Imagine you lived in one of the great Mayan
cities during its heyday, when food was plentiful
and it seemed like the good times were there
to stay.
And then imagine that same city empty, a ghost
town wrapped in the vines of the jungle that
has enveloped it.
Or what about the fall of the mighty Khmer
empire and the ancient city of Angkor, said
to be the largest pre-industrial city on earth.
Imagine what its demise would have looked
like.
Civilizations have fallen, entire cities emptied
of their people, completely abandoned.
Sometimes this was partly due to climate changes,
catastrophic agricultural practices, war with
neighbors and sometimes a bit of all those
things.
But what about the entire human race?
Could the Earth itself become a giant ghost
town full of monuments and buildings reclaimed
by nature?
Our question today is not an easy one to answer.
You don’t have to try too hard to find articles
written by serious scientists that tell us
we are on the verge of collapse due to forthcoming
catastrophic changes in the environment.
But even if we imagine the worst, some humans
will likely pull through and keep the race
going.
On top of that, there are people whose views
are more in line with a sudden oncoming doomsday,
and other people that are far more optimistic
even though they do believe we are heading
into hard times.
Let’s now have a look at what some of those
people are saying.
It won’t be news to you that a lot of people
are saying that humans have caused a great
depletion of the world’s natural resources,
or what the Guardian called just recently
the “Earth’s natural life-support systems.”
This was taken from a United Nations report
compiled over three years and released in
2019 that warned us that “nature is being
destroyed at a rate tens to hundreds of times
higher than the average over the past 10 million
years.”
That report said destruction of our eco-systems
has led to the loss of countless species and
some about to become extinct.
We have to act now, said that report, or there
will be trouble.
This was the conclusion: “The health of
the ecosystems on which we and other species
depend is deteriorating more rapidly than
ever.
We are eroding the very foundations of economies,
livelihoods, food security, health and quality
of life worldwide.”
It didn’t, however, tell us the human race
will end, only that things will get tough,
and soon.
It’s hard to feel afraid of imminent collapse
as you sit alone with a Cappuccino and a streamed
song playing in the background, the sun out,
the birds singing, the wind rustling the leaves
outside your window, but as Jared Diamond
points out in his book, Collapse, the reason
why civilizations fell was often because they
didn’t read the writing on the wall.
Imagine one day an Easter Islander saying
to his buddy, so it looks like we’ve cut
down all the trees, eroded the soil, and eaten
all the animals…what now?
According to Diamond, some of them ended up
eating each other!
Live Science, citing a paper written by Australian
academics, has one of the bleakest outlooks
and says that global warming could actually
end the human race as we know it by 2050.
That paper issued the stark warning that the
warming of the globe could soon cause a “near-
to mid-term existential threat to human civilization.”
It claimed that while climate scientists are
on the right track with regards to taking
global warming seriously, most have been too
reserved in telling the public just how bad
it is.
They said just a small rise in average temperature
would have worse consequences than first thought.
Because some governments have failed to take
climate change seriously, by 2050 the temperature
could rise by 5.4 F (3 C).
When this happens the ice sheets go, the rainforests
dry up, there is massive drought as well as
floods and this creates a feedback loop that
just makes things worse and worse.
“Thirty-five percent of the global land
area, and 55 percent of the global population,
are subject to more than 20 days a year of
lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold
of human survivability” the authors wrote,
so you can probably forget about your 2050
iced-Cappuccino.
It said extreme weather and eco-system collapse
would kill off much of the world’s population
quickly, but no doubt the wealthy could survive
for a while.
Nonetheless, with a world in chaos the paper
tells us that it will soon mean “the end
of human global civilization as we know it.”
That’s probably not the best thing you’ve
heard when watching our shows, but it’s
likely not something you have ignored.
As people presently take to the streets around
the world shouting about global warming, a
poll in the UK this year revealed that more
than half of adults in that country believe
global warming could end the human race soon.
Polls aren’t always an accurate representation
of reality due to who’s been polled and
how many people ticked the box, but it’s
clear that a lot of Brits feel for one reason
or another that we are on the verge of collapse.
NASA writes that not believing in climate
change is about as foolhardy as you can get
and its own website provides lots of easy-to-understand
evidence of things heating up.
The big picture, says NASA, is that humans
have accelerated global warming due to our
habits and ignorance, and most extreme events
are yet to come.
The world has experienced lots of periods
of climate change that have led to catastrophe
in the past, but the question is, is just
how bad will the next few decades get and
can we intervene and slow down global warming.
You could fill a library with the research
on this topic and read articles about imminent
catastrophe on the internet for the next year,
and we just cannot provide you with every
argument and hypothesis.
All we can say is that there are experts out
there who believe environmental devastation
and human collapse is coming.
There are of course people that will tell
you that global warming is a conspiracy theory
either to promote ideology to gain power or
for financial gain, or maybe they’ll tell
you scientists just want more funding.
But if you look at the consensus of the scientific
community from all over the globe you’ll
see the experts almost totally agree that
humans have caused potentially life-threatening
global warming.
We should mention the academic and author
Jared Diamond again, who has spent a considerable
amount of time in his life studying environmental
problems and the collapse of societies.
In a very recent interview he said, “Today,
the risk that we’re facing is not of societies
collapsing one by one, but because of globalization,
the risk we are facing is of the collapse
of the whole world.
He added, “I would estimate the chances
are about 49 percent that the world as we
know it will collapse by about 2050.”
If we don’t change the way we live, he said,
the game could soon be over for many people.
So, this is the big issue regarding the end
of the human race, but there is more depressing
news , because even if we somehow fix climate
change, there’s still a number of other
ways that human civilization could be destroyed.
This comes from left field, and perhaps shouldn’t
be you foremost concern when it comes to the
death of everyone, but the takeover of artificial
intelligence is not just something out of
science fiction, but something leading scientists
have talked about.
Artificial intelligence is everywhere, so
let’s call the dangerous thing super artificial
intelligence.
The author Yuval Noah Harari has said that
AI doesn’t need to have consciousness to
become dangerous.
How could we program consciousness anyway
when we don’t properly understand it?
For him, AI will result in what he calls a
“useless class” of people.
Many humans won’t have a place in the world,
but this won’t end the race.
It may look something like a dystopian sci-fi
movie, though.
Then we have the words of one of the world’s
most renowned scientists, Stephen Hawking,
who once said, “The development of full
artificial intelligence could spell the end
of the human race.
It would take off on its own, and re-design
itself at an ever increasing rate.”
As we said, such sentiments aren’t only
talked about by people with far out imaginations.
Nick Bostrom, one of the leading experts in
the field of AI currently working at Oxford
university, has said that machines pose a
bigger threat to mankind than global warming.
He believes that before we know it there will
be an “intelligence explosion” and machines
will design machines and we will lose control.
He said such superintelligence will perhaps
start by controlling financial markets, but
a worse case scenario is perhaps AI hacking
weapons after deciding that a species that
might destroy the planet does not use sound
logic, so it must go.
Other experts see such views as being over
the top, but the rise of AI is taken seriously
by tech leaders and that’s why ethics committees
have been formed.
Tech wizard Elon Musk is certainly taking
a possible AI-apocalypse seriously, saying
in an interview, “With artificial intelligence,
we are summoning the demon.
You know all those stories where there’s
the guy with the pentagram and the holy water
and he’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can
control the demon?
Doesn’t work out.”
So, there’s another end to the human race.
Different dates have been offered up as to
when artificial intelligence will get super-intelligent,
but most of the doomsday crowd have said sometime
between 2030 and 2050.
On the bright side, maybe this intelligence
could save the planet.
2050, though, is certainly starting to sound
like a bad year.
Many of our viewers will be having their mid-life
crisis about that time, so let’s hope things
won’t be as bad as some people say.
But let’s say the computers don’t enslave
us by 2050, there’s also the chance that
Earth will be hit by an asteroid at some point
that causes massive damage.
It’s happened in the past and it will happen
again, it’s just a matter of time.
The European Space Agency said that an asteroid
could hit the Earth this Fall, but the good
news is it isn’t anywhere near as big as
the one that wiped out the dinosaurs and there
is only a 1-in-7,299 chance of it hitting
us.
The bad news, according to the space agency,
is that it could flatten an area larger than
London.
According to Live Science, astronomers only
know about a small fraction of asteroids moving
about the universe so something could always
just pop up.
NASA watches over potentially hazardous asteroids
all the time, but also says, “given the
current incompleteness of the Near Earth Object
catalogue, an unpredicted impact – such
as the Chelyabinsk event – could occur at
any time.”
The Chelyabinsk event being a meteor explosion
over Russia in 2013 that we had no idea about
prior to it entering the atmosphere.
NASA also adds that no known weapon could
stop something like this from hitting Earth.
It’s an outside chance, but an asteroid
impact that destroys human life could certainly
happen.
We can’t give you a timeframe for this now,
but when or if the time comes you will know.
Then there’s the threat of nuclear war,
but we’ve managed to avoid it to this point
and we don’t think it will happen.
We might have some bad habits, but mindlessly
destroying each other en-masse to the point
of it being global suicide just doesn’t
make sense with the concept of mutually assured
destruction.
We might be ignorant and selfish at times,
but most experts think we are not that crazy.
Let’s hope they’re right.
The World Health Organization has put together
a list of catastrophes that could wipe out
a chunk of people, but it wouldn’t be all
people.
It’s said about 75,000 years ago a massive
super-volcanic eruption killed off a lot of
early humans, but the WHO gives just a 0.001
percent chance of that happening again anytime
soon.
But if one should go off the ash could block
out the sunlight and that would lead to summer
going missing, which would reduce farm yields
and cause mass starvation.
A global pandemic the WHO gives a higher chance
of happening at 1.5 percent, but again, it
wouldn’t wipe out everyone.
Let’s remember, though, that the 1918 Spanish
Flu is thought to have killed around 50 million
people or roughly 3% of the world’s population
at the time.
But what if some new kind of super virus came
along, is that possible?
Well, this is what Kevin Olival, a disease
ecologist from the EcoHealth Alliance, told
the BBC in 2018, “I think the chances that
the next pandemic will be caused by a novel
virus are quite good.”
In fact, many scientists have said they don’t
rule out the possibility of new disease causing
havoc on the planet.
Still, enjoy your coffee, because it’s unlikely
you will be felled by a super virus of unknown
origin any time soon.
We’d love to know what you guys think about
all of this, so please tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other episode
Could the Black Death Happen Again?
Thanks for watching, and as always, don't
forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.
