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Question:Over 99% of all species go extinct. What will be the most likely cause of human extinction?

Cosmic collision (comet, asteroid, etc)  2 (50%)
Gamma Ray Burster  0 (0%)
Global War (including nuclear)  1 (25%)
Radical climate change  1 (25%)
   
Total Votes: 4 

   Author  Topic: Apocalypse Now  (Read 1221 times)
MoEnzyme
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Apocalypse Now
« on: 2009-07-07 21:34:36 »

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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #1 on: 2009-07-07 23:47:04 »

We were very lucky. The chance of a planet developing vast stores of cheap hydrocarbon energy over millions of years to benefit a single species over the course of a few hundred years is probably minuscule. What a pity we wasted it. When it becomes uneconomic, unless we have massively reduced our populations  and ecological footprints, concentrated our remaining resources, and set in place developments leading to effectively unlimited energy, most of the humans on the planet, whose lives were made possible by cheap fuel, will die and their deaths will not be pretty.

We are already in deep trouble. If Obama had not been about business as usual there was a small chance we might begin to address the coming troubles while we still could, but he was, and has and is and I don't think we will. I'm not sure if any other leader has the presence and credibility he had at the beginning of his presidency and sadly, has largely expended, and the problems I see are large enough and close enough for me to be far from convinced that a solution introduced by his successor, even if Obama is thrown out of office before his term ends, could begin soon enough, be large enough, or even be affordable with the sad wreckage of the economy visible all around us, to change the very gloomy prognosis I see ahaead. If you were following what is happening around the world at http://www.smarterearth.org - or reading Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation, or studying the publicly accessible reports from Rand Corp on these issues, you might be thinking in the sufficiently short term to be making good predictions. Most people seem to be burying their heads and hoping that the problems will go away if ignored - effectively making them co-conspirators. Here are some of the issues that I think makes your predictions optimistic.

Irrespective of what happens to the global economy and the dollar, China will almost certainly be importing more oil than the US by 2014 putting extreme pressure on both the oil price and the dollar. Assuming that existing oil reserves are accurately assessed, the IEA has acknowledged that current usage will result in severe shortfalls in availability sometime between 2018 and 2022. Long before then, probably before 2013, North America will have experienced massive gas shortages which will result in the wide scale loss of heat and or power during a winter cold spell. While this is happening, Nature has published two peer reviewed articles suggesting that we can burn no more than 1/4 of the remaining proven hydrocarbon reserves without triggering catastrophic climate change.

Most cities in the USA have at most a 3 day supply of food and a much smaller supply of potable water. The infrastructure of the USA is already in a state of decrepit collapse. Any interruptions in energy or fuel would be likely to result in a total collapse of confidence in the government. Speaking of food, according to Coxe Commodity Strategy Fund, global food supplies are at their lowest level in recorded history. According to the FAO, we are just 13 weeks from massive starvation and the number already starving has increased by about 100 million to 1 billion in the last year. Should I mention that about 2 billion people rely on the sea for the protein and the sea is being turned into a desert where fishing quotas have become largely irrelevant simply because fishing fleets in what used to be the most productive waters can no longer catch their allocated quotas. In our current state, a single crop large scale crop failure, as we have experienced repeatedly in the past will result in death on an unimaginable scale. With the climate change currently happening, the likelihood of a major crop failure happening in any year, including this year, is soaring.

When people are dying, or desperate, they seldom surrender to death without a struggle, be it never so futile. So if one of the above or any of the other major threats, from disease, to Israel's nuclear policy, to the resource conflicts that ,Russia anticipates will most probably happen over the Arctic, occurs, the most likely consequence will be a major war in which Einstein will most likely be proved wrong. He was asked if he thought that WW III would be fought with nuclear devices. He replied that he didn't know about WW III but that he thought that WW IV would likely be fought with sticks and stones.  Being closer to the situation, I'd say that if we are stupid enough to try to fight WW III, then there likely will not be enough survivors to fight WW IV.

While a cosmic collision or gamma burst could of course happen at any time, they will need to hurry to hit us before we wise up and try to minimise the misery to come, or simply wipe ourselves out. If you can think of a way to convince me otherwise, I'd love to hear it.

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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #2 on: 2009-07-08 00:20:23 »

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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #3 on: 2009-07-08 03:43:54 »

Nuclear devices are very scary, but except for planet splitters (which are theoretically trivial as there is no upper limit on the size of a fusion device except those demanded by portability), they threaten local populations, not the entire biosphere. Of course, it only takes the detonation of one planet splitter to eliminate everyone, but I estimate biowarfare as a much greater species specific threat.

I think it likely that, when a major war happens, the first participant with a major biological program (Countries I am aware of with significant biowarfare capabilities include the USA, Israel, Britain, Iran, Russian Federation, PRC, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, RoC, Japan, Syria, Libya, DPRK, RoK. Possibly in that order) to start losing will likely deploy it. Other countries with biowarfare capability, perceiving themselves as having been attacked (whether actually attacked or not may be irrelevant) will probably respond.

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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #4 on: 2009-07-08 03:47:17 »


Quote from: MoEnzyme on 2009-07-07 21:34:36   

I'd be interested in suggestions for other options.

[Blunderov] Volcanic super eruptions would be on my list. The Toba eruption came within a whisker of wiping humanity out.

"Perhaps the greatest volcanic explosion ever tore a hole 100 kilometers across at Toba in northern Sumatra. This huge caldera, which is now lake filled, is very much a tourist attraction, but there is evidence of a much more sinister legacy. The eruption at Toba may have come within a hair's breadth of making the human race extinct. Estimates of the size of the blast vary, but there is no question that - along with the Yellowstone eruptions - Toba qualifies as a a VEI 8 super eruption. It was thought that the total amount of debris ejected was on the order of 3000 cubic kilometers, sufficient to cover virtually the whole of India with  a layer of ash one meter thick."

~ Global Catastrophes. A very short introduction. Bill McGuire (Oxford University press.)

[Bl.] It might not even take an eruption of quite this magnitude to do the trick given, as The Hermit has mentioned, the parlous state of the the world's food supplies. One year without a summer might do it. From the same book:

"... the climactic explosions of the Tambora eruption also lofted around 200 million tonnes of sulphur-rich gases into the stratosphere , within which high altitude winds swiftly spread them around the planet. The gases combined readily with water in the atmosphere to form a 150 million tonnes of sulphuric acid aerosols - tiny particles of liquid that are very efficient at blocking out solar radiation. Within months the northern hemisphere climate began to deteriorate and temperatures fell to such a degree that 1816 became known as the "Year Without a Summer".

[Bl.] As more energy is added to our planet by means of global warming, ISTM that the dynamics processes of our home are likely to become more intense and to express themselves more frequently. Humanity, and other species, have long been on the receiving end of volcanic disasters. Mute, and poignant, testimony to this persistent historical relationship* are to found in the  Laetoli footprints.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/07/1/l_071_03.html

"The Laetoli footprints were formed and preserved by a chance combination of events -- a volcanic eruption, a rainstorm, and another ashfall. When they were found in 1976, these hominid tracks, at least 3.6 million years old, were some of the oldest evidence then known for upright bipedal walking, a major milestone in human evolution."

http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications/newsletters/10_1/laetoli.html

"...the footprints are a poignant reminder of our ancient origins. Let Mary Leakey have the last word in talking of one of the hominids who made the trail: "At one point, and you need not be an expert tracker to discern this, she stops, pauses, turns to the left to glance at some possible threat or irregularity, and then continues to the north. This motion, so intensely human, transcends time. Three million six hundred thousand years ago, a remote ancestor—just as you or I—experienced a moment of doubt."

*[Bl.] Pompeii too of course. A Roman omen?
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #5 on: 2009-07-08 07:55:39 »

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I will fight your gods for food,
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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #6 on: 2009-07-08 14:18:24 »

[Bl.] It might not even take an eruption of quite this magnitude to do the trick given, as The Hermit has mentioned, the parlous state of the the world's food supplies. One year without a summer might do it. From the same book:

[Hermit] As Blunderov mentions, bad news tends to multiply. Any one bad thing may or may not be a problem, but as the Russians learned in Finland, Germany learned in Stalingrad, the French learned in Moscow and the Dutch learned in the Hongerwinter of 1944-1945, the combination of the catastrophes of war and cold is a quick recipe for mass deaths. Apropos of something, http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Dutch_famine_of_1944 has a string of classic examples of the use of the passive voice, "became scarce", "grew worse" to disassociate responsibility
Quote:
...during the winter of 1944-1945, near the end of World War II. A total of 18,000 people died during the famine. (At) the end of World War II, food supplies became increasingly scarce in the Netherlands. After the landing of the Allied Forces on D-Day, conditions grew worse in the Nazi occupied Netherlands.

[Bl.] Pompeii too of course. A Roman omen?

[Hermit] Vesuvius erupted repeatedly. Its existence on the edge of the subduction zone ought to have been omen enough, but before that the Romans were unfamiliar with volcanoes.
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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #7 on: 2009-07-09 11:06:09 »

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I will fight your gods for food,
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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #8 on: 2009-07-09 14:47:57 »

Assuming that we come to our senses and build the space lift needed to develop space power before it is too late for us (20 years maximum), even if Sol expanded to the orbit of Uranus with relatively little warning, we would be in a position to build space condoms (See Per Ardua Ad Astra in reply 7) and for some humans to leave Sol for less explosive climates.

If we seek long term relevance, in the medium term we should be moving our genomes to other planets around other star systems (including sending some explorers out of our galaxy), in city sized cruisers. Such ships would carry gene banks and the ability to create digital reproductions of anything the occupants wished to access from Earth.

In the long term, assuming we have acted to ensure access to space and energy before the fossil fuel bonanza ends and have somehow avoided wiping ourselves and successors out, we might be sufficiently sentimental to consider moving the planet elsewhere. After all, that would be "just" an engineering challenge. Unfortunately far easier to accomplish than persuading people that if we don't have answers lined up and in progress within the next five years, despite the challenges of the ever deepening depression, that mankind probably won't survive to see a sixth.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #9 on: 2009-07-09 19:42:41 »

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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #10 on: 2009-07-18 12:53:51 »

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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme


(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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