Almost all species that have ever lived have suffered extinction. Will humans be different? There are days when it’s hard not to wonder how much time is left for humanity. Whether it’s war, famine, another grim report on climate change, or a pandemic that has killed 6 million people to date, life on this planet can start to feel precarious. At times, it all feels like an action movie entering its final act.
But is it really possible that nearly 8 billion human beings could one day disappear? Could the planet continue to spin in peace without us?
“The end of the world is a great concept for shaping history,” says Anders Sandberg, senior researcher at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. “We want to know how it ends. We want there to be a meaning, a tragedy or a comedy. Maybe a laugh at the end of the universe ”.
It turns out that scientists, scholars, policymakers and others they are studying this questiontrying to decipher how the extinction of humanity could happen and if there is anything that can be done to prevent it.
Well, that’s a really sad thought, but the fact that someone is worried that humans may become extinct is relatively new, says Thomas Moynihan, author of the book X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction.
There were marginal whispers in the 1700s. In the 1800s the romantic poets picked up the idea. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man was about a plague that nearly killed humanity. Few at the time were eager to read such an uplifting story. The rise of Darwinism gave people some understanding that human beings were part of a long chain of organisms.
In 1924 Winston Churchill wrote the essay Shall We All Commit Suicide? On the potential of war to cause the extinction of all human beings. But according to Moynihan, perhaps it was only with the detonation of the atomic bomb during World War II that people realized that they could have been wiped out.
Humans eventually realized that we may be the only ones out there exactly like us. Whatever we have, however imperfect it may be, could one day be a victim of extinction, lost, not just by the planet, but by the universe.
“Once a species has disappeared, it has disappeared forever. Extinction is forever, ”says Moynihan,“ Now we understand the consequences. ”
There is more we can learn about where we are going as a species by looking to the past (even beyond any premodern humans who are no longer with us), specifically, to the fossil record. In a 2020 article on human extinction in The Conversation, paleontologist Nick Longrich pointed out that 99.9% of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct.
So maybe our odds aren’t great. Furthermore, humans also have some key vulnerabilities that they could make difficult to survive a catastrophe on a large scale: we are these large warm-blooded animals that need a lot of food; our generations are relatively long and we are not the most prolific breeders, writes Longrich.
Being human also has some advantages, though. “We are a deeply strange, widespread, abundant, extremely adaptable species, and which, as many suggest, we will be around for quite a while”, writes Longrich, noting that humans are practically everywhere. We can adapt our diets in ways that other species cannot, and we can learn and change our behaviors.
Extinction: a risky business
Those who work in the field of existential risk are pushing people today to do just that: learn and change our behaviors.
The Future of Life Institute is a Boston-based outreach organization that focuses on how to avoid making big mistakes that end species with technology. FLI’s advisory board is packed with names from institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and Cambridge University, as well as Elon Musk, Morgan Freeman, and Alan Alda, for good measure.
In a recent interview, senior government affairs consultant Jared Brown spoke of something called the Collingridge dilemma. When a new technology is developed, we see the benefits. Fire, for example, was great for keeping us warm and keeping predators away. When a technology becomes ingrained in the way a society works, we begin to learn about the downsides, such as burning villages.
Or, three square miles of Chicago as in 1871. Overall, though, we mostly take the good and the bad together. Many people die in road accidents every year, but we still drive cars.
“It works to the point where some of the dangers are potentially catastrophic or existential. And you don’t learn a lesson twice, ”says Brown.
When FLI examines its four main existential threats: artificial intelligence, climate change, nuclear weapons and biotechnology. Technology is at the heart of them all, even going back to the invention of the combustion engine.
That’s why groups like FLI are trying to get the powers, like lawmakers, to create safeguards now before we need them. It’s not always easy to talk to people about a topic that is somehow big and scary, but also abstract enough not to be an immediate concern.
Rogue AI aiming to maximize paper clip production may someday decide humans are slowing the process and must they be eliminated? Hey, maybe. But it won’t happen next week.
“The natural instinct is, ‘This is someone else’s problem’ … Or even, ‘If I believe you, what the hell am I going to do about it?'”says Brown.
In a disturbing twist, the pandemic has brought some current affairs bias into the equation, he says. Perhaps it seems less of an alarmist to wring his hands to worry about an event that apparently came out of nowhere and affected every person on the planet. For FLI, the point isn’t so much a countdown to disaster.
“We don’t feel it is necessary to be aware of a likelihood that a threat will be a problem for us in the next 30 years, but to know that there is enough uncertainty about the risk we should face,” Brown says.
Survive in the end
Despite these four main areas of risk, fortunately there is no guarantee that a disaster would wipe out every single person on the planet. It’s a little comfort, but as Sandberg says, “You can easily imagine someone holed up in a Walmart with a can opener.”
As long as any disaster, or confluence of disasters, that happens to us leaves at least a few survivors, there might be hope. The number of human beings needed by humanity to survive remains in question. Depending on who you ask, it could be a thousand or more. Those people should still survive any other challenges that have emerged along the way.
“We still don’t really understand the resilience of our societies”says Sandberg. As incredibly bleak as the prospects of humans may seem, even some of those people who ponder existential risk every day don’t think humans are completely down and out of their minds. At least not yet.
A key difference between humans and every other living thing on the planet is that humans have the ability to change their views on the world and correct course, says Moynihan. But just because we can change our ways doesn’t mean we always do.
“I think the future may be better in ways we can’t even understand,” he says, “But that doesn’t mean it will be. What is worth fighting for is that ability for us to revise ourselves, correct the mistakes of the past, and which continue to confuse you ”.
Sandberg, meanwhile, wears a stainless steel medal on a chain around his neck wherever he goes. He considers it a centuries-old medal of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. Instead of representing the third century saint, this medal has instructions on what to do with Sandberg’s body if he dies.
Pump it full of heparin; freeze quickly.
Sandberg’s head will be frozen by Alcor Life Extension Foundation and, ideally, it will be revived in a distant time. The decision to join Alcor was made, in part, out of curiosity about what the future will be like, pending many, many questions, both practical and existential about whether this experiment will work, and to some extent, a hint of faith in the future.
“I am an optimist”says Sandberg, “The future could be great. I think the world is really good. And it could be even better, much better, which means we have a reason to try and safeguard the future. “
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