It is unclear whether our policy makers will actually respond to the challenges that lie ahead and save us from the above statistical verdict. Humans are not good at coping with risks they have never encountered before, as exemplified by the politics of climate change.
This brings us back to the fatalistic view. The Standard Model of physics presumes that we are all made of elementary particles with no additional constituents. As such composite systems, we do not possess freedom at a fundamental level, because all particles and their interactions follow the laws of physics. These uncertainties are substantial on the scale of an individual but average out when dealing with a large sample.
Humans and their complex interactions evade a sense of predictability at the personal level, but perhaps the destiny of our civilization as a whole is shaped by our past in an inevitable statistical sense. The forecast of how much time we have left in our technological future could then follow from statistical information about the fate of civilizations like ours that predated us and lived under similar physical constraints. Most stars formed billions of years before the sun and may have fostered technological civilizations on their habitable planets that perished by now.
If we had historical data on the life span of a large number of them, we could have calculated the likelihood of our civilization to survive for different periods of time.
The approach would be similar to calibrating the likelihood of a radioactive atom to decay based on the documented behavior of numerous other atoms of the same type. In principle, we could gather related data by engaging in space archaeology and searching the sky for relics of dead technological civilizations.
This would presume that the fate of our civilization is dictated by the physical constraints. Population growth also contributes to rising unemployment and, when combined with a hotter Earth, leads to more frequent and intense storms, flooding and fires, poor water and air quality, and worsening human health. The authors write that the severity of the threats should transcend political tribalism. The paper suggests concrete changes that could help avert catastrophe, including completely and rapidly ending the use of fossil fuels, strictly regulating markets and property acquisition, reigning in corporate lobbying and empowering women.
The fossil record shows everything goes extinct, eventually. Almost all species that ever lived, over Some left descendants. Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus all vanished, leaving just Homo sapiens. Humans are inevitably heading for extinction. Headlines often suggest this extinction is imminent. The threat of earth-grazing asteroids is a media favourite. Mars is regularly mooted as a bolt hole. And there is the ongoing menace of the climate emergency.
Humans have vulnerabilities. Small, cold-blooded turtles and snakes can last months without food, so they survived.
Big animals with fast metabolisms — tyrannosaurs, or humans — require lots of food, constantly. That leaves them vulnerable to even brief food chain disruptions caused by catastrophes such as volcanoes , global warming , ice ages or the impact winter after an asteroid collision.
Slow reproduction makes it hard to recover from population crashes, and slows natural selection, making it difficult to adapt to rapid environmental changes. Are humans destined to become casualties of our own environmental recklessness?
The study that's generated so much conversation estimates that as many as three-quarters of animal species could be extinct within several human lifetimes, which sounds incredibly alarming.
That study is looking at very well-studied groups of animals. And they document pretty compellingly that extinction rates were already extremely elevated in [the year] , and are just getting worse and worse. Read about a study that says extinction rates are a thousand times higher because of humans. People have been debating whether we really are in the throes of a sixth mass extinction. What is your opinion? What is clear, and what is beyond dispute, is that we are living in a time of very, very elevated extinction rates, on the order that you would see in a mass extinction, though a mass extinction might take many thousands of years to play out.
Are there habitats or species—or groups of animals that you think are especially vulnerable to the changes that are going on? Island populations are very vulnerable to extinctions for a couple of reasons. They tend to have been isolated. New Zealand had no terrestrial mammals. Species that had evolved in the absence of such predators were incredibly vulnerable.
A staggering number of bird species have already been lost on New Zealand, and a lot of those that remain are in deep trouble. So, places that have been isolated for a long time.
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