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A professor famous for predicting the imminent demise of the human race at regular intervals since the 1970s has predicted the imminent demise of the human race.
Paul Ehrlich, who is the Bing Professor of Population Studies at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, says it's definitely on this time. In a tinned statement issued on Friday, the arm-waving prof lays it on the line:
There is no longer any doubt: We are entering a mass extinction that threatens humanity's existence ... the window of opportunity is rapidly closing ...
"[The study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event," Ehrlich said ...
"If it is allowed to continue, life would take many millions of years to recover, and our species itself would likely disappear early on," said lead author Gerardo Ceballos.
The original article can be found at The Register, with coverage of the cited study coming from ScienceMag.org
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Insightful) by morgauxo on Wednesday June 24 2015, @03:31PM
Now.. don't take me the wrong way. I'm not saying that we could provide for all 7 billion of us after a global ecological apocalypse. But extinction? I doubt that. As a worst possible scenario I would expect at least a few 100k survivors spread around the world in greenhouse like habitats. No doubt they would be the descendants of the super rich, the workers they need to keep it going and the soldiers they need to protect it from the starving outsiders.
I'm not saying the future is gauranteed to be rosy but why, as a species would we suddenly forget everything we know about surviving in a hostile environment? We have had people in the Sahara and Australian outback for about as long as or species has existed FCOL!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by gnuman on Wednesday June 24 2015, @03:41PM
Where I sit now it is far too cold for human life 1/2 the year
And yet, people lived there for thousands of years. People only didn't live in Antarctica. Otherwise, they lived all over the arctic.
No doubt they would be the descendants of the super rich, the workers they need to keep it going and the soldiers they need to protect it from the starving outsiders.
If it comes to war, then super rich will certainly not survive. Money, it's just a number in a civilized world. Without rules, that number is no more important than few grains of sand on a beach.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @03:47PM
i agree with your assessment. the future you describe is the future to worry about. depending on how far in the future things start to go to hell in a hand-basket, those rich people, in their artificial habitats (space castles), will have a few human servants around and an army of AI robots guarding the perimeter. sometimes the AI robots will perform crowd-control duties when the population gets a little too revolting to the king of the space-castle.
once the world's human population is way down and we have mastered building artifical habitats here on earth, we will begin building them on other worlds (space colonialism).
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Type44Q on Wednesday June 24 2015, @04:02PM
Where I sit now it is far too cold for human life 1/2 the year
Unless you're at Amundsen–Scott Station, I'd say the Neanderthal 2% of our ancestors would disagree with you...
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Wednesday June 24 2015, @08:37PM
I was talking about completely natural life. Basically, naked human animals. The neandertals had a level of technology, they had fire and clothing. They were cold adapted but I doubt they could have survived naked in the freezing cold! Their technology extended their range away from the equator, just like our technology will allow some people to survive the harsher environment to come.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday June 24 2015, @09:37PM
How do you define completely natural life? Are beavers not living a completely natural life because they build dams? [wikipedia.org] What about termites that build mounds? [wikipedia.org] Or animals that use tools? [wikipedia.org]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Tuesday June 30 2015, @06:50PM
Well.. I'm not sure but I think that most of a Beaver's ability to build dams, Termites' ability to build mounds, etc... is in their genes. It's a hard-coded product of evolution. Sure, on a certain level the same can be said of human technology but it is more of a meta-ability. We didn't evolve the specific ability to build a house of brick, wood, grass, straw, ice, etc.. or a skyscraper or even a space habitat. We evolved the ability to engineer different stuff based on what our current environment provides and demands.
I may be wrong but if not then when are we going to see a beaver build a home that is not a dam or termites build something that is not a mound? Show me this non-human innovation happening without the evolution of a new species, on a timescale that can keep up with climate change.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @08:55PM
What survival skills do the wealthy have? Poor people around the world live off the land every day. If there was a mass kill-off of humans and civilization crumbles into dust there would be tens to hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers that would not even notice...Well, they would get less christian missionaries leaving bibles and used plastic bottles all over the place.
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Tuesday June 30 2015, @06:57PM
So.. subsistence farmers are not a part of human civilization?
The article was talking about the extinction of our species. Your scenario, where the climate change, fallout, or whatever isn't bad enough to kill of the subsistence farmers is a significantly lighter issue. I'm pretty sure that in the scenario the article is talking about your subsistence farmers were among the first to go because their land no longer provides them with any food. Their crops do not grow.
"What survival skills do the wealthy have?"
Assuming they see the calamity coming.. the ability to buy land. The ability to get a compound built on that land. The ability to stock up on food. The ability to hire people to do the stuff that they can't do themselves such as build greenhouses which will continue to produce food when the outside is no longer livable.