What will cause human's extinction?

Beer w/Straw said:
Is that the one where at the end some extra dimensional portal is opened up on Earth and a big monster is walking the streets?
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That's the first one, "Cloverfield", but there's a meteoric landing outside the harbor, IIRC. This one is where they're trying to start a "special reactor" in space and the Earth disappears.

Have you seen the ITER documentary "Let there be light"?
http://fusion.film/LTBL/
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Haven't seen it/heard of it. If it's very long I won't be able to watch it. I doze off a lot when I'm on percocets.
 
Saint said:
What will most probably cause human's extinction?
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In the near term, the main serious threat is self-destruction by one means or another. Nuclear or biological warfare, for example. Maybe even a biological accident of the wrong kind. Another potential threat is meteor impact - like the one that took the dinosaurs out.

In the somewhat longer term, there are other methods of self-destruction that might do the trick, like continuing to mess with the climate of the planet. However, the slope to extinction in that case would be very long and slow. Before extinction, there would like be a long period of mass suffering and diminishment of the human population on Earth.

In the much longer term, maybe the Sun will kill us all, as it heats up, eventually boiling the oceans and then consuming the Earth as a whole. I would hope that some of us will have moved elsewhere before that happens, though.

There will no doubt come a point where the term Homo sapiens is no longer applicable to the descendents of today's human beings. Barring some catastrophe, we will probably alter ourselves physically and mentally. And if we don't do it ourselves, evolution will do the job for us.

Oh, and I forgot alien invasion. ;)
 
James R said:
There will no doubt come a point where the term Homo sapiens is no longer applicable to the descendents of today's human beings. Barring some catastrophe, we will probably alter ourselves physically and mentally. And if we don't do it ourselves, evolution will do the job for us.
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Unfortunately, more often for other species than ourselves, we have been, and continue to be the hand of evolution when it comes to extinction.

The Holocene extinction, otherwise referred to as the Sixth extinction or Anthropocene extinction, is the ongoing extinction event of species during the present Holocene epoch, mainly as a result of human activity. The large number of extinctions spans numerous families of plants and animals, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and arthropods. With widespread degradation of highly biodiverse habitats such as coral reefs and rainforests, as well as other areas, the vast majority of these extinctions are thought to be undocumented, as no one is even aware of the existence of the species before they go extinct, or no one has yet discovered their extinction. The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background rates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

Barring some cosmic catastrophe or occurrence of technology gone wild, I believe we will eventually engineer ourselves into an existence that is not dependent on the resources of the Earth for survival, and if so inclined, will possibly be able to do a reset on all of the extinctions cause by their ancestors.
 
Mammals cannot evolve fast enough to escape current extinction crisis
"Date: October 15, 2018
Source: Aarhus University
Summary: The sixth mass extinction is underway, this time caused by humans. A team of researchers have calculated that species are dying out so quickly that nature's built-in defense mechanism, evolution, cannot keep up. If current conservation efforts are not improved, so many mammal species will become extinct during the next five decades that nature will need 3-5 million years to recover to current biodiversity levels. And that's a best-case scenario."

Continues...

So there you go, we'll shoot ourselves in the foot.
 
James R said:
Before extinction, there would like be a long period of mass suffering and diminishment of the human population on Earth.
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an important point worth noting IMO
However one or two generations may not be considered a "long period" unless you are living it.
 
Saint said:
Super virus killing men?
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are you suggesting women are immune ?

probably something like a herpes spanish flu bird flu mix which has come from fish herpes after most of the worlds fish die off.
a bacteria that carried a virus...
something that last for 2 or 3 days before it dies and can pass right through the mucus membrain and cell wall.

maybe some type of mad pig disease that comes from chicken flu from raw infected chicken being fed to pigs which is then mixed into raw pig meat that is consumed by humans and festers for several years until the virus adapts enough to make the jump to something like a food poisoning listeria type thing that attaches to the human genetics shared with pigs.

pork or chicken hemoragic fever that comes from a marine bacteria
 
Saint said:
super bug will kill 1/4 of humans
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Influenza may have killed as many as 25 million in its first 25 weeks. Older estimates say it killed 40–50 million people while current estimates say 50—100 million people worldwide were killed. This pandemic has been described as "the greatest medical holocaust in history" and may have killed more people than the Black Death.
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Mortality of the Spanish Flu Pandemic. The global mortality rate from the 1918/1919 pandemic is not known, but it is estimated that 10% to 20% of those who were infected died. With about a third of the world population infected, this case-fatality ratio means that 3% to 6% of the entire global population died.
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https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/hea...infectious_diseases/Oral_Herpes_22,OralHerpes
50 percent to 80 percent of U.S. adults have oral herpes
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death#Death_toll
Pneumonic plague has a mortality rate of 90 to 95 per cent. Symptoms include fever, cough, and blood-tinged sputum. As the disease progresses, sputum becomes free-flowing and bright red. Septicemic plague is the least common of the three forms, with a mortality rate near 100%.
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The data is sufficiently widespread and numerous to make it likely that the Black Death swept away around 60 per cent of Europe's population. It is generally assumed that the size of Europe's population at the time was around 80 million. This implies that around 50 million people died in the Black Death.[56]
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usa 350 million
https://www.webmd.com/asthma/qa/how-many-people-die-from-the-flu
between 3,000 and 49,000 people have died from the flu each year.
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something with a mortality rate like the plague or ebola which attaches to a bacteria and is carrying the herpes genetic similarity, your going to get maybe close to a 50% population mortality.
it is not very likely but it is possible.

herpes is in fish and many other animals.
a bacteria that makes the virus become fatal would be quite nasty as it would not require incubation.

there is existing evidence of entire human civilisations that have been wiped out.
probably by their own doing, or by some type of virus.
many sites around the world show previous fairly well advanced societys that have simply been wiped out.
who is to say that is not going to change ?

humans are their own worste enemy
 
Artificial intelligence can live in a radioactive world for hundreds if not thousands of years.
if an AI takes control it will just nuke all the people of the world making a nuclear winter. while maintaining 1 or 2 nuclear power plants to last it out.
humans will be effectively wiped out.

it is highly unlikely, but possible
 
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