Will we be in the future?
A few coming events in our planet’s future – some predicted, some certain – will see the human race wiped off the face of the earth, literally. Of course there’s also the unpredictable, such as a rogue comet sending us the way of the dinosaurs or the absurd such as the sky eventually crashing down because of the ‘carbon tax’ (remember that one?). There might also be a virus, currently unknown and once exposed to life on earth delivers a catastrophic pandemic and of course there is always a religious loony warning that God will strike us dead with a bolt of lightning if we keep sinning. Steven Spielberg likes to assure us that creatures from another galaxy will one day develop a taste for human flesh and every one of us will end up on a galactic dinner plate; a fate that could have already befallen us if it weren’t for the likes of Flash Gordon or Sigourney Weaver.
But, science tells us we are all doomed unless there is some intervention or miracle to save our battered souls.
Ignoring the unpredictable, we could face our first real crisis in roughly 100 years, according to Professor Frank Fenner, emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University who has predicted that the human race will be extinct within the next 100 years:
He has claimed that the human race will be unable to survive a population explosion and ‘unbridled consumption.’
Fenner told The Australian newspaper that ‘homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years.’
‘A lot of other animals will, too,’ he added.
‘It’s an irreversible situation. I think it’s too late. I try not to express that because people are trying to do something, but they keep putting it off.’
Since humans entered an unofficial scientific period known as the Anthropocene – the time since industrialisation – we have had an effect on the planet that rivals any ice age or comet impact, he said.
Well, that’s his opinion, rightly or wrongly. None of us will be here to see if his crystal ball was working, however, I can’t disagree that humanity has played a big part in sending the planet on a downward spiral. It’s up to our generation, to a large degree, to ensure that humanity is still here in a 100 years. Our generation could cause either the demise of the human race or the seed of its longevity. Let’s face reality; we can’t always rely on science to repair what we have broken.
If we survive Fenner’s prediction, and those with similar apocalyptic prophecies, science tells us that the unstoppable forces of evolution conspire to ensure our demise anyway, in roughly 10 million years, unless of course science or nature can discover a way to halt the unstoppable. We males will be the first to go:
Among the more alarming rumors prompted by genetics research was the impending extinction of the Y chromosome. The classic male marker seemed to be shriveling. Would the human race become an all-female species? The Y is, after all, just a tiny nub of a chromosome, having undergone serious shrinkage in the past.
The time frame of 10 million years was heard on a radio show some months back, so it’s only speculation. But I’m not going to argue if it’s right or wrong.
There has already been a significant shift in the gender balance in my life time. In the mid 1960s males represented 51% of the human population. They’re now on the skids, making up 49%. Unless there are sperm banks on every street corner in 10 million years time it will be very hard to find a dancing partner.
Of little interest to any of us is the unavoidable obliteration of the planet from the dying sun. Of this we are doomed:
The sun is dying, and when it finally kicks, it will take Earth with it. We probably won’t be around to see it, though: The sun’s death throes will have taken out life here well before it swallows the planet.
The good news? We’ve got a very, very long time before any of this happens.
A panel of scientists at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science described the situation in 2000, and it still holds true. Astronomers generally agree that the sun will burn up its hydrogen fuel supply sometime in the next 5 billion to 7 billion years. As it does, gravity will force the sun to collapse into its core, which will ratchet up the heat on the remaining hydrogen and cause the sun to expand into a red giant.
At this point, the sun will swallow the Earth.
“Earth will end up in the sun, vaporizing and blending its material with that of the sun,” said Iowa State University’s Lee Anne Willson. “That part of the sun then blows away into space, so one might say Earth is cremated and the ashes are scattered into interstellar space.”
By then, the sun will be hot enough to burn all its stored helium and the sun will fluctuate in size. The sun isn’t quite massive enough to explode in an awesome supernova, so it will merely collapse into a relatively cool white dwarf.
Perhaps a moot point, though, because we’ll most likely be long dead before this occurs. As the sun revs up to its red giant phase, it’s getting about 10 percent brighter every billion years. At that rate, scientists estimate that all the water on the planet will evaporate in the next billion years.
That gives us a mere billion years to find way of getting off this rock and re-establishing our species on an Earth-like planet orbiting a distant star. Not everyone can go. If the human race was to survive past this point then it would be with thanks to a handful of intergalactic pioneers.
In a billion years the human race will find a way of ensuring it survival, subject of course, to having survived every other uncontrollable threat to it extinction along the way.
But I want to go back to the more immediate threats and our immediate future. Do we really deserve to be a part of it? Just look how we’ve shamed ourselves over the last 100 years; killing ourselves with war, turning a once fertile planet into an infertile lump of rock, wiping other species off the planet at an alarming rate, and choking the life out of every waterway, paddock or city.
We have a poor record. Since the beginning of the last century we have killed an estimated 200,000,000 fellow humans in wars alone.
We have polluted the planet so badly that it is estimated that 40% of all deaths worldwide are caused by the damaging effects of pollution. And that’s just us humans.
Pollution is one of the primary ways in which humans have caused drastic modifications of wildlife habitat. Historically we have regarded the air, water, and soil that surround us as waste receptacles and have given little consideration to the ecological consequences of our actions. As a result, wildlife populations are confronted with a bewildering array of pollutants that we release into the environment either by intent or accident.
Not content with wiping ourselves out, we are also intent to wipe out all life.
The planet would be better off without us. Have we earned our place in the future? Unless we can evolve into a higher level of consciousness we’d better start looking for another planet about a billion years earlier than expected.
But as it is, the earth is a very dangerous place. Nobody gets off alive.
Further reading: Will the human race become extinct? Almost certainly
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18 comments
Login here Register hereGood article, and not unrelated are offshore events on media, climate science and Murdoch, according to Turnbull in the US.
On Thursday local time, the Media and Democracy Project in the US ‘Rupert Murdoch’s Global War on Democracy and Climate’
https://www.mobilize.us/mediademocracyproject/event/695135/
You wrote this essay ten years ago, Michael! Oh my…. so much has happened over the last 3,652 days, so much more urg & yuk in the sense of manifestation of planetary stress. If Frank Fenner is correct in his extinction prediction, that should mean that the end is now 90 years away, that is, somewhere within the first two decades of the new century.
Population projections still have us around 9.6 billion in 2050, and about 10.2 billion in 2100, which are around a 15-25% increase over present numbers; notwithstanding catastrophes such as pandemic diseases at all levels, human, other mammals both domestic & wild, crops, along with such matters as sufficiency of potable waters, climate change-induced phenomena – fires, floods, droughts & famines, as well as the ever-present demand to feed hungry bodies.
Some big challenges ahead!
As our friends up in the north observed, may we live in interesting times! 🙁
Michael.
Thanks for writing this article Michael – ten years ago, and republishing it today. It’s a wake up call and makes us think of how far we have come. Not.
We mustn’t lose our nerve in fighting corporate greed, powerful vested interests and political corruption.People power is a good place to start. Small gestures are meaningful within our own communities.
The black box with the red button question: If someone walked up to and asked, “If you push the red button every trace of the human race will be wiped off the face of the planet. What will you do?”
You won’t believe this but I have cracked a text of Nostradamus he predicts 3 major conflicts with Russia and China getting 3 birds for 1 stone at the end of the 2 conflicts, Yes there is a comet predicted just after the global Jihad led by a chap named Mabus the other conflict is in the Subcontinent which kicks off first
I can highly recommend Tim Winton’ s latest novel Juice..a disturbing and dystopian story about a future earth, after the cataclysm of climate change.Nothing like he’s ever written before…he’s not a happy camper.
Leigh, I also have a “You won’t believe this”:
A book was written in the early 1920s by a German schoolteacher who had spent a fair bit of time in a coma.
Upon waking from his coma he said he’d been living thousands of years in the future. In his book he talked about future historical events.
Everything he wrote about the remainder of the 29th century was spot on. He even talked about a music band that would take the world by storm in the 1960s. Beatles, anyone?
As for the distant future, yep, it’s full of wars.
Just before he left us, the master of understanding the cosmos, Stephen Hawkins said he had faith in the inventiveness of his fellow humans, and that the devastations it had wrought upon itself would be seen to by the likes of genetic engineering. And it’s interesting to note that humans had been at that in one way or another for millennia.
It may be OK for the genius of the macrocosm to put trust in the sciences of the microcosm, yet there are ≈86,000 registered chemicals in commerce (registered with US EPA), with the majority not tested for toxicity. And it is reckoned it would take thousands of years to do that testing on the current registered chemicals.
As for chemicals and other harmful substances, we continue to be hell-bent on designing and using them based solely on their apparent usefulness and for making a ‘fast buck’, paying no or little heed to the risks – humans and animalia and plantae are seemingly of little consequence when it comes to the ‘fast buck’. There’s not only the dreaded cancer, but also heart disease, stroke, muscular-skeletal diseases, birth defects etc. wrought by toxicities including endocrine disruptors that affect the genome. So much for Hawking’s faith – it seems the (good) geneticists face an uphill battle against the giants of the chemical industry.
By way of the persistence of laissez-faire convenience via such deadly usefulness, think of asbestos, DDT, dieldrin, pvc, pseudo-estrogens (eg BPA), 245-T, BTEX, PFAS, sheep / sattle anti-tick dip (arsenic etc), and paraquat / diquat (aka “Spray Seed”), all well known and commonly used for years (and some still used) after risks were known. Both farmers and the general public were sidelined for convenience, when most of the chemicals persisted in the food-chain (unable to be cleaned out), increasing in toxic affect over time. And these are only a few of the 86,000 😡
No wonder the hospital / health industry can’t cope, as we are determined to shorten our mortality and existence. As for essential bacteria and other microbes, insects, arachnids, nematodes, worms, amphibians, crustaceans, fish, reptiles, birds, mammals, plants and fungi, they don’t stand a chance against our stupidity.
Great article and one, sadly, I believe whole heartedly.
We are a disgrace in so many ways and our current record makes me wonder if we will even make it another hundred years. We definiitely don’t deserve to. The one thing Micheal’s article didn’t mention that our species has developed that can destroy all life on earth tomorrow if we keep going the way we are- Nuclear weapons. The madness going on across the middle east and eastern Europe with threats from the old white megalomaniac dictators of using nuclear weapons if we keep interfering could see life as we know if wiped out in days and the planet not liveable for hundreds to thousands of years because of radiation.
If there ever was such a thing as a ‘god’ or supreme being who was responsible for evolution’s most ‘advanced species’ then we must be a bitter disappointment in every way. We have the capacity for so much compassion and goodness towards those we care about but sadly it is only a tiny part of our make up. Our ability for wholesale slaughter against those we consider to be ‘different’ than us clearly shows our ignorance and backward narrow minding thinking. Man has proved throughout our recorded history just how violent and aggressive he can be. Makes me wonder whether we might have more of a chance of survival if women were to put in charge. They definitely have qualities that men lack that would help our species have a better chance at a long life time for our only home.
Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a half century!
And for those who feel the urge to watch Duck Dodgers here’s:
On the matter of us, I will be very surprised if we make it to the end of the next century. If anything of the human race survives it will be Murdoch and The Donald. One seems to be like an amoeba and the other will just keep on denying that he’s dead.
One of my all-time favourites, GL. That and the time Daffy was Robin Hood.
Roswell,
What about Ali Baba Bunny and Duck Amuck?
Always loved a good conspiracy theory, Michael, and have often argued greenhouse gases create a greenhouse effect that will eliminate life.
I always asked the top students at camps which is the hottest planet the vast majority get it wrong.
The circumstances result in temperatures over 300 degrees and therefore no water, are applicable to earth. However it is tongue in cheek. “total number of species on Earth range from 8.7 million to a trillion. Of all the species that have existed on Earth at some point over the past 3.5 billion years, over 95% have gone extinct.” The timeline for us is approx another 4 billion years.
Currently humans can live anywhere on earth or mars or who knows so, even without AI nobody should be personally frightened by the words ‘climate change’.
The real worry is danger to the ultra important non-human life that the crow has been warning all of us.
Let’s let the crows of this world take the running and let them teach the children and the deniers may lose their grip.
ps
Hawkins 4eva
GL, every Loony Tunes cartoon is memorable.
In the 10 years since MT penned this alarming & somewhat pessimistic piece,
My LGA has added another 10,000 humans (72k – 82k),
Australia has added over 3 million extra people (23.4m – 26.7m),
& Sol3 has been blessed with another 10 billion Homo sapiens (7.2b – 8.2b.).
Attendantly (coincidentally?) atmospheric carbon has increased by around 30ppm (397.2 – 426.7), and another 467 previously cohabiting species have been officially declared extinct.
Have a nice day.
On the anniversary of yet another woeful example of human folly, herewith a great cry from the heart worth a shot through your best pair.
An unusual happy article Michael. I think it may nearly be time for you to have a nice single malt in the quiet open spaces …… and then maybe a second, just to make sure that opening the bottle did not cause deterioration of flavours.