Are Humans Extinction Proof?

[Miles Teg]

We're nowhere close on hundreds of different levels, it's not on the horizon, assuming we solve our world recession & can throw billions at it perhaps in 50 years we'll be fairly close but even that is uncertain (even assuming complete certainty we will recover for the global recession in the next few years which is in itself quite a leap).

Maybe we're just looking at this differently, but "Humanity is a hundred years away from living away from Earth" and "Humanity is on the verge of living away from earth" seem like synonyms to me. Behaviorally modern humans have been around for somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 years old. From any timescale of extinction, we're just around the corner from getting off this rock.

 

[Dachs]

Humans are extinction proof as we possibly can be. As long as the Earth is physically capable of supporting human life and no malevolent non-humans decide to exterminate us, we aren't going anywhere.

Why would the malevolent non-humans be any better at exterminating humans than malevolent humans have been?

 

[Miles Teg]

Why would the malevolent non-humans be any better at exterminating humans than malevolent humans have been?

Technology. I find the idea of aliens that can sterilize the earth to be just as plausible as rapid interstellar travel.

As long as we're on sci-fi, a robot apocalypse could work too. If you give the hypothetical Artificial Intelligence(s) enough advantages and inexplicable bloodthirstiness, humanity is screwed. I don't think you can set up a plausible scenario like that, but once it's set in motion, everyone dies.

In general, I think any entity with overwhelming power and a fanatic desire to see the extinction of the human race could do so if given enough time. The chances of encountering malevolent non-humans of that stripe are probably only slightly higher than the world happening to end on December 12, 2011, but I mentioned them for completeness's sake.

 

[Narz]

The second end-goal of the Apollo program was to land a man on Mars by the mid-80s. But Dicky thought it was too expensive. We have the technology now to get us to Mars. Hell we even have the technology to set up bases on the Moon and Mars. We know where the water is on both and we have ways to power it (Thorium). The only real barrier is cost.

We can't even keep humans alive & healthy for long in bubbles here on Earth right now. That's another factor. Then there's the cost of transport & the massive cost of constantly transporting supplies from Earth.

 

[azzaman333]

Are Humans Extinction Proof?

Pretty much. It'd take one hell of an event to kill us all off.

 

[Cannae]

I think humans are probably stuck here on this rock indefinitely however, I could see robots colonizing other worlds. Robots would be able to withstand conditions that humans can't.

 

[Cutlass]

The second end-goal of the Apollo program was to land a man on Mars by the mid-80s. But Dicky thought it was too expensive. We have the technology now to get us to Mars. Hell we even have the technology to set up bases on the Moon and Mars. We know where the water is on both and we have ways to power it (Thorium). The only real barrier is cost.

We don't have the ability to have a colony that isn't constantly supplied from Earth. We haven't figured that one out yet, so all the rest of it is premature.

 

[Formaldehyde]

How much power would it take to feed 10,000 people in artificially lit green house for however long it took for the planet to recover? Not much relatively speaking. Baring a super close super nova which would fry all life on Earth, yeah I say we pretty extinction proof.

This particular issue was the subject of speculation in this classic Hollywood flick:


Link to video.

If providing living space for large groups of people for 100 years at the bottom of deep mine shafts could work to defeat the threat of "cobalt thorium-g" nuclear weapons, it could likely work for meteorites as well.

 

[Tani Coyote]

There are three causes of death: aging, disease, and injury.

On a cosmic scale, aging can't do us in so long as we keep having babies and have a food supply. We've escaped the simplest means of extinction.

Disease? Unlikely it'd kill ALL life, so we're mostly-safe here.

Injury? We produce war machines no other species does. We could exterminate ourselves and ruin the planet for any unlucky to survive in what, an hour? Our tech can protect us from age and disease, but it only enhances our capability to maim eachother.

Humans are not extinction proof so long as we live on a single planet and there's a way to destroy every settlement we own. There are thousands of ways to kill a single human, and quite a few to kill them all - a massive impact, a nuclear war, chemical weapons, some random explosion of the Sun, a pandemic, etc.

 

[timtofly]

We can't even keep humans alive & healthy for long in bubbles here on Earth right now. That's another factor. Then there's the cost of transport & the massive cost of constantly transporting supplies from Earth.

Not to mention human nature. Even in Total Recall, humans were holding back from allowing survival when it was available.