Forum:Near-term human extinction...

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I've recently become depressed about the prospect of a near term (ca. 2030 AD) human extinction due to environmental mismanagement. I even briefly joined a support group on Facebook for it. Is there anything that definitively says we'll go extinct in about 15 years? ^{— Unsigned, by: Ru1138 / talk / contribs} 17:48, 27 October 2015‎ (UTC)

even with total enviromental change I don't see humans going extinct, we're hardy and adaptable. Modern human civilization is likely to notv sustain without major change however. Short of major impact, volcanoe or nukes its unlikely we could possibly die off in as few as 15 years and those people are idiots--"Paravant" ^{Talk & Contribs} 17:53, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

I don't think so. We're sturdy motherfuckers and at the very least according to what I know, there is no major disaster coming our way, most of the wars today are local and show no signs of going global or even engulfing a whole region (depends on how you define region). The human race and civilization are more or less safe.--Arisboch ☞✍☜☞✉☜ ∈)☼(∋ 17:57, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

"safe" is the adjective you're looking for. And yup, save for an asteroid or gamma ray burst hitting us, humanity is here to stay. 142.124.55.236 (talk) 18:04, 27 October 42015 AQD (UTC)

If there were any that were that imminent and significantly supported by scientific consensus, you'd think that people would be making a bigger stink over it, y'know? I can do a bit of a flip-though, but AFAIK, the only people saying that we'll all definitively be dead within 15 years are movie directors, Christian end-times preachers, and conspiracy theorists claiming a cover-up on a massive scale that would require an inordinately high level of intra- and international cooperation among a very large number of conflicting interests. _{(Also please don't forget to sign posts on Forums/Talk pages by adding four tildes "~~~~" to the end of your post. Thanks!)} ℕoir LeSable (talk) 18:01, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Thank you. Ru1138 (talk) 00:51, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

People don't respect the value of their supporting ecologies

But... extinction by 2030 is just absurd. Like... even if you got all the world's governments on board with that as an active goal, it still wouldn't happen.

You know what might seriously happen by 2030? Possible loss of agricultural stability, and everything that goes with that: civil wars, famines, massive social regress, and huge economic losses. That's only a maybe by 2030. ikanreed ^{You probably didn't deserve that} 18:23, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Because of massive population movements due to climate change, I could see the threat of a pandemic. There would be people carrying diseases and lets say a civil war broke out, that would spread disease further. But for it destroying humanity I could not see it as there would be no hosts left. As for the main subject, I do not see humanity going extinct in the near future.--Rationalzombie94 (talk) 23:11, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Most Natural diseases have shown a remarkable inability to actually wipe out humanity as a whole. --"Paravant" ^{Talk & Contribs} 23:13, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Super pandemic + big-ass civil war? That sounds too much like some half-baked zommbie apocalypse flick.--Arisboch ☞✍☜☞✉☜ ∈)☼(∋ 23:14, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, people seem to me to have an issue with mentally calibrating their "disaster scale" or whatever you want to call it. There's a difference between "extinction" and "massive calamity". Extinction means 100% of humanity needs to die. Not 99%, or 90%, or 50%. I think the mental shortcut some people's brains might be taking is "well 90% is close to 100%, so they're basically the same thing". Heck, I think there's a good chance a Chicxulub-size asteroid wouldn't make us extinct. We're tenacious little buggers. Sure it would kill most of us, but you only need between a few hundred and a thousand-odd survivors for sufficient genetic diversity. In fact some scientists think humans already experienced such a bottleneck: see population bottleneck. --Ymir (talk) 00:23, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Think about it this way, there would be population shifts due to loss of resources. There would be conflicts and people could spread disease; I am not going for a paranoid zombie apocalypse scenario.--Rationalzombie94 (talk) 13:10, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

And even the deadliest diseases don't eradicate populations. Even before modern medicine, we've never seen an entire city completely depopulated by disease. ikanreed ^{You probably didn't deserve that} 13:27, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

There have been a number of situations where it got close; epidemic disease killed off all but a handful of the native Tasmanians. The epidemics following the Spanish landings in the Caribbean may have come close. - Smerdis of Tlön, ^{LOAD "*", 8, 1.} 14:57, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

I mentioned before that not all people would be killed off. I stated in my original post that a disease would die out if all people died; I agree with the fact humanity would not die off in the near future.--Rationalzombie94 (talk) 18:29, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

As Barry said

way back in the sixties Doxys Midnight Runner (talk) 15:11, 28 October 2015 (UTC)