Human extinction

A lot of fiction novels, sci-fi movies, and even religious mythologies have predicted End of the World. Variety of causes including a deluge, super volcano, asteroids, devastating natural disasters, pandemics and war could be blamed for this annihilation. 

While the Earth went through multiple rounds of destruction of the entire life like the Great Dying and End of the Dinosaur Era, how plausible is a similar situation in the modern world?

With the technological power that humankind has now, any natural disaster causing a total destruction, looks a little far fetched! Even a worldwide pandemic as we experienced this year, one of the possible causes of apocalypse, is far from causing the amount of destruction that could be considered apocalyptic. 

The pandemic did affect all the countries, but the total number of infections is about 1% of the world population, while only about 0.02% perished in the disease so far. Compare that to the pandemics of the previous centuries, where 10% or more of the world population perished! Even with the super connected world that we live in, where you would have visited multiple countries and continents before knowing that you are carrying COVID-19, these numbers seem to be minuscule.

It’s not only the sheer size of human population, which stands at 8 billion, but also the extent of our reach across the globe which makes us more immune to extinction. Humans have well adapted to live in hot or cold, dry or moist, coastal or inland countryside. Any natural calamity like the rise in sea level for that matter will displace the human population but will not cause extinction!

Nature has to invent new, innovative ways and methods to drive the human race to extinction. Natural disasters including the recent devastating hurricanes, wildfires, and even earthquakes will not completely destroy humanity. 

Eruption of super volcanoes which will spew a lot of ash in the atmosphere causing global winter has already been remedied by people who will hide in their bunkers with a supply of oxygen and food which will last for months! Of course, this event may spare only the super rich who can afford these bunkers, but the human race overall is saved!

Causes like asteroid strikes will also be ineffective as humans will develop, if not already developed, technology to fire a rocket which will land on the asteroid leaping towards the Earth and detonate a nuclear bomb which will deflect the asteroid away from the Earth.

Speaking of nuclear weapons, these man-made disasters have the potential to eradicate us, however in the last 75 years after their first use, regimes, including rogue ones across the nuclear armed world, have shown restraint in using them. Having said that, the only scare of our own destruction is ourselves and not nature.

While global climate change can cause havoc (by the way, it’s also caused by humans only) and can increase droughts, hurricane strength or fires; humans will shift to places which will be rendered more livable in the light of these newer, stronger disasters, including places like the Tundra.

A lot of movies predict that aliens will come and destroy us as they are more intelligent and advanced. But for any alien to even reach the Earth, even at a speed of a tenth of the speed of light (which itself is huge at 30,000km/s) will take them decades as we have not found any livable planet with advanced life 5-10 light years from us. And they have to carry weapons which can destroy humanity from those mammoth distances, fight us, and then colonize the Earth! Seems too distant!

Of course, a lot of things can change in the cosmos, which could create black holes which will suck the Earth, or the Sun becomes a giant star engulfing all the inner planets including the Earth. Here we are talking about millions if not billions of years.

So for now, we can be rest assured that the human race is not in danger of immediate extinction unless we ourselves shoot in the foot!