My last article discussed the idea that this moment in history will become completely irrelevant and forgotten in 10000 years, even if records of our lives still exist. It leaves a pretty big question though: will we even exist in 10000 years?
I'd bet a majority of you will lean towards "probably not" or "no".
But consider this. Humanity has existed for 200 thousand years. In comparison, the ever famous T-Rex lived for ~5 million years. Extinctions usually happen because of predators that over-hunt or drastic changes to the environment.
Climate Change? Basically a joke. loss of coastal land and dangerous weather patterns may through humanity into chaos, but you think it's going to kill every last man, woman and child on the planet? No, in all of human history it'll probably register as a slight inconvenience.
But what about the wars from that displacement? Or war in general? Well, specifically regarding the displacement, those wars will be for survival. We're not going to kill each other off trying desperately to survive. Do you really think that we'll kill off so many humans that the last two people on earth are shouting battle cries at each other trying to kill the other person off?
What if it goes nuclear? Terrible for the environment, but do you think the entire world will be carpet bombed with nukes? This would probably devastate the population the most between explosions, fallout and environmental change, but humans have survived in some pretty terrible conditions. There's a good chance that many countries will collapse, but humanity will march on.
What about the rapture? Well, I won't argue with you there. It'd be a waste of my time.
One way or another we'll almost certainly reach some event where the human population is decimated, but even a cluster of 1000 people that survive can go on to repopulate the world. We survive on being resourceful. We have an incredible ability to adapt, and many of us are educated enough to maintain at least industrial-era levels of technology to help us along.
The idea of humanity reaching an early extinction event is pretty absurd. We'll survive the environmental changes, and the chances of a new apex predator emerging to kill us off is pretty unlikely. So why are are so many of us convinced our existence as a species will be so short lived?
It's likely a mixture of things, perhaps pessimism or believing hyperbole, but I imagine a large factor has to do with my last article. We'd rather die than be forgotten.
Once we get past our base survival instincts (a woman starving on the streets probably isn't going to bother with this BS) we tend to be incredibly vain. Many people seem to think that there is nothing humans can't accomplish given enough time, but there are still physical properties to the universe that we can't get around and there are likely aspects of reality that are completely incomprehensible to the human mind.
So the thought that nothing we do now will matter in 10000 years is terrifying, even more so if there are people around to remember it but just don't. So we hope there is no one to remember. We hope to vanish instead of be forgotten. We don't want to kill ourselves off, yet we don't what our struggles to mean so little that not a single person living in the future even considers us relevant among all of the other data we have created.
Humanity will survive. We will not.
This is an encouraging article! Since I have occasionally been called a pessimist, what are your thoughts on the tiniest of predators? Viruses and bacteria. Those critters freak me out!
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I actually considered disease when creating this article, and it is one of the more problematic ones.
Even then though, a new plague is bound to devastate the dense human population eventually, but it won't kill us off.
Humans have several advantages that have kept us alive for so long. A huge one, and one considered to be why we outlived the neanderthals, is that we occupy pretty much every environment on earth. With a sort-of exception of Antarctica, humans occupy every continent.
While a plague could easily travel in our globalized world, it couldn't travel quickly enough to prevent countermeasures like countries closing their borders and developing vaccines. I played a disease simulator game online awhile back, can't remember the name, but I think it illustrates how difficult it would be to spread a deadly virus across the world. In the simulation, Madagascar almost always closes off their borders before the virus truly takes hold, which is pretty close to what you can expect in a real life situation. If one island nation survives then humanity survives.
Now, I have been using 10000 years as an example for my articles, and a lot can happen in 10000 years; almost all of these doomsday scenarios are likely to happen, but none of them could wipe out humanity on their own. The likelihood of them overlapping in such a way that all of humanity dies is exceedingly unlikely.
To our knowledge, we are the most intelligent and adaptive species that has ever lived. So early in our existence we have already begun space travel, which may save us until the eventual death of the universe as a whole. If we stay on Earth though we can likely expect to live millions of years like any other apex predator. Basically for as long as we can still breathe the air.
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You could be right. I think that it could make a cool series script. "Hermit family comes to town to get help for ailing daughter and finds that everyone is dead. So now they have to find out what went wrong and if there are other survivors". I'd watch it.
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This was written very well with basic knowledge of history. With some of what I have learned. I found it a good read and thinker. Thank you for your thoughts
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