Aussie Scientist: Homo Sapiens Extinct Within 100 Years

reply to post by Nosred


First off, what does that have anything to do with what he said?

Secondly, there's less than 7 billion alive, and it's estimated that 100 billion have walked this earth.

That means less than 7% of humans to have ever existed are alive today.


[edit on 17-6-2010 by unityemissions]

Meanwhile, life goes on. We laugh. We plan. We invent. We build. We adapt.

And we talk of other things than the end of the world, and luckily so, because we'll be around a lot longer yet, if we keep our heads - and our hope.

Damn straight Herald Sun. Humanity will never die. We will adapt.

people will survive, man has lasted through many crazy things. unless the planet becomes so inhabitable, but the bill gates and warren buffetts of 100 years from now will move underground with enough food to last them and find ways to have underground cities. bill gates has seeds frozen in antarctica right now. obviously preparing for something to the effect.

Originally posted by unityemissions
reply to post by Nosred

 

First off, what does that have anything to do with what he said?

Secondly, there's less than 7 billion alive, and it's estimated that 100 billion have walked this earth.

That means less than 7% of humans to have ever existed are alive today.

Please source that, because it's absolute bull#. (excuse my language.)

The population gains one more billion in less amount of years than the last billion added. What this means is that the first recorded billion people was in 1804. It was 1927 when the world hit 2 billion people. It gained a billion people in 123 years. It had 3bn people in 1960. Thats only 33 years. It had 4bn people in 1974. Thats 14 years. See what i'm getting at with this? And with that, you can make the EXTREMELY safe assumption that before 1804, the population reaching in the millions had to have gone at a slower pace, as not as many people are copulating, its basic math.

You can almost look at population growth in the light of Moore's law, just not as extreme.

Originally posted by ofhumandescent
Good ridence, Mother Earth will be better off without us.

(Oh I know I'm gonna get flamed for this one!

)

On the contrary, I heartily agree. She'll be better off without you.

So will the rest of us.

reply to post by Schmidt1989


Dude, we've been around for how many generations?

Are you seriously not able to do the math?!

Number who have ever been born 106,456,367,669

Link

So what's with that absolute, then?



btw, it doesn't follow moore's law. It just looks like that when you look at a graph from a very, very long perspective. It blew the F up after the industrial revolution because of oil and tech. IF/When the age of oil goes pop, so does the majority of the people.

[edit on 17-6-2010 by unityemissions]

Originally posted by unityemissions
reply to post by Schmidt1989

 

Dude, we've been around for how many generations?

Are you seriously not able to do the math?!

Show me the math. We've been around for 180,000 years.

[edit on 6/17/2010 by Schmidt1989]

reply to post by traditionaldrummer

Dinosaurs lasted what, over 100 million years? And humans have been around wnat? a few tenths of one million years? We're going to run into serious problems. Global warming and/or global cooling will be among them, but while those will kill many people and reduce populations, it won't make us extinct. Someone said we would adapt, and to a certain extent, we can and will since we are adaptable. However, what we can't adapt to, is what the dinosaurs couldn't adapt to, a giant rock destroying much life on the planet. There's simply no time to adapt in a catastrophe of that magnitude, it's eradication on a global scale, an ELE or extinction level event.

Our only hope to avoid the same fate as the dinosaurs is to have at least one other colony on another world, like maybe Mars. Then if one planet gets destroyed we would have a backup colony. But at the rate we're going, it doesn't even look like we'll make it back to the moon.

Yeah I heard that in 1909.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
Dinosaurs lasted what, over 100 million years? And humans have been around wnat? a few tenths of one million years?

Mammals evolved at about the same time as dinosaurs, 265 million years or so ago. We've comfortably outlived them.

The comparison more appropriate to the point you're making would be to an individual dinosaur species. This isn't very feasible, unfortunately, because many dinosaur species are known from only a single fossil. We can, however, try to estimate the average longevity of a dinosaur genus, as in this paper.

According to the author, estimates of the average duration of a dinosaur genus range from 5 million to 10.5 million years, with the most likely value about 7.7 million years.

Compared to that, our own genus, Homo, is either 1.9 million or 2.5 million years old (depending on whether you admit Homo habilis or not). That doesn't mean the genus is particularly youthful; remember that we are the only surviving species of it.

And it may well be that we have reached our peak as a species. Earth's human population will start to fall in a few years if current demographic trends continue. As you know, a species whose numbers are thinning out is by definition a species in decline.

Our only hope to avoid the same fate as the dinosaurs is to have...

Nothing will save us from the fate of the dinosaurs, though we can make shift to postpone it for a good long time. Maybe a couple of million years more if all goes well.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


But, did the dinosaurs actually go extinct? Or did they evolve, thereby adapting to a changing environment? Are birds descendants of dinosaurs?
I'm not qualified to state how likely that would be, but I have a point to make and here it is:
The environment appears to be changing. Will we go extinct as a result, or will it just appear that way from fossil records 60 to 70 million years in the future?


I'm only commenting from piqued interest. I'm certainly not qualified to put forward any sort of solid debate on the subject. But perhaps my contribution will be compelling to some.

The end of the world wont be in 100 years.

When we go to war with Iran, I would give it a few years for things to escalate into nuclear armageddon. China and Russia will be nails for the coffin. Our insanity will be the hammer.

Originally posted by Recouper
But, did the dinosaurs actually go extinct? Or did they evolve, thereby adapting to a changing environment?

What is the difference?

Species evolve other species, they don't evolve into other species.

The appearance of a new species doesn't necessarily make the species it evolved from extinct. That only happens if the parent and daughter species share the same range, the daughter species is fitter than the parent species, and the parent species is wiped out by the daughter species in environmental competition.

Originally posted by Recouper
But, did the dinosaurs actually go extinct? Or did they evolve, thereby adapting to a changing environment?

What is the difference?

Species evolve other species, they don't evolve into other species.

The appearance of a new species doesn't necessarily make the species it evolved from extinct. That only happens if the parent and daughter species share the same range, the daughter species is fitter than the parent species, and the parent species is wiped out by the daughter species in evolutionary competition.

i've already started my external cooling module for when this rock really gets heated.

i've got a radiator, ac fan, some hoses, a manual water pump and 5L of coolant. i'll stick one hose in my ass and the other in my mouth and bob's your uncle, moderated temperature.... woopa-cha!!!

Good thread!! I was reading this on science daily and thought I would come here to see if any intelligent discussion was going on...

We will not be dead with in a 100 years. The reason we have made it this long is our ability to adapt. If the Earth gets warmer, we will adapt, if it gets colder we will adapt. If we by chance get stuck by a asteroid, well, then, were SOL.

I do think though as another poster pointed out that the possibility of us evolving ourselves, via genetics or whatever we can think about, has a large chance of happening in our upcoming future.

With the possibility to take a pill and let your child get a 20+ points raise in their IQ, what parent would not do it while other children are? The amount that our scientific field of bio-engineering is advancing, in 50 years anything we could possibly think of now would not even touch where we will be.

And if you want to play semantics, species never die, they evolve. There was never a primate that gave birth to a human, it happened over generations and millions of years. So even though we think our ancestors are extinct, technically, with semantics, were them!!

And you can do that all the way back to 'primitive' life.

Pred...

[edit on 23-6-2010 by predator0187]

reply to post by Astyanax


That make sense... to me.
It's hard to imagine a new species gradually evolving from humans and then perhaps coexisting with humans for a time. I really can't imagine how that would come about. Maybe because the concept is so far outside of my imaginative abilities or the time frame for such a thing happening is too expansive to make sense of... or both.

reply to post by Schmidt1989


Extinctions happen because of a total inability to cope with a change.

I would suspect that there are very few changes that would be impossible for some humans to cope with.

And example: people with sickle cell anemia do not get really get infected with malaria. This explains the high rate of sickle cell anemia in Africa, and African descendants. To most people, sickle cell is a curse. In the jungle, it may just be what it takes to keep your species alive.

As long as you can find 0.01% of the population that is resistant to whatever change is there, and they can find each other for mating, i wouldn't think the human race could be gotten rid of so easily.

We are like cockroaches. We are highly adaptable, and live in every environment on Earth. Extinction is normally reserved for specialized species, and that would not describe humanity very well at all.

reply to post by bigfatfurrytexan

We are like cockroaches. We are highly adaptable, and live in every environment on Earth. Extinction is normally reserved for specialized species, and that would not describe humanity very well at all.

I like your attitude, bfft, but the truth is that we are very specialized creatures indeed. We have put all our evolutionary eggs into the basket labelled 'language and general intelligence'. These confer behavioural lability and the ability to pass on lessons learned, but only by means of technology and culture, and even then at tremendous evolutionary cost - consider the ridiculously long gestation and juvenile phases of the human lifespan, the unpleasant, painful and inherently dangerous process by which we give birth (occasioned by the prodigious size of our infant skulls) and the massive energy consumption of our brains, which make frequent feeding mandatory and also creates serious temperature-control issues.

No, we are not like cockroaches. A cockroach is like an old-fashioned Jeep: a simple, robust piece of machinery that can operate in a wide variety of environments with few inputs and very little maintenance. A human being is more like the Macintosh PowerBook on which I'm typing this: complex, powerful and versatile, but useless without an elaborate support system of technology and cultue to sustain it. No, we humans are not environmentally adaptable, like cockroaches. We adapt the environment to us, not the other way round. Take away our technology, our culture and our access to abundant energy, and our ability to do this vanishes.

I don't have to be an Aussie scientist to be safe making that prediction.