraction, but not an extinction of the species. With some luck, people would survive that know how to do it. And, it’s worth noting that there are still people on this earth, such as the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, that are uncontacted and still live in pre-stone age conditions. For them, the day after the solar flare would be a day like any other.
Number 1. The Known Unknowns
This is more of a class of speculative methods of human extinction. It’s anyone’s guess just how possible these are, but it illustrates that we could go extinct from something we haven’t yet thought of, or at least fully understand. One example is an encounter with an extraterrestrial artificial intelligence entirely bent on accomplishing whatever purpose it originally built. The famous example here is If it were originally designed to manufacture paper clips using the raw materials of the universe. If it encountered earth and us, it would achieve the end of making as many paper clips as possible by disassembling and converting the planet. Another is a strange matter. This is a hypothetical material made up of quarks, that if it actually exists, could be extremely dangerous.
If certain thinking about the strange matter is correct, in this case, called a strangelet. Earth coming into contact with it would result in earth’s matter and all life on it being converted into the strange matter along with a release of energy. Earth would be left, after a time, a hot mass of strange matter. And it’s always possible that science, or a rogue state or entity, might make a mistake and create an insidious artificial virus that could cause extinction or some other unforeseen consequence of something perhaps seemingly unrelated. But, for now, it also pays to remember that we’ve been here for a very long time and are currently very much not extinct, and as we branch out into the solar system, the possibility of extinction begins to drop. But, the universe has to end sometime, so ultimately, sooner or later, it will be lights out for homo sapiens.
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