Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction 399
wiredog sends in a study from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Center For Biosecurity, assessing risks of human extinction and the costs of preventing it. "In this century a number of events could extinguish humanity. The probability of these events may be very low, but the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future human lives."
On the other hand, who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
I honestly don't give two figs if humanity goes extinct (I certainly won't after the event).
Sure, if it happens while I'm alive, there maybe some un-avoidable pain and suffering for myself, but if it happens after I'm dead, well, I'll be dead.
Dead people can't suffer.
Anyway, extinction is a natural part of evolution, adapt or die motherfuckers, adapt and die. Yes, change from or to and is deliberate, because we are all going to die.
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Anyway, onto the actual scenarios. From the introduction:
None of these things is going to wipe out each and every human, nor even enough humans to make the population enviable. Unless climate change is really, really dramatic (in which case, there is nothing we can do about it anyway). And to talk about flu... Viruses have never killed more than 70% of a given population (number pulled from the air, probably less, Wikipedia says The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population. [wikipedia.org]). Oh, and terrorism. Scary shit that.
Then we get onto astronomical events, comets, solar flares and stuff, and the paper goes on and on.
Basically, we are all going to die, humanity is going to go extinct (if nothing else, the heat death of the universe will get us), and to think about the issue with any great thought is probably a waste of time.
Re:Let's Get a New Dominant Species On This Planet (Score:3, Interesting)
Not with a bang, but with a whimper (Score:4, Interesting)
OK. Let's assume that everything that's been worked on for 50 years and still doesn't work isn't going to work. This includes fusion and space travel.
Industrial civilization is only about 200 years old. It's convenient to start at 1808, the first year somebody bought a train ticket. That was when the industrial revolution started affecting large numbers of people. Does industrial civilization have another 200 years left?
We're running out of oil. The optimistic position is that peak oil is 20 years away. The pessimistic position is that peak oil was two years ago. Few think there's 50 years of oil left. There's really nothing on the energy horizon big enough to replace oil. All the alternatives are considerably more expensive, and have a lower return on energy invested vs. energy out.
We're running out of some other minerals. There are substitutes, and recycling, but using a substitute is usually more energy intensive.
It's quite possible that industrial civilization will just run down. This has already happened in a number of Third World countries. A few countries, such as Argentina, have already gone from rich to poor. The usual pattern is devolution into rich central cities surrounded by an ocean of poverty. Mexico City and Rio are classic examples.
That may be the future.
Re:Offsite backups (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Grey goo (Score:3, Interesting)
They've (science fiction writers, newspaper reporters, even the people building them who should know better) been calling computers "thinking machines" and "electronic brains" since the existance of electronic computers.
Computers still don't think and I don't forsee them thinking; not digital computers, in any case. Thought and feeling are chemical processes, not binary arithemetic with NAND and NOR gates.
If we are controlled by computers, the computers will be controlled by men; the same rich, powerful, and evil men who control us now and who have always controlled us in the past.
The real Matrix will have a human archetecht. The real termnators will be controlled by humans. "Gray goo" is a fanciful concept that came out of someone's pipe, much like Von Daniken's aliens in the '70s.
Note that I'm a cyborg; the device does not control me, I control it.
There is very little that will be able to make us extinct in the next hundred years. We are in less danger of extinction than we ever were (and some fifty to a hundred thousand years ago humans almost did become extinct).
No need to worry about extinction, as the risk is infinitessimal and besides, you won't be around to see it anyway.
I, on the other hand, am certain to become extinct in the next fifty years.
How to reduce the risk of human extinction (Score:2, Interesting)
#1 Find a new fuel instead of oil and fossil fuels.
#2 Get rid of hatred and bigotry and racism.
#3 Invest in Fringe Science to create future technology and not let some asshole scientists holding up progress with flawed theories that they cherrypicked data or did fraud like Piltdown man that prevent us from having rapid progress in improving our technology for cleaning up the environment (Terraforming) space travel (Earth will be crowded we need to make a few colonies)
#4 Creating floating cities and under water cities to help with population growth.
#5 Until we can replace oil, why are polar bears more important than human beings? We either can save the polar bears and make humans extinct or drill for oil and natural gas in the Alaskan wilderness to get enough oil until we can invent a replacement for it. Save the Polar Bear DNA so when he invent cloning we can recreate the polar bears and the Dodo and other extinct animals.
#6 Fight terrorism by following the money trails and bank accounts they use to pay off members to do suicide bombings. Make it an International law to shut down any bank account that pays terrorists and prosecute the owners. The same for donating to fake Islamic charities that fund terrorism by giving money to Sheiks and Clerics that launder it for terrorist networks. Terrorist networks work like a business, so just shut off their bank accounts and money and they won't afford to be in business any more.
#7 Learn ancient skills like pottery, black smithing, leather working, wood working, etc so in case civilization collapses we can have experts to help rebuild it using ancient technologies that don't need oil or electricity. Study the Amish and other groups that do this so in case the rest of us can survive an economic collapse and post-oil world with no alternative to oil.
#8 Set up more charities that help poor people and people with disabilities and mental illnesses and drug and alcohol addictions. Teach them how to be responsible and sober and think clearly and be able to go back into the work force or start up their own small businesses to help stimulate the economy.
#9 Get governments to stick to a budget by cutting pork spending and useless programs, leave the taxes alone, but control spending, end useless wars and stop trying to protect people from their own bad decisions and bad behavior and bad actions, and let them learn from the consequences of them, so they can avoid them in the future, Tough love, but if they spent $50,000 in credit cards for useless crap and then could not afford a house payment, they are too stupid to bail out. The same for banks who didn't verify that they made what they claimed they made they claimed $45,000 a year but only earned $15,000 a year, and banks that gave them loans and mortgages are too stupid to allow to stay in business. Let them fail and eat their own mistakes. Why should the rest of us, responsible people, pay more taxes and lower the currency value to bail out stupid people so they can rip us off again 5 to 10 years later with the same "scam"? The bailouts are a Ponzi scheme that ruins the stock market and economy and ruin the US dollar's value and cause inflation and unemployment to rise, stop them!
#10 Find a better way to rehabilitate criminals, most of them are repeat offenders. Learn from Europe and Australia and other nations that do not have the crime repeat offender rates the USA has.
Re:Not with a bang, but with a whimper (Score:3, Interesting)
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True, assuming there's nothing else in space.
Think bigger, think space. Plenty of energy there (solar/magnetic/heat), and other planets/moon too. Move the bulk of energy consuming processes to space and you'll likely see an efficiency increase and energy consumption decrease. And you can always ship energy back to Earth easily at that point.
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Space is the final frontier.
!Goo (Score:5, Interesting)
Carbon based life has little use for the silicon in dirt. Silicon based goo can convert it into solar panels...
The "grey goo" apocalypse presumes exactly what it name stands for : that the surface of earth will be covered with an amorphous mass comprising an almost infinite number of the same nano machine.
What you advocate instead, requires specialisation, organisation, etc...
Basically, you're just re-inventing evolution, but this time with silicon-based life forms organising into a complete eco-system (including plant-like solar-pannel-nanobots whose purpose is to serve as energy entry point for the rest of the food chain including the carnivore-like nanobots which lack access to light).
It's not extinction by grey goo, it will be extinction by grey life instead.
Re:Old news (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:On the other hand, who cares? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.
And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.
But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take our breath away.
Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly."
- From Watchmen by Alan Moore.
Re:Extinction (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm almost as left-wing as they come, but I have to say that nuclear weapons have an unfair bad rap. Compare the number of people killed before and after the invention of the Bomb. According to Wikipedia, WW1 and WW2 killed 20 million and 70 million people, respectively. Since 1945 there has been a lot of chest-thumping by the major powers, but in terms of actual human suffering things are dramatically better. Now we all have big guns pointed at one another, and everything is just fine. On any factual basis you'd have to say the Bomb is the greatest instrument for peace the world has ever seen. Just so long as it doesn't fall into the hands of a rogue individual...
Re:On the other hand, who cares? (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, we can hope, anyway.