Human Extinction?
Here’s an article that predicts the extinction of humanity within the coming few decades. It begins:
In case you haven’t heard, we’re currently in the midst of Earth’s sixth mass extinction event, and it’s only accelerating. On a recent episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes, Stanford scientists dropped by to ring the warning bells again.
“Oh, humanity is not sustainable,” Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford-based author of The Population Bomb, told CBS’s Scott Pelley. “To maintain our lifestyle—yours and mine, basically—for the entire planet, you’d need five more Earths. Not clear where they’re gonna come from.”
Obviously, I don’t have the skills nor the resources to challenge the Paul Erlichs of the world. Having said that, here are a few ideas:
The idea that population growth will someday strangle humankind to death goes back to Thomas Malthus in the 18th-19th Century, and it got picked up in earnest in the 1960s and 70s by Donella Meadows (The Limits to Growth) and her colleagues in the nascent environmental sciences. That, of course, doesn’t mean that it’s not a threat, but current estimates had Earth’s population topping out at 9.5 – 10 billion somewhere around mid-century.
I look at the overall threat to the human race as being a nexus of interwoven elements:
Our failure to mitigate climate change causes desertification and loss of land mass, meaning desperate people bringing civil unrest and consequent loss of freedom, increased pressures to go to war (conventional and perhaps nuclear), higher population densities and higher temperatures leading to the growth of disease-carrying insects and thus pandemics.
Of course, it could be argued that these all go back to population growth; if there were fewer people consuming fewer fossil fuels, eating less red meat, etc., we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place.
But would finding more “Earths” really solve our problems? Wouldn’t we be likely to simply export our robo-consumerism, our selfishness, and our stupidity to other locations in space?
